Why You Don't Smell as Nice as the Oligarchs

...and why Bernie Sanders can just forget about being president

Bernie Sanders ought to be president, but boy, did he need an acting coach, and boy, did he never have the sense to hire one. He never doesn’t address his audiences as though they it’s composed entirely of obnoxious teenagers who’ve taken a messy dump on his front lawn. He’s never not irate, brimming with self-righteous fury, forever scolding. And that right hand of his! The endless distracting gesticulating! “Use it every once in a while,” I’d have told him, “and then sparingly. Do NOT, under any circumstances emphasize every syllable you utter with a little job of your index finger.”

But let’s leave all that for another day, and give some thought to our dread of oligarchy, whIch I last week concluded was unfounded.

A seething Bernie Sanders argues on behalf of ordinary working Americans in a way guaranteed to have ordinary working Americans lunging for their remotes a couple of sentences into his oration on their behalf.

Because they are both rich and brave (the injections can be painful), oligarchs can afford Botox, dermal fillers, or even cosmetic surgery to maintain their physical attractiveness even while you and I are beginning to sag and droop unbecomingly.

Moreover, they commonly smell really nice, not because they’re more attentive to hygiene than you and I, but because they can afford expensive designer fragrances like Cllve Chrisian No. 1, a harmonious fusion of 222 rare and precious ingredients sourced from around the globe. This majestic woody amber fragrance opens with lively pimento and sparkling lime, revealing an exotic floral and spice heart that evolves into a base of vetiver and tonka bean. The crowning touch is a velvety 50-year-old aged sandalwood. A mellow Tonka bean base is enriched by the deep, opulent textures of golden Amber, Sandalwood, and Madagascan vanilla, culminating in a silky alabaster finish delicately touched by a spritz of Musk.

Fifty milliliters of CC1 would set you beck £670 if you came over to London, or elsewhere in the United Kingdom, but that’s nothing compared to Clive's Imperial Majesty Perfuma, which, at $435,000 per 16.9 oz bottle, might seem affordable only by one of the tech bro gazillionaires who attended President Trump’s second inauguration.

I was lucky to receive a bottle of CCIMP as a Christmas gift from my urologist this past December. (As you know from Michael Moore’s Sicko, British physicians commonly make more money than they know what to do with.) Having, dabbed a drop or two on my pulse points, I know that anywhere I go, beautiful women will want to buy me a frappucino, and virile heterosexual men will want to punch me in the nose for having besotted their wives, girlfriends, and fiancées.

The invocation of Madagascan vanilla reminds me of those famous automobile commercials of the 1970s in which alleged star of stage and screen Ricardo Montalbán rhapsodized about the alternately fine, soft, or rich Corinthian leather with which certain higher-end Chrysler automobiles’ seats were covered, though in fact it was made by the Radel Leather Manufacturing Company of Newark, New Jersey, in whose tannery Clem Burke of Blondie briefly labored, and I’m just making that up.

In almost every case, the obscenely wealthy are obscenely wealthy for two main reasons. They are smarter than you or I, or the two of us put together, as witness their having won multiple math olympiads, and much harder workers. After launching Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington, Jeff Bezos was sometimes observed to work up to 12 hours per day. That would mean that, if he’d begun work at eight in the morning, he wouldn’t call it a day until eight in the evening. By the time he got home and had a light supper, it was nearly time for him to go to bed if he hoped to get the eight hours of sleep physicians agree is imperative for one’s wellness journey.

I have been saying this for years. A society is best judged on how tenderly it treats its very rich and very powerful. By which yardstick, America is looking better by the hour.