Money Can Still Buy a Lot

If I get the drift of David Larsen’s “Priceless Gifts: What Can’t Money Buy? Health, Memories, Freedom and Love,” it is the best ad for poverty to appear yet this season (Dec. 13).

Several select celebrities--Jack Lemmon, Julia Child, George Foreman, Art Buchwald, Norman Cousins, Mike Marshall, Wolfgang Puck, Gloria Allred--a successful author, a prominent doctor, two senior religious leaders, the manager of a downtown center for women, and a token Skid Row victim were each interviewed regarding the things they think money can’t buy. Except for the latter two individuals, the one characteristic the rest have in common is resources--high income, prestige, autonomy, opportunity and, most of all, control over their fate.

The collective outpouring of this unlikely sampling of opinions is pretty straightforward: Money is essentially irrelevant when it comes to happiness, peace, justice, memories, love or health.

Surely, one might have reached a different consensus interviewing an employed mother wondering if her children are safe and sound, the old person losing everything in a Lincoln S&L; investment, the black facing discrimination, the unemployed man, the young family struggling to make it, or the divorcee alone and bewildered.

If the Larsen story was designed to make the down and out feel up and in, forget it--just send money. America is still a grand theater of consumption. Christmas means gone shopping.

Further, it is still the case that for many (if not most) Americans, the pursuit of happiness is equated with the pursuit of money, and materialistic values do play an important part in definitions of the good life.

RUSSELL TRAVIS

Los Angeles