A long time ago, I was a preacher at the First Baptist Church in Blakely, Georgia. It was a small town with many good things, but if we wanted to really go “uptown” we’d go to Dothan, Alabama, across the Chattahoochee River, all the way in the Central Time zone. And our girls especially loved going to the Wiregrass Commons Mall.

One Saturday we were there shopping and came to the food court. Lo and behold, a wedding was going on. A bride and groom, groomsmen wearing tuxes and bridesmaids in pretty dresses. In the food court of the Wiregrass Commons Mall. Turns out some lucky country girl won a drawing from Dillards store to get a free wedding at the mall.

Now my girls, being raised by their mother with fierce Southern sense about right and wrong, moral and immoral, and good taste and bad, immediately turned and looked to Mom to see what she thought. She has never been able to hide what she thinks as long as I knew her. Our youngest, little Katie, was probably in second or third grade. She asked the obvious question.”Mama, is that tacky?”

Her mother didn’t hesitate. “It certainly is.”

I remembered that wedding while watching the shenanigans over in Italy at the wedding of Jeff Bezos and that Sanchez lady he left his first wife for. They decided to go full Food Court—yachts worthy of a Russian oligarch, endless parties, white dress and all. The global paparazzi fell over each other to tell us about it.

So they’ve been acting out the garish, ubertacky nuptials as they gathered with all the other global gluttons of overconsumption, privilege, and entitlement. Protestors followed along, and apparently a good time was had by all.

On the positive side, the fiasco made a finer argument for killing the proposed tax break for the wealthy than any of us could. Mr. Bezos and the Silicon Valley crowd and their princesses of Silicon, have an annual tax bill that is only half of what the ultra rich paid fifty years ago, and they obviously don’t need the cash.

Besides, if you think about it, it’s our Amazon dollars that sort of paid for that Beverly Hillbillies bash. As Jed Clampett always said, “Pitiful, jest pi-I-ful.”

Meanwhile, our elected officials are falling over each other, racing to pass a budget that cuts the SNAP program and Medicaid so the super rich can get a tax cut that will jack up the national debt we were supposedly trying to fix. This will hit hundreds of thousands of struggling folks in Alabama and plenty of other states who can’t afford a car repair, much less a wedding at the mall.

I’m no economist, but the math doesn’t seem to work. I am a theologian, and I do know what the Bible says about poverty, wealth, and our obligations in this life. We owe our children, grandchildren, neighbors, communities, and people who barely have enough to eat something better. We all have a debt to God and one another. We can well live as we please, I suppose, but the bill always comes due one day, one way or another.

Lord, have mercy. It’s about all I can think of. Something just seems so wrong about the whole situation. It’s nothing to admire, this arrogant disregard for others. It’s certainly nothing to admire. And as my little girl learned from her momma, some things are just tacky,and whatever that meant,she knew it was something nobody with a lick of sense would ever want.