What Did *You* Do During the Class War, Daddy?

You know, I feel a bit silly blogging about a letter to the editor of the WSJ from 1%-er billionaire Tom Perkins, even one given an intriguingly tasteless title like "Progressive Kristallnact Coming?"  But it really tweaked a nerve with me. Here we go:

Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

I'm thinking about how dreadful it his, him writing that from someone's attic where he's hiding  a luxury penthouse, probably, with an utter lack of perspective regarding his own privilege and a thorough failure to imagine the lack of privilege of the people he just compared himself to.

He goes on:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

Pure ingratitude people have these days. After all, when Marie Antoinette recommended starving peasants supplement their diets with pastries, the grateful French peasants offered her a free haircut. Sure, they made her wait a bit, and botched it by about a foot (or a head) but it was hardly as bad as being called "a snob".  There wasn't any such a thing as class consciousness before Occupy and them, these days. (I wonder if he thinks "conspicuous consumption" is that thing where someone makes a nasty racket coughing into one's handkerchief and then inelegantly expiring on the floor?)

I'd say he'd be the one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes (in jest) but I'd only be making his point.