Oh, Dear! Heaven Forfend!

Advisor: But there's a down-side to it. The latest polls indicate you're in danger of losing touch with the common man.

What oh what are the well-off to do? First the bourgeois started muscling in on the nouveaux riches' turf, what with This Old House and the Antiques Roadshow and Martha Stewart Living and all, and now mere common folk can sit in the front of the airplane! What's the point of being élite if anyone can buy the special treatment?

Well, of course, there's the old fallback of buying access that only the very well-off can afford: in this case, your own jet! For a mere $2 million, you can own a "Bigshot, Spouse, and No-More-Than-Three Children" Special: not only will you not have to rub elbows with the cattle on the airliners, but you'll be able to rub their noses in your wallet. Instead of ten VSIPs (Very Self-Important Persons) having to share not only the same first-class cabin air but the same departure and arrival slots, four of them will have their own of everything. With your own personal dinky li'l jetlet, you too can join in the quadrupling of congestion at the nation's main airports! Lord knows you have a dollar-given right to ignore everyone poorer than you; if America doesn't stand for Horatio Alger and overconsumption and your freedom and everyone else's responsibility, why, it doesn't stand for anything. So what are you waiting for? Zzzzzzzoooooommmmm!! And at $2M a pop, you'll still have enough for a wicked spoiler on the back, and some phat hubs for the wheels! Oh, and the fuel, too. It won't be your fault that those Hummer jets have worse passenger-mile fuel efficiency, thereby causing increased demand for a static fuel supply. And after all, aviation fuel is just another commodity and the market is God, so if the west-coast grandparents of five east-coast children can't afford $100 fuel surcharges, that's just too damned bad.

And all those stories about aircraft emissions contributing to global warming – you know, the high-level clouds and the carbon dioxide and all? Those are just stories made up to scare tree-huggers, like DDT, or acid rain.

And for you non-stinking-rich peons out there, turn off your damn PC! Don't you know you're killing the planet?!