Some may call this folly

(for Jeff Heath and now, it's sad to say, Kevin Byrne)

In the last week I’ve rejected offers to pick up riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Not once, I might add, not twice, but three times. In one week.

Firstly there was 15% from Mr Odongo, son of a multi-millionaire who died in a plane crash in some quiet corner of Nigeria. On Wednesday, according to Mrs Jackie Paeta (no return address) I won US$1,000,000 in El Gordo Sweepstakes. That came as a surprise because I never bought a ticket. But hey, you know what they say: stranger things happen at sea.

Today I received a tragic tale from Samuel Nguessan. His dad was assassinated recently, in Sierra Leone apparently. Sammy wants my help to claim US$5,500,000 stuck in a bank vault somewhere. And because I’m helping Sam, he tells me, I get 20%.

So it seems that in return for giving those people my bank details and date of birth I will receive about US$5,000,000. I have already ordered the Ferrari. There’s a four-cabin yacht I’ve had my eye on for a while. And do you know that absolute waterfront palace that’s been advertised in the property pages? You guessed it … sold to the man who cornered the market in easy money.

But wait a minute. There are a couple of things wrong here.

Firstly: the Ferrari. I use a wheelchair. Have you any idea how hard it is to transfer out of a Ferrari? They’re four inches off the ground. And where would I store the ‘chair? Better think again about the prancing pony.

No, I’m joking. The Ferrari aint the problem. (I’ll just get a trophy blonde to help me transfer … sorry, I’ll be serious!)

The problem is this. What do I do about my own cynicism?

Oscar Wilde wrote, “a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. He was correct.

Despite the behaviour of George W Bush, I try hard not to be cynical. But even I have limits, which makes me say to Mr Odongo, Mrs Paeta and Sammy Nguessan - I don’t think so somehow. Many may suggest that’s hardly cynicism. Rejecting those offers to get rich quick hardly requires a brain the size of a planet. They are scams - stupid, obvious, shallow scams inviting vulnerable, naïve, silly people to connect with their baser instincts and greedy impulses.

Gimme, gimme, gimme – me, me, me.

My more fundamental questions go beyond the Nigerian e.mail scam. In a land where every pub, it seems, has more pokies than paying customers, where ten squillion lottery games are drawn every evening on television and public services that are underwritten by taxes derived, in no small part, from roulette tables, one-armed bandits and scratch cards, who am I to castigate those who dream of getting rich as quickly as possible. As the man is reputed to have said, once upon a time, “let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone.”

We all dream, don’t we? Or maybe it’s more accurate to write, we fantasise. We speculate on the idea of being a winner. We price the rewards: X thousand on a car, Y thousand on a house, Z thousand on a world cruise. A, B and C thousands in trust funds for the grandchildren. No big sin there.
But what does that tell us about what we value in life?

Do the roads of Australia, urban speed limit 50 kph, truly need another Ferrari? Do I actually want to cross the ocean on the QE2 or the new Queen Mary? And, you know, if material wealth is all its cracked up to be, how come after 500 years of Capitalism and 220 years of European domination, large numbers of affluent people in our communities feel stressed, alienated and dissatisfied?

But do you know what annoys me even more than all this price of everything / value of nothing rhetoric? It’s this. We manage to have constructed a pattern of self-absorption in our public and private lives that means we say little about what we truly value. Then one day, usually too late, someone offers up a platitude: we never knew how good she, he or it was until she, he or it was gone. What a tragic glorification of inattentiveness.

So I try. I try to value everything about us that money can’t buy. I don’t think Mr Odongo wants to hear that from me. But, as Rhett Butler once said: frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
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