Playing with the rich at a Gatsby-like party

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ASPEN, Colo. -- I've come to this sybaritic playpen of the rich and semi-famous for the annual Ideas Festival, put on by the Aspen Institute. The idea I'm having at the moment is that I would like to ride in Mr. and Mrs. Fiji Water's swan boat.The Fijis, who I'm given to understand made their fortune by selling water in plastic bottles featuring a colorful label referencing a Pacific island, are hosting a party for the festival's participants at their ski chalet.Among other things the grounds include a pond (trending toward a lake), complete with its own dock. A paddleboat in the shape of a swan is tied to the dock.The chalet is full of people you can vaguely recall having seen on TV, along with an Indian swami or two, whose flowing robes add just the right touch of third world exotica to the proceedings.I think, inevitably, of The Great Gatsby, and in particular that passage in which the author recites a Homeric list of fictional celebrities and socialites who attend Gatsby's parties: "Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel (cq) Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square."After going on like that for a couple of pages, the narrator ends the passage with a terse epigram: "All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer."After a couple of glasses of champagne I find myself jostling with Thomas Friedman (of the New York Friedmans) for the last prawn at the end of a splendid buffet table. I ask him if he wants to help me paddle the swan boat, and he declines politely.I then ask him if he has ever noticed that one of the other guests -- another rich and semi-famous "media personality" -- has an accent exactly like that employed by Eva Gabor on Green Acres. He retreats in horror.The following idea then occurs to me: A man who makes $5 million a year can no more question the fundamental structure of the society that pays him that salary than he can long jump the English Channel.Things like the Aspen Ideas Festival perform many useful and edifying functions. For example, the next morning I'll have the opportunity to point out that the panel I'm on, which is supposed to discuss "solutions" to the "obesity crisis," has been organized around a false premise (that there's an obesity crisis requiring solutions).But on this star-spangled evening I'm struck by how these kinds of events play a role in creating a sense among the elites that, in the end, they really should be running things, and that, moreover, things ought to stay largely as they are -- subject, naturally, to various marginal tweaks and reforms that above all must not and will not alter the social and economic relations that have brought us together on this lovely summer night.Suddenly the whole thing -- the swan boat and the prawns and the champagne and the ridge full of $50 million houses that are occupied for 20 days a year, and which loom directly above the conference center where tomorrow we're going to be talking about why the poor eat too much cake -- feels very much like France in 1776.That, of course, is absurd. I'm well aware that everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. After all, I'm at this party.(Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Paul.Campos(at)Colorado.edu.)