Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

—”The Rich Boy”, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)

This passage is probably the source of the supposed exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway. (F. Scott: “The rich are not like you and me.” Ernest: “Yes. They have more money.”)

I wonder what the author of Gatsby would think of Gossip Girl, whose second season bowed last night on the chronically under-performing CW network. I guess money and scantily clad young things don’t pull viewers like it used to, though we would be mistaken to take this as encouraging evidence about the taste of the American public.

Or maybe Hemingway’s (alas, apocryphal) ironic comment is the more revealing here. By seeming to misunderstand Fitzgerald’s point, he suggests that he doesn’t have one.

I think that Gossip Girl is, at bottom not a show about money at all (though money has a great deal to do with its deeper significance). Mild spoilers and spicy overthinking after the jump. And yes, I am going to make this a weekly series.