The epitome of decadence

Seoul National University is taking us$150.000 from a grieved woman from California who recently lost her beloved pitbull Booger. She wants him cloned, and the university is willing to indulge her fancy. You may snicker. You may laugh. You may mock this woman. Yet she does represent the self-indulgence of America's decadence and boredom and barrenness and the lack of connexion with other fellow human beings.
Anyone who knows English fairly well, knows what a booger is. In fact, Booger is a character in the spoofs Hollywood churned out in a series about a bunch of goofey recruits at a police Academy in sunny California. A booger is a congealed bit of snot or mucus which little children have an odd habit of eating! So Booger's mum wants a clone of her dear departed pit bull.
This exercise in money and cold humanity is not something new. Tinseltown adapted with wry humour Evelyn Waugh's acid biting 'The Loved One', which put up to the light of ridicule pet cemeteries in California. But he was a foreigner and a nasty man, so Americans can dismiss him with a flick of a flyswatter. But Booger's mum is an echt American and so her indulgence cannot!
Hollywood has also recorded on celluloid and with great humour and a deep cut of disdain especially in films about the Great Depression the rich who coodle and primp poodles and dogs in a way that they wouldn't throw a bone to the starving poor. Even the Israeli's used Jewish humour to that effect about a poor Sephardic man looking to cash in a reward rounds up stray dogs. He lives in a slum not unlike the ones we see in Parisian suburbs...and has a large family to feed...so he knocks on the door of a comfortable, middle class couple with a dog any dog...they open the door and by the look of horror on their European faces, they recoil in horror and slam with a thud in the man's face. Okay he had a mutt, they lost a poodle, but the facial expressions said it all---they had see 'vermin' and they didn't want anything to do with it...And in her own way, Booger's mum lonely as she is without her Booger has no consciousness of the poor within her town or the struggling needs of her neighbours in these brutal economic times...she wants but one thing...her Booger as a clone. Here we go again, and it was said more than a century ago by America's own and not widely read economist Thorstein Veblen in his 'Theory of the Leisure Classes'...so as the economic crisis deepens in the US and recovery is not for tomorrow, Booger's mum is a poster gal for the decadence which defines Herr Bush's America.