What happened to their moral compass?
Why do people think they’re going to get away with it, that no one will notice a bit o’ dodgy behaviour? Where do they get their gall?
Why did Sen. Colin Kenny allegedly use government staff to help run his tanning salon? Why did former MP Dean Del Mastro, convicted of election overspending, think he could get away with, well, frankly, being Dean Del Mastro? Why did former Manitoba judge Lori Douglas think she could alter evidence to her own benefit and keep her job? Why did Quebec Superior Court Justice Michel Girouard give “false and deceitful” evidence in a judicial inquiry into alleged cocaine-buying at a video store? Why do Toronto cops get away with shooting distressed people holding knives, a hammer, scissors or a chair leg?
Don’t say, “but they did get away with it,” which in many cases — notably that of Sen. Mike Duffy — is or will be true. I’m asking why these powerful ambitious people thought that if they stepped into the moral Big Muddy, as Springsteen put it, they wouldn’t come out wearing visible mud, whether ankle deep or waist high.
Sadly, the CBC didn’t tell us the name of Kenny’s tanning salon. Was it Senator Sun’s Salon & Bakery? Colin’s Colour Me Beautiful? The Red Chamber? Kenny and his Senate staffers discussed the fact that he was running out of “bed disinfectant.” What is that? Should I get some? What actually goes on at Kenny’s UV Emporium and does it involve a standing members committee?
All this stuff was in emails. And Douglas posed shackled to a bed, even though she knew her day job was basically shackling people who would then accuse her of having a taste for it and file appeals. Not a judicious move. Her husband posted it online, where it still lives. Del Mastro’s mud was on paper and Const. James Forcillo’s killing of Sammy Yatim was filmed, as U.S. cop killings so often are now.
I’m wondering if Kenny and his cohort watch thrillers differently than the rest of us do.
At some point, someone’s always rifling through a desk or a closet for clues. They have their back turned. I am unable to watch — the tension destroys me — and since I always yell, “Look out, he’s behind you!” other people are unable to watch them with me.
Kenny People never think they’ll be snuck up on from behind. I harass people with my erupting apologies, but Kenny People never apologize. Why should they? Kenny People are low on paranoia, fat with self-regard. Long after Rep. Anthony Weiner was caught sending dick pics to strangers, he said he had become a “figure of fascination” rather than derision.
Here’s my theory: Most Kenny People are men because so few women reach positions of power. Statistically, the number of women with lesions of self-love and bubbles of swagger are in the 1s and 0s, as a prime minister recently said of non-quantum computing.
These wrongdoers are confident, blithe even. When prosecuted, they protest devilish persecution, although the documents, photos and videos say otherwise. This puzzles me. Is it narcissism? Do we blame their parents for not having raised them in the free-range shame kettle that was my family home?
Kenny People attain power at a certain age. They don’t understand the surveillance society and they certainly don’t get freedom of information legislation where forms, contracts, deals and emails sit quietly like poached eggs in the pan until they burst.
Expense claims are biblical in that they’re based on Thou Shalt Nots. Powerful people should be abstemious. I keep thinking of George Orwell, a saint in some ways though not in others, eating boiled cod with bitter turnips and “squeaking” with enjoyment.
It is precisely people like Orwell — self-denying idealists — who don’t go into public life; instead we have sybarites and people not ashamed to allow millions of tax dollars to be spent on lawyers defending the indefensible: that they should be allowed to preside over common people in a courtroom, balloon with melanoma money, kill with impunity.
Imagine being that sort of person. Or perhaps there is a seed of it in all of us, and we let it sprout and grow. We become Kenny People. hmallick@thestar.ca