The Poor Get Poorer, and The Rich Get Dumber

According to Forbes Magazine, Bernie Ecclestone’s fortune is now somewhere around $4.2 billion, up $200 million over last year. He is the fourth wealthiest Britisher alive. He’s also the CEO of Formula One Management (the world’s leading motor sport business), and has owned all or a portion of the company and its predecessors for 40 years. From what I can tell, Bernie is considered a formidable capitalist, a tough, smart businessman, with emphasis on “tough” and “smart.” (On the other hand, when asked about Danica Patrick’s entry into automobile racing as a driver, Bernie quipped, “she should be dressed in white, like all other domestic appliances.” Not smart, Bernie. Not even dumb. Stupid.) Bernie is now 77 years old and recently divorced from his Serbian wife of 25 years, Slavica Radic Ecclestone. Savica is (still) a gorgeous former Armani model 28 years younger than Bernie and about foot taller (Bernie is 5-3). Bernie and Slavica had two children together, Tamara (27) and Petra (22).

Petra Ecclestone, who has “long platinum locks and a Barbie doll figure,” is best known for her “anti-recessionista tendencies“ — which, I’ve learned, have to do with “dealing with the recession but living life to the fullest.” You get the picture. She collects Hermès Birkin bags, favors fur, Alaïa frocks and lives in a $90-million manor in the Chelsea area of London. Petra has had a lot going on lately: she was recently married, just purchased a home in Los Angeles, and is about to embark on a business career in women’s fashions (a previous venture into men’s fashions went bust).

Petra was married in August to James Stunt, her boyfriend of four years, known as “an entrepreneur and a reputed party boy.” Petra managed to spend $5 million on the wedding, the venue for which was a 15th-century Italian castle. The highlights of the event included: a $130,000 Vera Wang wedding gown, performances by Eric Clapton and Alicia Keys, and white roses from France. Petra views herself a “teetotaler,” a “homebody,” as well as a “businesswoman” (“my full-time job isn’t just blowing my parents’ money”). Nonetheless, Petra was recently seen with her friend Paris Hilton at the trendy, ultra-expensive Beacher’s Madhouse, a nightclub in Hollywood, where the New York Post reported that one evening last April Mr. Stunt spent $200,000 on Cristal (an ultra-expensive vintage champagne recently associated with rap and hip-hop culture) for their friends. So much for staying home and hanging around the house.

Even so, Petra has managed to maintain a pretty low profile in the States — until recently, when she purchased a place to live in Los Angeles for her and her husband. (They’ll spend their time alternating between LA and London.) She hit upon a mansion in the Holmby Hills section of Brentwood, a virtual palace originally designed and built by television producer Aaron Spelling and his wife Candy, and which ever since has been referred to as “Spelling Manor” or “Candyland.” Spelling, a formidable capitalist in his own right (the producer of a slew of exceptionally popular television programs, and eventually the owner of a large number of entertainment production and distribution companies) had purchased the property in 1988, demolished the existing mansion previously owned by Bing Crosby, and constructed in its place what was and still is the largest private home in Los Angeles County. Its amenities include: 57,000 square feet of living space, 123 rooms, an entire floor of closets, a kitchen in which “you can cook for two or 800,” a screening room, a gym, a bowling alley, four gift-wrapping rooms, a flower-cutting room, a beauty salon and barber shop, the usual tennis courts and swimming pool, plus four two-car garages, 16 carports and a parking lot for 100 vehicles.

At the time it was built, the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times called it one of the region’s worst projects of the 1980s and “a sad commentary on the distorted values that have taken the architectural form of monster mansions at a time when tens of thousands of persons are homeless.”

Nonetheless, when placed on the market in 2009 the asking price was $156 million, making it the most expensive private residence in the country. Petra, however, explained that she paid “kind of half-price,” which made it “a great investment at the end of the day.” (She reportedly borrowed the purchase price from her mother.) Happy with the purchase, Petra described it as “homey and livable.” (As for the price, Petra must have taken a lesson from her father who, in 2004, sold one of his London residences in Kensington Palace Gardens for over $92 million, at the time making it the most expensive house ever sold. Bernie, however, never lived in the place. Which, of course, if you’re rich, makes it an especially cool transaction.)

Her wedding behind her and the deed in the vault, Petra recently sat back and agreed to an interview. When asked why a 22-year old woman and her husband would want to live alone in such decadence, she mentioned that she had her five miniature dogs to consider: “It’s important for them to be able to have space.”

So now, her dogs squared away and happily ensconced in Candyland, Petra will just have to make a go of her new venture into the fashion business, won’t she? (Or will she?)

Hey, is this capitalist system we’ve got something special, or what?

