'Wherever People Are Rich Together' - The Great Gatsby, Jeffrey Epstein, And The American Dream

 

They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

This was what Nick Carroway, narrator and central character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby said about Daisy and Tom Buchanan. 

The Buchanans were the idle rich - homes on Long Island, unimaginable wealth, and the status and privilege that it provides.  Yet, 'they were careless people, Tom and Daisy'.

They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

 

Nick is fascinated with Daisy - she shines like silver, her smile is bright, 'her voice sounds like money'. At the same time he is repelled by her insincerity and facile composure.  He is attracted to her but repelled by her.  'I am the only honest person I know'. says Nick in the story's introduction, and because of that, despite his recognition of Daisy's unusual beauty, affability, and charm, cannot help criticize her. 

At the end of the novel, his doubts are justified.  Despite her renewed love affair with Gatsby, his selfless act of responsibility (taking the blame for the car accident which killed Mabel Wilson), Daisy and her husband leave for Europe without a sign, call, or gesture of recognition of Gatsby's death.  They are, as Nick said, going off where people are rich together and leaving mess they created to be picked up by others. 

Gatsby is a self-made man, a millionaire, a man without Tom and Daisy's culture and class, but desperate to show off his success.  He, too, is wealthy beyond the reach of most people and more than the equal of people like Tom only whose inherited wealth has given him the stage. 

The source of Gatsby's wealth is only surmised - his association with Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series suggests bootlegging or something far more sinister.  His parties at his Long Island estate were renowned - they were jamborees of wealth and privilege, insubstantial and capricious, thousands coming without invitation to eat and drink at his expense, and none of them coming to his funeral. 

They were also 'people being rich together' but nothing of the Buchanans' sort, only lowbrow parties for people with highbrow aspirations. Those who attended Gatsby's parties were just as careless about what they left behind as the Buchanan crowd. 

Fitzgerald understands the American fascination with money and its display, either the reserved, aristocratic Chippendale and old silver Buchanans, or the bourgeois excesses of Gatsby.  He is far more critical of the entitled rich - the Buchanans - than the nouveau riche, Gatsby, for America is all about striving for more.  Gatsby doesn't know any better - he has no idea how his world differs from Daisy's and how a marriage between them, despite the simple, innocent romance of previous years is impossible. 

'You're better than the rest of them, all put together', Nick says to Gatsby despite the fact that he has admitted that Gatsby stands for everything he hates.  There is room, even in a gangster, for friendship, admiration, and love. 

Jeffrey Epstein's parties were no different than Gatsby's - they were showy, glitzy, low-brow affairs which attracted the self-made, people like Bill Clinton, born and raised in trailer parks with the same aspirations as Gatsby. Clinton writes in his memoir about how he knew he was destined for greatness and set to work on achieving it at a very young age, chauffeur to Arkansas political royalty.  Every one on Epstein's list were of the same ilk - bourgeois to the core, lovers of wealth, glamour, and all the perks of wealth. 

They were not just Americans - the great Gatsby-esque parties of youthful beauty, abandon, excess, and secure privilege were irresistible.  There was something about being rich together that had an ineluctable allure.

The guests at Epstein's parties were not the rich of Tom and Daisy - old money, New England, Wall Street, industrial turn-of-the-century private incomes- and had no interest in being rich together like them, all leather and fine tailoring, paintings by Gainsborough, furniture by Townsend, the Yale Fence Club, Park Avenue and Southampton. They wanted to be rich together like Gatsby's guests, a 'look what I've got' cavalcade of new money and earned and bought influence. 

Epstein's list is long. It seems like everyone who was anyone visited him on his island.  It wasn't enough to be rich alone.  It was the collective wealth, the universal wealth, and the same heady bourgeois desire to spend and be seen spending.  Whatever happened at Epstein's parties was kosher.  How could such an assemblage of wealthy, ambitious men of influence and power do anything wrong? There was an unspoken but mutually agreed upon ethos - if the likes of Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and others like them were there, ethnics, morals, or proper behavior were never questioned. 

The Epstein parties were not only the rich being rich together, but scenes of opportunity - the crass bottom of the American dream. There were chances for all kinds of intimacy - business deals could be begun or concluded, sexual affairs arranged or consummated, political friendships cemented.  Sub kucch milta hai -  everything is possible - the old Indian aphorism in a society where rules don't always apply, was never more pertinent than in Jeffrey Epstein's jamborees. 

Still, it is amazing that Epstein and Ghislaine were able to attract so many of the world's rich and famous to their island.  These were not quiet little dinners on a terrace in St. Bart's overlooking the Caribbean, nor elegant soirees, nor black tie affairs with cello and orchestra.  These were indeed worthy of The Great Gatsby - grandiose, opulent, caviar affairs where anything goes. 

Epstein understood the dynamics of association like no one else.  He was a genius at event planning, a master of great and grand ceremonies, who stood top hat and tails at the center of a three ring circus.  One man and one man alone - Jeffrey Epstein - stood at the center of this ambitious, hungry crowd, and gave them each what they wanted.

In the highly-charged, often chaotic political atmosphere following revelations of Epstein's party excesses and the serious crimes committed, critics have overlooked the social dynamics of the situation.  These parties were remarkable and unique for their drawing power, their immediate sense of camaraderie, their uncanny tapping into male egos, and a brilliant understanding of how and why people group together. 

Much has been written about individuals, their guilt by association or their direct involvement in Epstein's criminal activities; but little about the parties themselves - the enabling environment for abandonment of common sense let alone morals.  There is a lesson in the parties, an explanation of not why rich people do rich things together but how they can stray so far from center once there.