"The rich are different . . . "

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who longed to be rich and hobnobbed with the rich American expatriots in the 1920s Europe, said something like that: "the rich are different from you and me." And some wag later tacked on: "Yes, they have more money."

I was reminded of this when I read a newspaper blurb a couple of weeks back that Bernie Madoff was hiring a prison consultant to help lobby for the selection of the place he will spend the rest of his days.

Prison consultant?

I guess it's a mark of how far he has fallen that, despite having a prison consultant, he did not get his first choice of a minimum security facility full of other white collar criminals. Instead, he got a medium security assignment.

Oh, well. I wonder how that goes over with the poor guy from the ghetto who is serving time for a minor crime in the worst hell hole of a prison, because he couldn't afford a pricey lawyer to get the charges dropped, to say nothing of a prison consultant.

Everyone is equal before the law, no? Except that some are "more equal than others."

Ralph