God and the Survivor - The Prayer Dilemma

Over the September 11 weekend, Terry Gross interviewed several New York City firemen who had been involved in the rescue of persons caught in the Twin Towers ten years ago. This is not the kind of program, or interview, that I would ordinarily listen to, anticipating that it would be either another occasion for patriotic flag-waving or a mawkish, self-serving tale of personal heroism. But, as it turned out, the stories of the firemen I heard were not even close to either of my narrow, prejudiced expectations.

An interview that particularly impressed me was that of Deputy Chief Jay Jonas of the New York Fire Department. A captain on 9/11, Jonas led his men up the stairs of the North Tower in an attempt to rescue people. Upon reaching the 27th floor they heard a huge roar; to get some sense of what was happening, he and one of his men left the stairway, entered the nearby floor area and went to the widows on the north and south sides of the building; there they discovered that the South Tower had collapsed. Jonas immediately directed his men to retrace their steps and get out of the building as soon as possible. Not all of the men heard his report that the other tower had collapse, so some of them were perplexed and a little irritated; after all, they hadn’t rescued anyone and they had just trudged up 27 floors with 100 pounds of equipment on their backs.

Part way down the stairway, they found Josephine Harris, who could barely walk. She was crying, and urged the firemen to go on without her. Knowing that rescuing her would slow them down and increase the chance that all die in the collapse, Jonas nonetheless decided to take her with them.

When they got to the fourth floor, the North Tower, the one from which they were trying to escape, began to collapse. (The towers were designed to fall in a catastrophic event, not like a falling tree, but in pancake fashion, floor upon floor.) Because the top of the tower where the collapse began was 1,300 feet above them (about a quarter of a mile), Jonas and his men at first could only discern a slight noise and a slight rumble. The noise, the vibration and the debris grew louder and more severe as each floor collapsed on the floor below it. Because of the tremendous force of the vibrations as the collapse proceeded, one of his men was eventually thrown two floors down the stairwell. But when the collapse reached the fifth floor, one floor above them, it suddenly stopped. There was so much debris below, there was no place for the bottom floors to collapse to. Jonas found himself trapped between the ground and the fifth floor with 12 firefighters, one port authority officer and Josephine Harris.

A short time later, a sliver of bright sunlight fell into the space in which they were trapped. It was then that Jonas realized that, standing in the stairwell near the fifth floor, he was actually standing on what had become the top of the North Tower, which had suddenly opened to the sky above. He would later realize that everyone above the fifth floor and everyone below the fourth floor had been killed. Eventually, however, Jonas, all his men, and Josephine Harris, were able to get out of the building alive.

This story was recounted by Chief Jonas in an articulate, clear, almost matter-of-fact manner, without much discernable emotion. He had a deep, resonant Irish voice, with a certain masculine vibrato to it, and he was warm and easy to listen to. But what struck me was his humility. That, too, was evident in his voice. Jonas’ humility was not prefaced upon a belief that God had bestowed some exceptional grace on him. He didn’t go on and on about how God looked down and saved him, his men, and Josephine Harris. Chief Jonas, whatever his personal religious or spiritual orientation, didn’t go there.

Here’s what he said (from the transcript):

TERRY GROSS: You say . . . that you don't like it when people say to you: You survived because God was with you. Why don't you like it when people say that?

CHIEF JONAS: Well, first of all it's a little pompous to say that you are a miracle, you know. But second of all, by them saying that God was with me that day you're also kind of saying that God was not with them that day, and that's certainly not the case.

You know, I think of the one radio transmission between Chief Pete Hayden and Captain Paddy Brown. Chief Hayden is talking to him as we're coming down the stairs and I'm hearing this over the radio. Pete Hayden is calling Captain Paddy Brown on the radio. He says Command Post to Ladder 3, get out of the building. Get out of the building. And Paddy Brown gets on the radio and he says I refuse the order, which is unbelievable, you know, that somebody would say that. He says I refuse the order. I'm up here on the 44th floor and I've got too many burnt people with me. I'm not leaving them. You know, it still sends shivers up my spine hearing that. And...

GROSS: I take it he did not survive.

JONAS: No. Paddy Brown, all the men from Ladder 3 and all the people that they were treating all died in the collapse.

One of the several things that really impressed me in this statement is that Chief Jonas implicitly expressed, if you will, a valuable insight into the meaning, and the theology, of prayer.

Years ago, I was taught as a young Catholic seminarian that there are four basic kinds of prayer: petition, contrition, thanksgiving, and adoration. They’re stated here in ascending order of inherent virtue; that is, petition, by which the person praying asks for something, is at the bottom of the list, while adoration, which has no object other than the love of God, is at the top.

Unlike prayers of penance and praise, prayers of petition and thanksgiving have a built-in problem. When we pray to God “for something,” we often, though not always, through no fault of our own, are asking God to favor us in a way that will result in his disfavoring someone else. Similarly, when our prayer is one of thanksgiving, it often entails expressing gratitude for some benefit or advantage that someone else did not receive, again often through no fault of our own.

