COUPLING LINDSAY LOHAN AND ADOLPH HITLER ... WITH HELP FROM TIGER WOODS

　
　
     Here’s a puzzler for you: what do Hosni Mubarak, Charley Sheen, Eliot Spitzer, the United States government, Ted Haggard, Mel Gibson, Adolph Hitler, Leona Helmsley, Tiger Woods and cute little Lindsay Lohan have in common?

     
     Answer: they’re all victims of their own mythology.


     When individuals are powerful, rich or famous (PRoFs), they tend to believe what they’re told about themselves. The people who do the telling are usually friends, admirers, sycophants and subordinates: an ‘inner circle’ that acts as a protectorate, so to speak, deflecting criticism and rationalizing bad behavior. So what the PRoFs receive -- day after day, year after year -- is sympathy, tolerance and praise. And praise, to paraphrase a famous dictum, corrodes; absolute praise corrodes absolutely.
     Especially with egos the size of, say, Charley Sheen , Mel Gibson, Tiger Woods and little Lindsay Lohan.
     Sometimes the corrosion is subtle .. as when a corporate officer quietly sucks up to the CEO’s wife. Other times it’s absolute .. as when a Charley Sheen abuses everybody in sight; and then tries to justify it. That’s the ‘shoot yourself in the foot’ brand of corrosion; identical in conceit to the wildly oblivious remark made by hotel magnate Leona Helmsley: ‘Only the little people pay taxes’.
     That is the stuff of which legends are made .. and jail terms.


     But there are also other kinds of corrosion: most commonly the “It can’t happen to me’ variety. That’s when someone is UP for so long that DOWN no longer seems a possibility. Tiger Woods and his infidelities, John Edwards and his Argentine girlfriend, Eliot Spitzer and his hookers, and Ted Haggard with who knows what … fall (appropriate word) into that category. Mind you, they know when they’re wrong. How could they not? But the influence of their enablers -- all those sycophants and supporters, agents and managers -- has made them feel as if they can do no wrong. Not that they’re above the law. No, no … of course not! But they are different, aren’t they? Almost everyone says so. And almost everyone has always said so.
     So they eventually forget where and what they came from and begin to think they’re living in a separate universe; an alternative reality in but not quite of the real world. And in some sad and sorry ways, they’re right.
     Do you suppose Hosni Mubarak’s cabinet warned him that the Egyptian people were profoundly unhappy with him? I doubt it.
     Did the German general staff remind Adolph Hitler -- even gently -- that Napoleon’s armies died at the gates of Moscow and that his were facing Stalingrad in winter? I doubt that too.
     And how come Mel Gibson’s inner circle didn’t insist to him that (duh!) anti-Semitism isn’t exactly de rigueur in Hollywood and that the Holocaust really did happen? Were they too busy drinking his booze?
      As for Lindsay Lohan, a talented and unresolved child, I suspect her handlers and hangers-on didn’t start ringing their hands in despair until it was too late or until the ganja ran out. Her career has certainly been ruined and most probably her life.
     Because like all the others --whether giants of history or here-today-gone-tomorrow personalities, -- she came to believe her own mythology.

     Now let’s get serious.

     What about an entire government? Does the same pattern hold true? After all, don’t we regularly elect a new government? We choose new leadership; with entirely different people gaining power, position and influence. So can they seriously believe in their predecessors’ myths?
     Can there be such a thing as serial self-deception?
     Well, as the simplistic Mrs. Palin would say, you betcha’


     Take Iraq as an example. (Pakistan and Afghanistan qualify too.)
     And let’s forget all that crap about nuclear threats and weapons of mass destruction and terrorist training camps: the hard sell that sold the American body politic on military intervention. We know now it was all smoke: no nuclear threat, no WMD, no terrorist camps.
      But what about bringing democracy and stability to a long-oppressed people?
     That’s a goal Bush embraced and Obama has affirmed. He‘s promised to get us out of Iraq and to leave behind a safe, stronger and more democratic country.. So will that promise be real or will it prove to be a serial myth: something we’ve been telling ourselves for so long and so often that we now believe it?
      Well, I have a little story that bears on the issue.
     
      In the year 1097, the first Crusader armies reached the Bosporus on their way to recapture Jerusalem from the ‘infidels’. The Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, Alexius, (himself a man of demonic dimensions as inhuman as Hitler‘s), told the Crusade’s leaders that two factions had been struggling for control of Jerusalem in a seemingly endless battle for supremacy in the Levant.
     They were the Shiites and the Sunnis.
     That was nearly a thousand years ago.
     And we think we’re going to leave behind a stable and peaceful society? We, the United States of America, are going to miraculously erase a millennium’s worth of hatred … heal a millennium’s worth of wounds!
     If that’s not being victimized by your own mythology, I don’t know what is.
     What we will leave behind is yet another genocidal war between Shiites and Sunnis who’ll be joined in a merciless menage a trois by the Kurds (who only want to secede and to pump oil).
     What we leave behind, in fact, will be chaos … because of our own self-deception.

     But please don’t misunderstand me. We need myths. We really do. We need a Paul Bunyan and a John Henry, an Abe Lincoln and a Mohammed Ali, a John Kennedy, an Amelia Earhart and a Patrick Henry. We need them all … because they carry truths about honesty and courage and human value. But above all, we need to realize that myths about ourselves are always distortions .. and must be tested in the bright light of common sense. Just plain common sense.
     Look. Pakistan has always claimed it needs massive American aid -- meaning weaponry mostly -- to maintain the balance of power on the Asian sub-continent and to counter the threat of an invasion by India. And we seem to have bought that rationale for decades. We’ve poured in countless billions of dollars. But now?
      An Indian invasion? You must be kidding!!     Why would one of the world’s healthiest economies want to take over a violent, sectarian, corrupt, poverty-ridden, lawless, illiterate, inhumane, dissected and diseased society? It defies common sense.
       India needs Pakistan like the Russian Mafia needs an attorney general.

     So yes, institutions and governments, like individuals, can and do become victims of their own mythology … more often than we realize or want to admit.
     And it’s so sad.
     I mean …who could have dreamed that Martha Stewart, Barry Bonds and the Roman Catholic church had so much in common?
　
　


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Until next time … when I’ll be remembering Alastair Cooke in a somewhat revisionist way,
　
　
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