Some ‘values’ can be a parade of the vanities

I  find it quite alarming how rapidly the gap between rich and poor is widening.

And to make matters worse, it seems that the rich are going to far greater lengths to see which of them can find the most ridiculous reasons for getting rid of excess cash in pursuit of keeping up with the Joneses.

Some time back a whale that stranded up the River Thames went into a state of chronic distress. Londoners crowded to watch as well-meaning animal lovers tried to save the creature.

A month later, a watering can used to pour water over the whale to protect it from the sun was auctioned on the ebay website for R20000.

Before that, on the same website, actor William Shatner’s kidney stone was auctioned for R150000. And a toasted cheese sandwich that somehow vaguely resembled a statue of the Virgin Mary was sold for R175000!

And these over-the-top excesses are not restricted to Americans with more money than sense. Some years ago, when the champion, cancer-beating cyclist Lance Armstrong visited this country, a photograph was taken of him with a group of local businessmen who paid a whopping R320000 for copies of the photograph to hang on their office walls.

Quite often though, auctions of intrinsically worthless objects are held to raise money for charity. I believe this is a rewarding and entirely satisfactory way of getting rich people to part with their money in aid of the poor.

But the people who bought William Shatner’s kidney stone and the thousands of other bizarre and worthless oddities with vague connections to celebrities do it because they want to show off to their friends. They want to have something that the Joneses can’t have, no matter how hard they try.

And above all, they love to impress their friends with how much money this exclusive one-upmanship cost them.
Just thinking about these excesses recently got my blood boiling. How powerful, pathetic, wasteful and illogical is the human ego, I thought. But then, being the sort of person who tries to see something positive in everything, I started wondering if one couldn’t start using this weakness of the wealthy for the benefit of parish fund-raising.

So, I’ve decided to auction off some of my own completely worthless possessions for vast sums which I’m sure my parish will be able to put to good use.

First up is a pair of socks, the left one of which has the makings of a hole in roughly the region of the little toe. These I wore some years ago on a visit to Rome when we were fortunate enough to be among the thousands of people in St Peter’s Square to receive a blessing from the pope. I am sure that a pair of socks that has been in presence of a pope should be worth at least as much as  Captain Kirk’s kidney stone.

Then I have a piece of elastoplast that is exactly the same—except for its colour, shape  and size—to that which was applied to my finger by none other than President Kennedy’s sister-in-law, Ethel, when I caught my finger in the door of an hotel in Cape Town. She and her husband Bobby were on a tour of South Africa and happened to be coming into the hotel as I was walking out. Being a motherly sort, Ethel immediately took charge of the first aid on my finger.

Now that should be worth at least as much as the watering can used to try and save the Thames River whale.

I also have a golf ball that I lost in the rough on the 10th hole of the Wild Coast Golf Course and then miraculously found when playing the same hole and hitting my drive into the same area a week later.

But the high improbability of this is not what makes this golf ball worth anything. What gives it a value, akin at least to that photograph of Lance Armstrong, is that I played that golf ball precisely two weeks to the day after the famous Spanish golfer Seve Ballesteros played that exact same hole. I’m hoping that the fact that he didn’t lose his ball in the rough should not devalue mine too much.

But getting back to the insanity of all these excesses, what really makes me wonder is why we are always asked to pray for the poor? Seems to me that if we understand God’s word correctly, poor people will get to heaven a lot easier than those who are rich.