To be rich would be a wonderful thing. Now, I don’t mean to have a nice car and a nice home, but really rich. Rich like a Kennedy or a Bush. Rich like the GDP of a small to medium country. Because when you are rich, when you are famous and absolutely fabulous, when you are king, you can do anything. You can have sex with nubile young things; 13-year-old girls even, if that’s your scene. You can ply them with drugs and bang them at Jack Nicholson’s pad. Oh, what a trip! You can hog the runway with your Gulfstream, hold up an entire airport at a whim. You can steal millions and still play golf at your favourite country club. When you are stupidly rich, you can be richly stupid, and still be president. You can walk away from a girl drowning in a sinking car and still be honoured by your peers as a good man. You can have little boys sleep over in your bed and be a beloved icon of the pop world. You can shout at the top of your voice that Jews are the cause of all the world’s problems, blacks are dirty rapists and women in short skirts are asking to be raped by a pack of them said blacks. You can do all of these things and still make all the movies you want, still crack the A-list, still live the dream. Your obscenities will be written off as oddities and your perversities as eccentricities. You will never be called filthy, when quirky will do. Biographers will say you were colourful when really the words: lowlife, crackwhore or scumbag would have suited more. People will always forgive a tyrant before they forgive a common thief. Robert Mugabe, a man who stole a country got VIP tickets to the World Cup. Kunle Benjamin, a man who stole some World Cup tickets, got three years in prison. That’s the beauty of wealth and fame. Common people like you and me are suckers for it. We will gladly buy MJ’s albums, defend Polanski in fanzines, get the Mel Gibson boxset and pour over their pictures in You magazine. We will vote for men like Bush (and Ted Kennedy), make them our leaders, forgive them their sins, over and over again. We will edit and re-edit the bits about them that we don’t like, shift the pieces until we have a nice picture. We will cut them slack that we wouldn’t even give to our own mothers. All in the hope that one day we’ll be just like them. Because when you’re rich, life is your bitch.

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  • David Smith is a world famous artist and a British Olympic hammer thrower. He is a curler for Scotland and Manitoba. A pro wrestler fondly known as the British Bulldog. A Canadian economist and a Mormon missionary they call the Sweet Singer of Israel. He is a British historian and a bishop. David Smith is the biographer of HG Wells, a professor of physics, a composer and a music teacher at Yale. He played rugby for Samoa, England and New Zealand. He created the Melissa worm, a deadly computer virus. He is the Guardian's man in Africa, he starred in a reality TV show and shot his way to silver in the 600m military rifle prone position at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. But this isn't that David Smith. This is the blog of the other David Smith. David J Smith. The one from Durban by the Sea. The one who lives in Amsterdam. Yes, him. The David Smith who likes to write about himself in the third person. To learn about all the other David Smiths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Smith To contact this David Smith: [email protected]

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David J Smith

David Smith is a world famous artist and a British Olympic hammer thrower. He is a curler for Scotland and Manitoba. A pro wrestler fondly known as the British Bulldog. A Canadian economist and a Mormon...

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