While this view of prayer may seem blasphemous to some, to me it’s simply a reflection of sheer existential reality. It is obvious, there for all to see. Nonetheless, those who pray for favors of one kind or another surely believe their prayers will be efficacious; that is, that they will make a difference, otherwise they wouldn't pray that way. This doesn’t necessarily mean that by petitioning God for some specific outcome they are asking God to “change his mind.” But if they’re not asking him to alter the course of events to coincide with the prayer, according to one well-known Catholic theologian, they are acting on the belief that “God sees everything in an eternal ‘instant,’ and that he has already factored in our prayer in determining and guiding the course of our human and personal histories.” [Fr. Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (Harper Collins 1994)] Either way, they believe that their prayer did, in fact (i.e., in reality), have an effect — even if their prayer wasn’t “granted.”

That said, I don’t know if there are any theologians who share my outlook, but I do know one author and humorist: Mark Twain (no theologian, he). My outlook is much the same as that Twain hit on a century ago in his famous “The War Prayer,” written during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Of prayer, he wrote:

God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

Good examples of what I mean here abound in competitive sports. Ubiquitous in professional and college sports — football, basketball, hockey, tennis, to name a few — are the celebratory prayers offered by players after achieving some objective: scoring a touchdown, hitting a three-point shot, scoring a shot on goal, or winning a set. The players make the sign of the cross, point skyward toward god in the heavens, or go down on bended knee in prayerful submission.

But what are these athletes really saying?

It seems to me that what they’re saying goes something like this: “Thank you, God, for permitting me to intercept the opposing quarterback’s off-balance wobbly pass, for allowing my teammates to smash block into the turf those trying to tackle me, and for letting me give a stunning straight-arm into the face of the last opposing player, thus helping me run unscathed into the end zone for the touchdown.” In other words, thank you for favoring me and not my opposition, which perhaps, on paper anyway, should have won the game. The point is that, in sports there are winners and there are losers, and if God has set up a big-time win for my team, he has necessarily set up a big-time loss for the other guys.

But isn’t this the prototype for all prayers of petition and thanksgiving?

The answer, I think, is yes. It is illustrated by the parody of a prayer for soldiers as they go into battle, probably the most frequently quoted lines in "The War Prayer." Similar to athletic competition at least in this respect, war is (or used to be anyway) a one side wins/one side loses undertaking, and, as Mark Twain makes dramatically clear, prayer is thereby rendered problematic. While we might like to think a prayer for the safety and well-being of a soldier is good, kind, and compassionate — not to mention patriotic, Twain saw it in all its stripped-down horrific unpleasantness, and made it part of a forceful argument that both the Christian religion and humanism are incompatible with war.

The War Prayer begins with a brief supplication for the soldiers on our side:

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

Then this, what that really means to the enemy combatants and non-combatants stated in the stark terms of what actually happens in war:

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of the summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protect their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

I have a close friend, a former fundamentalist and (later) Methodist minister, who told me that lately he has become uneasy about saying grace before and after meals. Assume for the moment, he says, that the world’s food supply is finite and, as a practical matter, that at present it’s not only finite but inadequate to feed the entire world population; or, if that’s not accurate factually, that those with more than enough food simply don’t distribute their surplus effectively to those in need. In all of these scenarios, my friend feels that the clear implication of thanking god for the food we eat is to also thank him for not giving it to someone less fortunate — i.e., someone starving. He’s very much aware that today one-third of the world’s population is properly fed, one-third is under-fed, and one-third is starving. Why should he fall in the properly fed group, he wonders, as opposed to the group that is under-fed or starving? And just how can he presume to thank God for putting him in the first group rather than the last? In today’s world, only so many people can get enough food, you know. For my friend, this is a very real religious and moral dilemma.

This is precisely the dilemma Chief Jonas did not permit himself to fall into. If the fact that he survived the collapse of the North Tower was a miracle, was he to presume that his friend Captain Paddy Brown and all the others — firefighters, policemen, office workers — who didn’t make it not worthy of such a miracle? If he labeled it a miracle, he wondered, wouldn’t he have been saying just that? Wouldn’t he have been saying that he was the preferred firefighter that day? Chief Jonas had the humility to know that he was not, in fact or in spirit, or in any other way, shape or form, that day or any other day, a person preferred by God over everyone else. He just knew that.

I do not, of course, know whether Chief Jonas was or is now a “man of prayer,” as they say. That’s his business, not mine. Indeed, the way in which he approached the dilemma may be, for him, a way of praying; and then again, it may not. That, too, is his business. But I do think that if he is a man of prayer, his approach to prayer and his relationship to his God is a cut more salutary and a lot more mature, if you will, than that of most of us.

For me, however, no longer a man of prayer in the traditional religious sense, I am more than content to admire Chief Jonas, first for his courage, and then for his humility. For me personally, I don’t believe he was preferred by God, but I do feel he is inspiring as a human being.