No cash, no trophy wife: It’s a simple enough psychosexual equation
Ah, there’s nothing like a tragic love story. And indeed what follows is nothing like a tragic love story. For, if you listen carefully, you may just be able to catch the sound of high-end scuttling among the steep-sided canyons of New York. That would be the Manhattan rats leaving the sinking ships or sinking husbands — pretty much the same thing.
It appears that the credit crunch has sent top-flight New York divorce business rocketing up 40 percent, as the trophy wives of Wall Street’s beleaguered super-wealthy (executives, hedge funders, property developers) race to lawyers to cite “irreconcilable differences,” which in this case roughly translates as: “He’s poor now.”
It’s got so bad that some Wall Street husbands are trying to hang on to their wives by taking out huge loans to maintain their mansions, yachts and Saks accounts. However, lawyers are saying that wives aren’t interested in standing by their men, opting instead to end their marriages as quickly and clinically as a bad credit card snipped in half in front of you in a restaurant. The whole debacle amounts to a somewhat ruthless: “If the gravy train is over, then so are we, darling.”
The only appropriate response is how appalling. What kind of cow leaves a marriage just because the helicopter has left the lawn? Indeed, any decent person should despise these women, right?
LOYAL TO A FAULT
Well, no, actually, wrong. It seems to me that these women are loyal to a fault, that is, loyal to the deal that was originally struck.
When you think about it, there is a world of difference between being a trophy wife — waving hubby off on his private jet while you face another day of lonely, unfulfilled spending in Barneys — to being a real wife — having some sacked bitter bozo under your feet all day, reliving past glories, hogging the remote control and asking too many questions about your lipo-fund.
More to the point, before we all start working ourselves into a righteous lather over the behavior of the trophy wives, these masters of the universe knew what they were getting into. After all, weren’t they the ones who brokered the “deal” in the first place — their cash and status for a trophy wife (someone to make their peers drool)?
So, no cash, no trophy wife. It’s a simple enough psychosexual equation. Cold yes, but only as cold as the one that makes it clear to the trophy wife that she will be unceremoniously dumped, Trump-style, for a new hottie if she commits the crimes of becoming fat, old or Ivana (the patron saint of failed trophy wives). In short, in the land of the deal, the fleeing rat-wives have a point — what does love have to do with it?
Indeed, while the new breed of credit-crunch bailer-wives might be ruthless, maybe they learned from their masters. Only last week, I was hard at work doing research (OK, sprawled on the sofa reading the newspaper) and came across the tale of Arpad Busson, the hedge-fund philanthropist and multi-zillionaire, who had a nine-year, two-children relationship with model Elle Macpherson, allegedly couldn’t marry her, because he was a strict Catholic, and she was a divorcee and then went on to propose to twice-divorced Uma Thurman.
REVENGE
Just as I was thinking: “Nice guy — way to go, Uma,” I came across another tale of Super-rich Lurrve Gone Sour.
Christie Brinkley’s Hamptons’ paradise was shattered when her husband was discovered paying off a neighbor’s teenage daughter to keep quiet about their affair.
Just in case Christie hadn’t been humiliated enough, the divorce judge commented that she might care to “examine her taste in men.”
At which point, you think, enough already! Whatever happened to the great high-end romances, the ones that were examples to us all — Bogie and Bacall, Scott and Zelda, Bill and Monica? Which, for their sins, were about love, sex and madness. Anything but money.
So what are we seeing here — the revenge of the trophy spouse? Certainly it’s a timely reminder to the rich of Manhattan that the first law of the trophy wife is that she, natch, atrophies at the first sign of trouble. For the rest of us, it’s culturally interesting.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, another great period of international stress, it was noted, rather droningly, that every day brought a new life lesson. With this in mind, maybe we should take heed of the morality tales emerging from the credit-crunch crisis.
Certainly, it seems to say something that the relationships of the rich seem to be the first ones to go.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS