A richer look at the rich

When I hear the word “bling-bling,” I want to run out and buy a revolver just so I can reach for it when I hear the word “bling-bling.” (Or is that two words?) But the awful popularity of this term suggests that mine is a minority opinion, that America may be all too ready for “Life of Luxury,” Robin Leach’s latest celebration of the vile excesses and diamond-studded excrescencies of the mogul class.

Airing tonight on ABC, it is meant to update and outdo Leach’s long-running “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” whose very title reeks of the hypermaterialist age that saw it born. (A lifestyle, after all, is not a philosophy of life, but the sum of what you own and consume.) It would be pleasant to think that the network has mounted this hour as an incitement to revolution. But I fear not.

It’s all block-long yachts and private jets and 40-grand-a-day vacation hideaways (shown here with coyly positioned topless models). It’s hotel butlers hand-warming your sheets, and single pieces of jewelry that cost more than most people will make in a lifetime. It’s Faberge eggs and Louis Vuitton bags and 24-karat this and platinum that. Of course, if you think there’s any decent reason for someone to own, as Larry Flynt does, a gold-plated tissue box -- “That’s nothing to sneeze at!” says Robin -- we have nothing more to discuss.

It is true that many of those visited or profiled here -- Donald Trump, rap mogul Russell Simmons and designer wife Kimora Lee Simmons, Virgin Records/Airlines/Etc. founder Richard Branson, the Olsen Twins -- are self-made successes, or they are harmless celebutante heiresses like the Hilton sisters.

They have not built their empires on the backs of the masses, nor have they defrauded investors, or pumped sludge into the waterways or poison into the air. No one forced you to buy all those Mary Kate and Ashley videos and hair-care products, after all.

The problem isn’t the money they have, but the uses to which it is sometimes put, the gross self-indulgences that Leach lovingly details here in his familiar hectoring tones, speaking at the volume of a man whose hearing aid has failed.

It’s as if the ‘80s never ended. Here is “the irrepressible Trump,” who we learn was nearly a billion dollars in debt not so long ago but now is “back in the black and on a spending attack.” But to what end? A look into the enormous penthouse he shares with his current fashion-model girlfriend shows that he suffers from a complete absence of taste -- though anyone who has seen a Trump building even from the outside knows this much already.

Still, bad taste is every man’s right, rich or poor. And many, if not most, would say that it is just harmless fun, peeking into the closets of people so loaded they might as well be living on another planet.

I suppose someone has to keep the furriers and yacht captains employed -- one might even argue the moral superiority of patronizing the work of well-paid artisans instead of the virtual slave labor that produces much of what’s cheap enough for the rest of us to buy.

That is a subtler argument than you will find advanced here, however, where it is taken as given that too much is never enough. Leach may be a nice enough guy, or a saint even -- he’s on the board of Meals on Wheels. (Though it does take a special sort of person to casually slip a phrase like “my friend, supermodel Tyra Banks” into conversation, as he does, without irony, and then broadcast it on national TV.)

But in a time when “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is regarded as irremediable gospel -- and a basis for national policy -- this is a difficult hour to recommend.

*

‘Life of Luxury’

Where: ABC

When: 8-9 tonight

Rating: The network has rated the special TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children)

Host...Robin Leach

Executive producers Andy Friendly and Krysia Plonka.