"Which is more revolting?" an editor e-mailed me the other day, "Rupert Murdoch spending $44 million for a triplex at 834 Fifth Avenue with 20 rooms and a monthly maintenance of $21,469.07," as narrated on the front page of that day's newspapers, "or King Mswati III of Swaziland spending $690,000 on a DaimlerChrysler Maybach 62?"

Mention of the Great Beast buying his three-floor pad on Fifth Avenue gave me a chance to saunter down memory lane. I think Murdoch had one floor of that building in the late 1970s when he bought the New York Post and then the Village Voice, where I was working at the time. He came down to 80 University Place, pledged not to fire the editor, climbed back into his limo, went back uptown and fired the editor the next day.

Murdock has fired hundreds more editors and now has three floors instead of one. But I don't grudge him his triplex. He's the one who has to climb up and down endless stairs or wait for the elevator so he can go to bed. Besides, there are so many billionaires around these days that it's hard to be affronted by Murdoch throwing his spare change around.

Mswati's costly DaimlerChrysler doesn't bother me much either. Last time I looked out the window, I counted four old Chryslers of mine, spanning the glory years of 1959 to 1967, and I bet they are more fun to drive, more reliable and certainly less costly to fix than Mswati's latest rig.

Really, it's up to the people of Swaziland, most of whom live on about 25 cents a day. If this is the car — and be assured, he has many others — that finally sprains the camel's back, they can shoot him, put his fleet up for auction in Scottsdale, Ariz., early next year and have a good party on the proceeds. Let the people decide. They're the ones who have to look at their king driving in and out of his palace.

When it comes to moral outrage, we all have our specialties. To me, there's more evil festering in one square millimeter of the balance sheet of a major pharmaceutical company than in all the sheet metal of every car of every African tyrant of the last hundred years. It's a matter of judicious allocation of one's yearly moral outrage budget.

In the old days, that budget was way bigger. People didn't have to work so hard, so they had more time to get mad at the unfairness of it all, to sneer at the gross-outs of the rich. Those were the days when people gasped in outrage as Craig Claiborne reported on the front page of the New York Times that he and Pierre Franey dropped $4,000 on a 31-course, nine-wine dinner at Chez Denis in Paris.

This was in November 1975, when columnists kept whole stables of moral high horses pawing the ground in their stalls. Espying the $4,000 binge, Harriet Van Horne stabbed furiously at her typewriter: "This calculated evening of high-class piggery offends an average American's sense of decency. It seems wrong, morally, aesthetically and in every other way." Over the column, I remember, one editor ran the head, "Edunt et Vomant" — they have eaten and let them vomit.

Oh, for the '70s, when, as songwriter Steve Earle said, optimism abounded and they tried to have cocaine classified as a vegetable. There was more social idealism back then too. Sen. William Proxmire of Wisconsin, demon foe of government fraud and waste, used to give out "Golden Fleece" awards. Month after month they'd make the papers, and the sums weren't even so big. These days you have to steal at least half a billion and have the name Halliburton on your corporate letterhead even to get noticed on the CNN news tape.

Oh, I know Arizona Sen. John McCain makes a big show of denouncing his colleagues for priming the defense budget with pork. But it doesn't raise a stir and only irks his fellow senators because they know he doesn't really mean it and when he's finished grandstanding he'll vote for the budget.

Do I have a line in the sand? OK, I do. I resent, and I hereby protest, money in the defense budget going for war crimes, which, as stipulated in a 1996 law for which Republicans voted, could put the commander in chief in the death cell.

What war crimes? In Iraq they're happening every day. In the recent glorious conquest of Fallouja, for instance, irked at the reports of casualties from Fallouja General Hospital, the U.S. military shut "the propaganda weapon" down. U.S. soldiers tied up the medical staff and patients.

Now, the Geneva Convention states: "Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the medical service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the parties to the conflict." So put Bush and the Defense secretary he recently declared to be a sensitive and wonderful human being on trial for their lives.

Who cares about Murdoch's triplex or Mswati's cars? There are much, much worse expenditures rolling out day after day to get furious about.

Alexander Cockburn writes for the Nation and other publications.

© 2004 Los Angeles Times

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