The grotesque consumerism, greed and social impunity of those with extreme wealth

In Monty Python’s comedy, The Meaning of Life, there is a character called Mr Creosote. Mr Creosote is monstrously obese, to the point where he is unable to move unaided.

Towards the end of the movie, Mr Creosote is sitting in an upscale restaurant being served plate after plate of food. To create space for ever more food, he vomits repeatedly into a bucket next to his chair. When the bucket is full, he simply vomits on the floor and finally on to the menu and his table.

Other guests in the restaurant occasionally look over with a measure of nonchalant disgust, but then continue eating as if this was a normal occurrence. Eventually, Mr Creosote tells the waiter that he has had enough.

The waiter (John Cleese) offers him a thin wafer to finish the meal. Mr Creosote initially refuses but then agrees. As he swallows the wafer, there is a deep, ominous rumbling from within his bowels. Mr Creosote then explodes, the remnants of his meal as well as most of his internal organs being strewn across the restaurant and over all the other guests.

Mr Creosote is seen sitting with a mixture of bewilderment and shock as he ponders his now splayed-open rib cage, and dangling between the now shattered ribs, a slowly beating heart.

I began writing this piece while sitting in a small hotel in Kampala, and it was to Mr Creosote that I went when thinking about a discussion during the course of the day. I was there as part of a research planning meeting for a study to be conducted in three of the poorest and most conflict-affected countries in the world (actual countries are not important for the point I want to make).

The intervention focuses on “out-of-school” children and children who are at risk of dropping out of school. The main aim is to increase attendance.

In an earlier evaluation of the intervention, children and their families were asked about what they might like to receive as an incentive for attending school. There were many options, but the one that stuck with me was how many of the children spoke of the shame they felt having to go to school in dirty clothes, as their families were unable to afford soap.

It was decided that one of the incentives for attending a month of school would be a bar of soap. We were told about the joy of the children when receiving the soap, and how they ran home to deliver the soap to their family.

The day I heard this was coincidentally Donald Trump’s Liberation Day, the day that our most prominent convicted felon unveiled his global tariffs, essentially waging economic war on every country in the world. All at the same time.

Trump’s most often cited justification for his tariff war is that the rest of the world is “ripping off” or even “raping” the United States.

Why tariffs? To make the world a safer and fairer place? To make the world better? No.

Other than that, Trump is obsessed with tariffs. What he is doing is trying to make the richest country that has ever existed even richer. The United States is so rich that one state, California (based on GDP), would be the fourth-richest country in the world, if it were a country.

Let that sink in. California is richer than the UK, Japan and India.

And then, in the middle of April, linked to his flip-flopping on tariffs, Trump announced that “now was a good time to buy”. This was shortly after the market opened, but importantly before he suspended tariffs for 90 days.

That Friday, at a meeting in the White House, Trump triumphantly pointed to financial investor Charles Schwab and stated that Schwab had made $2.5-billion on the day of the announcement. In fact, the richest billionaires in the world made around $304-billion on the same day.

The annual GDP of Lesotho, a country with a population of 2.3 million people, is $2.118-billion. One investor, on one day, in all likelihood with insider information from the president of the United States, made more money on the stock market than the entire country of Lesotho in a year.

How did we get here, to such grotesquery?

Of course, the scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life is an allegory of excessive consumerism, of consumption gone mad, of greed and avarice, not to mention the social impunity of those with extreme wealth.

And it makes its point disturbingly well. When I look at Donald Trump and Charles Schwab, it is increasingly difficult not to see Mr Creosote in them.

I have found it difficult not to think about that little boy overjoyed by a bar of soap. And I have struggled with the realisation that there is this country across the pond that will seemingly never have enough.

And I cannot but wonder what the wafer will be for Trump’s America. DM

If you wish to comment on this issue, please send an email to [email protected]