Most days I don't care much about income inequality. Sure, it exists, and it's probably not altogether good, but you can say the same thing about death and the debt collection industry but if you don't feel sick or owe anything in arrears, you're not going to dwell on them. I know that there are people out there who make more money every fifteen seconds than I have earned in total since Sofia Vergara squeezed into her first bra, but it doesn't affect my daily routine as long as they leave me alone. Intellectually, I am aware that the Koch brothers plan to buy the next US Presidency for someone who is, for all intents and purposes, their employee, and that Bill Gates has become the richest man on the planet by enslaving all of us to a computer program whose best feature is the production of untimely error messages, but I don't sweat it, most of the time.
I didn't sweat it, that is, until I ran across this ad in the New Yorker. Yes, this is an advertisement for a solid gold chamber pot, which you can buy for $125,000. Why this glaring example of income inequality, instead of any other, made me want to find the guy who owns this item and choke him to death with one of his Ralph Lauren neckties, then drag his body out to the curb and let pedicab drivers run over him until he is an unrecognizable bloody pulp, I will try to explain here.
First off, this is a gift, obviously. A gift for someone for whom you have already bought a specially designed, lightweight water bed for his private jet, so that jet can land on shorter runways. A person for whom you have already gotten a gorgeous female sex robot that doubles as a figurehead on his giant ocean-going yacht. A person about whom someone right now is thinking "What possibly can we get Pater next Christmas?"
And here is what SJ Shrubsole, hopes the answer will be for that spoiled, selfish, incredibly rich fat bastard on your gift list. The pot was originally made for the Earl of Warrington, and presumably used by him when said noblesse was obliged to take a leak. If you buy it, you can mingle your personal urine, whether it is the strapping young liquid waste of a masterful junk bond trader in his prime or the diabetic dribble of a member of the landed gentry in his dotage, with the trace micturations of that expired blueblood. Whether you want the pot cleaned immaculately before delivery or you prefer to piddle in the must of history is up to you, I expect—for one hundred twenty five large, Shrubsole will no doubt honor your wishes, although if my job was cleaning out chamber pots for gazillionaires, I wouldn't neglect any opportunity for sabotage. Fair warning.
I'm not saying that the Earl's honeybucket is not a good investment. You can't urinate on a fur coat or a stack of paychecks for your minimum-wage employees and expect them to hold their value, but your solid gold piss pot, whether empty or full, retains and maybe even increases in worth. Sure, you could say the same about whizzing in your wife's jewelry collection or on a pile of Krugerands. Maybe you've even done that when you were plastered on Kristal or the Bordeaux you suck up like it was Pabst Blue Ribbon because you're so rich there's no point in not being continuously drunk, but you noticed you kept spraying on your Gucci loafers when you did so. Hence the services of Shrubsole.
When gifted with the pot, you could do the right thing and donate it to charity, if you haven't secreted most of your wealth away in numbered accounts and actually need a deduction. Or you could melt it down and sell it to a dentist who specializes in grillz for rappers, so that the next time some rap music offends, you can fantasize that the rapper is singing through the same gold that some long-dead British lord has tinkled upon.
Of course, you have no need to actually use the pot. You already have a solid gold toilet with a mother of pearl seat for doing two of the few things you can't pay someone else to do for you. But once you've got it, you figure you've got to use it at least once. The best thing that can happen afterwards is that you order the illegal Filipino maid the King of Dubai gave you on your last birthday to empty it into your regular toilet, then buff it up and put it back on the mantelpiece. Or (and this will surely be a temptation) you could emulate medieval kings and simply dump the bucket out the window, murmuring "Occupy this, a-holes," as you do so, and let passersby fend for themselves. You live in the penthouse, of course, so by the time your liquid waste reaches the earth, it's just a brief, smelly vapor that the plebeians walking there barely notice wetting their clothes.
Subtly peeing on the rest of us--probably your usual business model, anyway.
I didn't sweat it, that is, until I ran across this ad in the New Yorker. Yes, this is an advertisement for a solid gold chamber pot, which you can buy for $125,000. Why this glaring example of income inequality, instead of any other, made me want to find the guy who owns this item and choke him to death with one of his Ralph Lauren neckties, then drag his body out to the curb and let pedicab drivers run over him until he is an unrecognizable bloody pulp, I will try to explain here.
First off, this is a gift, obviously. A gift for someone for whom you have already bought a specially designed, lightweight water bed for his private jet, so that jet can land on shorter runways. A person for whom you have already gotten a gorgeous female sex robot that doubles as a figurehead on his giant ocean-going yacht. A person about whom someone right now is thinking "What possibly can we get Pater next Christmas?"
And here is what SJ Shrubsole, hopes the answer will be for that spoiled, selfish, incredibly rich fat bastard on your gift list. The pot was originally made for the Earl of Warrington, and presumably used by him when said noblesse was obliged to take a leak. If you buy it, you can mingle your personal urine, whether it is the strapping young liquid waste of a masterful junk bond trader in his prime or the diabetic dribble of a member of the landed gentry in his dotage, with the trace micturations of that expired blueblood. Whether you want the pot cleaned immaculately before delivery or you prefer to piddle in the must of history is up to you, I expect—for one hundred twenty five large, Shrubsole will no doubt honor your wishes, although if my job was cleaning out chamber pots for gazillionaires, I wouldn't neglect any opportunity for sabotage. Fair warning.
I'm not saying that the Earl's honeybucket is not a good investment. You can't urinate on a fur coat or a stack of paychecks for your minimum-wage employees and expect them to hold their value, but your solid gold piss pot, whether empty or full, retains and maybe even increases in worth. Sure, you could say the same about whizzing in your wife's jewelry collection or on a pile of Krugerands. Maybe you've even done that when you were plastered on Kristal or the Bordeaux you suck up like it was Pabst Blue Ribbon because you're so rich there's no point in not being continuously drunk, but you noticed you kept spraying on your Gucci loafers when you did so. Hence the services of Shrubsole.
When gifted with the pot, you could do the right thing and donate it to charity, if you haven't secreted most of your wealth away in numbered accounts and actually need a deduction. Or you could melt it down and sell it to a dentist who specializes in grillz for rappers, so that the next time some rap music offends, you can fantasize that the rapper is singing through the same gold that some long-dead British lord has tinkled upon.
Of course, you have no need to actually use the pot. You already have a solid gold toilet with a mother of pearl seat for doing two of the few things you can't pay someone else to do for you. But once you've got it, you figure you've got to use it at least once. The best thing that can happen afterwards is that you order the illegal Filipino maid the King of Dubai gave you on your last birthday to empty it into your regular toilet, then buff it up and put it back on the mantelpiece. Or (and this will surely be a temptation) you could emulate medieval kings and simply dump the bucket out the window, murmuring "Occupy this, a-holes," as you do so, and let passersby fend for themselves. You live in the penthouse, of course, so by the time your liquid waste reaches the earth, it's just a brief, smelly vapor that the plebeians walking there barely notice wetting their clothes.
Subtly peeing on the rest of us--probably your usual business model, anyway.
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