Another bonfire of the vanities

Here’s the plot of a story:

There’s a very wealthy man, so powerful and arrogant that he and his colleagues refer to themselves as ‘Masters of the Universe’. He could belong to a variety of professions. He could be a politician or the leader of a religious movement; he could be a high ranking international bureaucrat or a captain of industry; he could be a movie mogul or a very senior lawyer or judge; but for the purposes of this story let’s say that he’s a banker. He lives in a millionaire penthouse on Central Park in New York, drives the latest and fastest sports car and, in addition to the wife and child who occupy the penthouse with him, he also has a mistress, for whom he is about to purchase an apartment where he can visit her without fear of detection, what in Mexico would be called ‘la casa chica.’ He certainly has it all, until suddenly his whole world is overturned because he takes one wrong turning when driving across town with his mistress. They find themselves in a slum neighbourhood, unfamiliar, hostile and threatening. They want to get out quick, panic and hit a man. Out of fear of being lynched they drive away from the injured pedestrian, turning what would have been classified as an accident into a criminal offence.  Even then they might have got away with it, but fate conspires against the hero. He mishandles what should have been a routine meeting with the police, arousing their suspicions, a politician becomes involved because he sees a wonderful chance to make political capital out of the case of a greedy, wealthy man callously knocking down a pauper in a slum street and then driving away from the scene. And so it goes from bad to worse. The police enjoy humiliating him, handcuffing him with his hands behind his back when they take him to court, nearly driving him to suicide. He finds himself denied bail, forced to share a police cell with hardened criminals. His clothes get dirty and sweaty. As the trial drags on, the comfort, luxury and power he used to know become increasingly distant memories. The press demonise him, the prosecution closes in for the kill with a jury fully manipulated by political and social considerations. The politician stirs it up as much as he can. And in the end the ‘Master of the Universe’ ends up serving a lengthy jail term. It all happens at the drop of a hat, a total reversal of fortune, all because of one wrong turn.

The point is that for a normal human being, that is to say for a person who did not consider him or herself to be a master of the universe, above the law and above conscience, the wrong turn in all probability would not have turned into such a catastrophy.They probably would not have driven off from the accident to begin with.

Just recently this tale has come to have a strange familiarity. In fact it is a rough rendering of the plot of Tom Wolffe’s 1987 novel ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’. But as I have, inevitably and I hope without relish, followed the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn – his arrest when already seated comfortably in the first class compartment of a plane about to leave New York, his denial of bail, his hand-cuffing (hands behind the back of course, which Wolffe is at pains to point out is done by the police to maximise the sense of vulnerability and humiliation of the defendant), his demonization by the press – I could not help catching my breath at the way true life mirrors fiction.

It is, of course, more appropriate to reflect on the nature of hybris and the strange and usually sudden inevitability with which the powerful and the mighty fall. In that sense, one might look around the world at this time and take a long hard look at what has happened in Egypt and Tunisia and what may ultimately happen in several other countries in the region. When I was working in Egypt back in the early nineties, managing a number of projects in technical and agricultural education, it was clear that a massive population bulge was coming through that the system – political, social and economic – simply was not geared up to coping with. Thousands of young people were going through technical secondary schools knowing full well that there would be no jobs for them and not even the means or the right to give tongue to their frustration or support a legitimate political party that offered to address their needs. Even back then President Mubarak was referred to with rueful humour as the pharaoh, the head of an autocratic dynasty. And of course we should remember that in the early days of the first dynasty the ancient Egyptian believed that only the Pharaoh had an immortal soul. Only he would live on in the after world after death.He truly was a ‘Master of the Universe.’

And that brings me back to the solipsism of the very wealthy and very powerful. It has not been pleasant to read some of the really vicious comments that have been made about Strauss-Kahn or the way he has been found guilty in the press and on the internet long before due process has taken its course. Of course his reputation stands against him as evidence, but even so, the presumption of innocence is an important principal that seems in danger of being forgotten. Some of the things written are plain stupid, such as the claim that in France his behaviour would have been condoned and his alleged victim would have been silenced. In fact, it is possible to find predatory male behaviour that abuses power and authority in order to take advantage of vulnerable women in every society. It is simply located in different niches. While there is no doubt that a woman in Taliban-run Afghanistan must have faced the worst odds in terms of protection or redress, it is certainly crass to point fingers without plenty of self-criticism, too. The USA, for example, at one point was awash with stories of sexually abusive behaviour by the leaders of ultra-protestant sects affiliated with right-wing politics, cases of misbehaviour with congressional aides surface on a regular basis and, of course, Hollywood has always taken a perverse pride in its seedy tales of ugly sexual behaviour by media moguls taking advantage of would be stars and starlets.Meanwhile the writer of the series of books about ‘The girl who something or othered a something or other’ has shown that even nice, liberal and ethically advanced Sweden may have its dark side.

The dark side we are talking of is this thing that seems to lurk deep down in the male persona. As we read the horrific news about the routine use of rape as a tool of intimidation in the Republic of the Congo, or consider the fate of the thousands of women who are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation, we must surely pause for thought – about what is in ourselves. When the news broke a year or two ago in my own nice little home town of Cambridge in the East of England (home of Stephen Hawkin and the death of God, of course!) of the existence of houses where trafficked young women from Eastern Europe were being held against their will and prostituted, the chief investigating police officer asked publically how any men could want to ‘make use of’ these girls. But apparently there are plenty who do.

My own worst encounters with this dark business were in Bangladesh, where girls are sold at an early age into brothels and told that they have an enormous debt to pay off before they can start to earn on their own account. It isn’t nice to think of young teenage girls having to accommodate as many clients as possible a day in conditions of imprisonment and de facto slavery. Sadly, I’m not sure if the project we were funding was able to do that much to help them.

But leaving that very dark world behind and emerging into the comparative daylight of more common or garden predatory sexual behaviour, I’m pretty sure it’s true to say most of us know one or two men who seem obsessed with sex from the narrow perspective of how many women they can bed or viewing every woman they meet as a potential conquest. Nothing particularly wrong with that, I guess, in a fair and equal world, where everyone has an equal right to say yes or no. And as Montaigne said ‘Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition,’ so we’re all pretty much tarred by the same brush.

However, the real world is not fair or equal. Most relationships are asymmetrical, especially in the work place, where we are all busy bullying or manipulating one another for one reason or another. And I guess it is that asymmetry that has got the fur flying in the Strauss-Kahn case. Once the high and mighty topple from power, the awe and respect in which they have been held disappears at once. That’s what happened to the Romanov Tsars in Russia, of course, when Nicholas the Second abdicated. In the space of a minute he passed from being the most powerful autocrat in the world to becoming a figure of ridicule, for whom death at the hands of a Bolshevik firing squad was probably already inevitable. At least heads of the IMF don’t risk such a fate when they fall.