Please Laugh At This Man

I’d buy a Birkin bag before springing for this nonsense:

Mr. Brooks sat and listened this year as Ms. Schlegel, her memory apparently intact and keen, spent 23 days testifying against him in a highly unusual trial in United States District Court on Long Island that has been highlighted by sweeping accusations of fraud, insider trading, and company-financed personal extravagance.
DHB, which specialized in making body armor used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, paid for more than $6 million in personal expenses on behalf of Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.
Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.

This is something I’ll never understand, and it illustrates a point I want to make again: even if you’re one of the people who disagree with my assessment of $10,000 purses, would you acknowledge — having been exposed to the $100,000 belt buckle — that some purchases are so extravagant and irrational that a perversion of values is at their core? Even if the materials, craftsmanship, and style surpass every other belt buckle made in the history of human civilization, this is an accessory that shouldn’t have been made.

To be clear, I don’t think it should be illegal to spend $100,000 on a belt buckle. What I do think is that Mr. Brooks inhabits a culture where some people who gaze upon the bling beneath his belly button are impressed. Instead, they ought to laugh at him and mock his extravagance, is all I’m saying.