It is axiomatic that those to whom we accord unlimited power will lose touch with the groundlings who made space for them. The weary old truth concerning absolute power & absolute corruption needs no reiteration. Up there on the mountain, Bush & Blair breathe a different atmosphere & it intoxicates them into believing that they are accountable to no-one but themselves. And those who surround them feed avidly this conviction because then they get to breathe that special air too.
Now, in the face of unified condemnation from the strangest of political bedfellows across the world, these two men stand alone together, toughing it out. “It was never going to be easy”, grates Blair, “and it isn’t now… We will stand firm. We will do what it takes to win this struggle. We won’t yield. We won’t back down in the face of attacks either on us or on defenceless citizens”. Up there on the mountain they actually believe that for the first time in recorded history the military might of two nations is going to destroy, through brute force, an enemy driven by ideas. They really do believe that there is in this struggle a “what-it-takes” option & that they possess the means to implement it. With history comprehensive in its narratives of muscle-bound Goliaths felled by Davids fired by faith alone, these two men want us to share their crazed conviction that this time, this time it’s going to be different.
If such a conviction arose from hubris, from the febrile imaginations of men who have had their heads turned by a cockeyed angle on events, the acolytes whispering in their ears, their elevated isolation from the rational masses, then there might be hope. Epiphanic conversions do occur against all reasonable expectation; scales do fall from eyes. But the higher up the mountain that you climb the thinner the oxygen becomes & the thinner the oxygen, the more addled the perception. It’s not essence of ambrosia, this special atmosphere that you get to breathe, it’s diminished oxygen. Blair & Bush occupy a different space from the rest of us. In their place the sun rises in the west & it sets where & when they dictate.
For a long time I have resisted a recurrent image. It has seemed too trite, too rhetorical, too melodramatic. But I’ve just started to read Joachim C. Fest’s Inside the Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich & the extremity of delusion depicted in it no longer seems unique. There is, of course, no paralleling of situation & context or protagonists possible here; there is no direct historical comparison intended. But to my mind the strong, clear thread that binds one sequence of political events with another as no more than a matter of degree has seldom been more apparent in recent times. Thin air delusion on the part of ‘the lordly, the isolate ones’ has been our undoing countless times in the past. It’s happening again.
