The Good Ship Utopia
by Gary Phillips
The earthquake disaster in Haiti; those racist fools Rush Limbaugh's and Pat Robertson's remarks about same and all black folk in general; the prez striking back against the hand that has fed him, and finally doing a smart populist move (with an eye on the fall elections) and proposing the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee on the big banks; Mark McGwire admits to juicin' (which we all knew); Harry Reid's "negro" problem; Michael Steele's "honest injun" response (and how can a guy with a bad ass '50s paperback private eye name, Mike Steele, be such a nebbish?); Conan The Blabber getting punked, all of this and so much more has been in the 24/7 news cycle of the past week or so.
One news item hasn't been in the spin, but intrigues me nonetheless. In a piece in the Business section of the January 11 L.A. Times, a Beverly Hills based firm calling itself the Utopia Residences Company is planning to sell luxury "homes" on a cruise ship called, you guessed it, the Utopia. Yep. The über cabins will range in price from a low $3.7 million to $26 million, which you'd think shelling out that amount you'd own a substantial portion of a deck. But I guess not as I took a peek at their website and the cabin sizes range from around fourteen hundred to sixty six hundred square feet. The company will also offer other cabins for rent like hotel rooms.
I like it that one of the principals of the company mentioned in the article that no matter if you were a renter or an owner, the common areas like the pool, miniature golf course and so on would be for all. Unlike say how some in Malibu try to pretend the public beach outside their window is really their beach. A blow for the proletariat...well, at least equalitarianism, on the Utopia.
Anyway, the selling point here is the mighty Utopia offers shopping opportunities from around the world, and docking at swell events like the Wimbledon tennis matches, the Cannes Film Festival and Carnival in Rio. I wonder what happens if you fall behind on your rent or our mortgage? Like poor landlubbers who get evicted, will the owners kick you and your belongings out wherever the ship happens to be like passing by hardscrabble Haiti? Now that could be, not hilarious, but a scene out of a André Malraux novel where you'd have some maven in her mink and heels walking though Port-Au-Prince trying to carry all her hat boxes, her little dog trailing behind her yapping away.
Now if the ship's backers were really smart, they might include a Grab-n-Go Espresso (see Jim Washburn's blog elsewhere on our lovely site) outlet -- for card members only, of course. But to end on a humanitarian note, yet still with prurient undertones, there are rumors that Tiger Woods, er, also rumored to be deep in sex rehab, may be taking the advice of sportswriter Jason Whitlock who twittered: "If I'm Tiger, I park a big luxury liner off the coast of Haiti, and me and Rachel Uchitel pass out $10 mil in bottled water." The Tiger-Man is said to be supplying a medical ship in that regard.
That's not utopia, but it's something.
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