Is there anything more nauseating than the self-pitying sanctimony of the rich and famous? Every time I see Jim Carrey pontificating about how making truckloads of money made him really, really miserable, I don’t know whether to just vomit on the spot, or point out that, for all the evils of his vast fortune, he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to part from it.
Just as irksome are the ultra-wealthy women, who spend more on business lunches than you or I will earn in a year, whining about “glass ceilings” and “gender pay gaps”.
But when it comes to self-pitying sanctimony, Lisa Wilkinson is in a class of her own.
Just when we thought Lisa Wilkinson had heeded the warning that when you’re in a hole, it’s best to stop digging, the television celebrity started digging all over again. And the mess around her is just as embarrassing as her last ill-fated dig when she proved to be a galah over a gender pay gap.
Simultaneously, Wilkinson has confirmed a long-suspected link between money and sanctimony, namely the more money some people amass, the more sanctimonious they become.
I suspect most BFD readers will at this point be asking, “Who?” Wilkinson is a former lady pages editor, married to has-been rugby player and wannabe “historian” Pirate Pete FitzSimons. Wilkinson’s last gig was hosting the Australian edition of nauseating left-elite smugfest, The Project, from whence she drove viewers in droves. When even people who venerate the oleaginous Waleed Aly can’t stomach you, what is there to do but slink back to your harbourside mansion and weep into your Moet.
But, in a desperate stab at being noticed again, Wilkinson tried to parlay being papped into a last grab at relevance.
Last week, the Network Ten star posted a long and emotive post on social media explaining how she had been “totally violated” by a “creepy old guy” who photographed her while she ate alone at a table facing the window of a Melbourne restaurant. The photos featured in the Daily Mail.
Wilkinson did a poor job of pitching her plight as one faced by Ms Woman Everywhere. “And here’s to women everywhere,” she wrote, “being able to happily – and safely – take themselves out to dinner after a long day to do some work, plough through a few dozen emails, text friends, have a cheeky cocktail, eat broccoli (because, hey, greens!), catch up on some reading … place a white napkin on their lap in peace … without worrying about being shamed or judged or dissected or made to feel totally violated by some old creepy guy secretly taking pictures designed to make you look sad and lonely … when you’re actually having a great night.”
Yes, because “women everywhere” are noshing and boozing it up at poncy Chapel St restaurants and trying to dodge lurking paparazzi.
The second hallmark of the sanctimoniously wealthy is the sound of the drawbridge being pulled up. People such as Wilkinson, who have made a stash of money, can get very snooty, wailing with outrage, at other people earning money from an industry in which they made money.
As Steve the photographer pointed out, it’s a bit rich for a former editor of women’s magazines to claim she felt violated by paparazzi.
After all, it’s not like paparazzi photos of slebs and royals, and inane gossip, isn’t the stock-in-trade of women’s magazines. If there were no magazines such as the ones Wilkinson proudly edited for decades, paparazzi would be broke.
Wilkinson’s self-serving duplicity was further exposed by the inconvenient fact that she lied through her teeth about the “old” guy.
Steve said he was, in fact, 10 years younger than Wilkinson. What did that make Wilkinson, he asked? He also denied Wilkinson’s claims that he walked back and forth in front of her without a camera, staring at the celebrity. He was standing farther afield, carrying a camera because he was a photographer. Though he noted others staring at the not-very-shy celebrity who was, after all, seated at a restaurant table fronting a window.
The Australian
As Theodore Dalrymple once wrote, of one of his patients, “By demanding this difficult psychological feat of us, recognition and nonrecognition at the same time… she was in effect exerting her power over us”. Most of us may live lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau said, but an elite few are wealthy and privileged enough to live lives of very loud and incessantly demanding desperation.
To quote Dalrymple again, it’s all very pathetic.