You Can, Alas, Take It With You

SAN DIEGO â€”  Whatever the new tax code does or doesn’t, the old song will still sing true: “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.â€� They do. It’s true. And it goes a lot further than we’ve been told.

Certainly, everyone wants the good life while he’s alive to live it. Even church evangelists forget how weentsy that eye of the needle is and ask for donations. But the advantages of wealth actually last forever.

When archeologists dig up the rich and the poor a thousand years after they supposedly couldn’t take it with them, we find out they could. Which corpse do you know by name--King Tut or Ahrcab, the skinny kid with the limp who cut reeds for boat builders? Archeologists lavish attention on “status burials�; they write them up in journals and take more photographs. Kings rate bigger pictures in archeology texts.

Novelty graves get better spots in museums. Queen Asa of Norway was buried a thousand years ago in an entire ship with bowls and wagons and two pairs of leather shoes. She doesn’t have just a good spot in a museum, she has a whole museum built to preserve her grave/boat and two others.

Even for non-royalty, the richer you are, the more typing you get on your display card. The wretched are dumped into plastic bins, their bones painted with acrylic sealant so they won’t disintegrate. Nobody bothers to even translate their names. Once a nobody, always a nobody. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

If you’re famous in life and have yourself buried with pomp and gold, it’ll always be worth it. While you’re here to supervise, you’ll get the best tables at restaurants, drive cars that don’t make mysterious squawking noises and live in houses other people sigh about. After you die, you’ll still be better known than your gardener. All the tourists will see your jewelry and porcelain inlays and be impressed by the things you couldn’t brag about in person.

Pharaohs understood the importance of the afterlife. They put their money where it counted, and we’re doing exactly what they planned.

In Heaven, it’s probably the same. The ornate wings will go to the rich and powerful. Some will just happen to get better robes and more ornate halos. Sure, all the streets are golden, but location has always been everything. What will your address be? On which golden street? And don’t special people get to sit at the right hand of God? Who’s going to have to sit way in the back, behind God, where you can’t see or hear, or be seen or heard?

‘Yourname’ Here

Rich people can guarantee they’ll be seen and heard--by donating tax money to scholarships and university halls so people will have to say their names and print them in catalogues.

It’s important to set up the scholarships and be specific about the buildings before you die, though. Wouldn’t you hate to be remembered 500 years for the Yourname Gymnasium if you’d spent your entire life avoiding sweat--or reminded for 600 years of the only class you ever flunked when they built the Yourname Chemistry Building?

I myself will not have enough money left to worry about whether to build my memorial in sea stones or marble. Anyway, it would be more in keeping with my life style if I played a joke on the archeologists of 3000 A.D.

I could plan to be buried with Tupperware bowls full of eucalyptus pods from some parking lot. I could frame my favorite Gary Larson cartoons, and display my collection of Thurber stories beside models of “Stars and Stripes� and the lovely old Jaguar I learned to drive in but never had the patience, skill or income to own. I’d have plenty of time (I think) to build a doll house and fill it with miniatures to my taste. I could add little people--including the staff I’ll never afford full-sized.

Then, in five languages, on a nouveau Rosetta Stone, I could extol my virtues and explain the precious rarity of the flexible containers of aromatic pods from massive groves planted in my honor and the images and miniatures I’m taking with me to the Great Beyond.

I should do it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer--and those of us who live to laugh might not feel quite so bad about dying if we figure we can look forward to one more joke.