Monday, April 25, 2011

Variation on a Theme

Before browsing ThinkExist, I had not realized that Jean Paul Getty, founder of Getty Oil Company and thus the Getty dynasty of wealth and power, had acquired such a variety of quotable observations.  I had only known of one, which I had encountered in Paul Dickson’s The Official Rules:

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.

On this anniversary of the BP disaster, it may be worth thinking about whether or not the meek would have done a better job with the legacy of the Earth than the corporate elites;  but Wiley Miller, the creator of the Non Sequitur comic strip came up with a better idea.  The strip for today (April 25, 2011) is a single panel, depicting those elites (without suggesting whether or not they represent a single corporation or some kind of cartel).  The clearly comfortable (not to mention well-fed) man (everyone at the table is male) at the head of the table says only one thing:

The meek may inherit the Earth, gentlemen, but we’ll still own Congress.

This image also has a title:

The Big Picture

Things may have changed since the days of Getty and those of his ilk, but capitalism has remained resourceful in finding ways to keep the meek in their place!

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