The lost art of lost reputations
Bad behaviour doesn’t have the lasting effect it used to, Timson,
If there were a stock market soley for reputations, the crash and burn this week of HRH Prince Andrew and his royal reputation would have singlehandedly caused a recession.
Andrew, 59, the second son of Queen Elizabeth is now, supposedly at his request, relieved of his royal duties for “the foreseeable future.”
This after the Duke of York disastrously tried and failed to defend his reputation in an excruciating BBC interview about his persistent friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, convicted sex offender and trafficker to the stars, one of whose alleged victims claims Epstein forced her to have sex with the prince in 2001 when she was only 17.
One British commentator called it “reputation suicide” as Andrew failed to show the teensiest bit of compassion for Epstein’s victims, and instead came across as entitled, tone deaf and none too bright.
Has he ever come across as anything else?
“The crown always finds its way to the right head,” says a rueful dying former king, the one who abdicated back in 1936, David, Duke of Windsor (briefly King Edward VIII.) Or in any event his fictional counterpart says it in Season 3 of The Crown. (Splendid timing, Netflix!) So does the royal duncecap I guess.
I don’t envy the Queen her heart these days, her smile of course in place at public engagements, her steely bright eyes discouraging anyone who meets her to challenge her own dignity and worth. In private, oh my. Her so-called favourite son Andrew stripped of his royal epaulets.
My wish for Elizabeth, 93, is that she at least make it to the royal finish line with her own good reputation upheld.
But why stop at royal reputations when there are so many very public reputations being shattered at breakneck speed these days?
Who would you vote for as having had the second worst week other than Prince Andrew, with a name so smeared you’d think they will never recover? Not Donald Trump, if you please, whose own reputation has never been that of a good and noble or even merely decent man. Trump remains what he is: bad news when it comes to good character.
The U.S. President continues to tweet his false but dangerous smears of real time witnesses at the congressional impeachment inquiry; and then preposterously, appears before the media with his crazy sharpie-penned ransom note talking points: “I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.” Clearly it is not this oval office con job whose reputation continues to suffer, but that of America itself. Has it really come to this?
Keep in mind that despite the digital burning at the stake that many powerful and famous miscreants endure these days, some of them emerge reconstituted at a later date.
Why is that? Our short attention span could be one of the problems.
Remind me, is Gordon Sondland, who testified publicly that the President and everyone around him, including Vice- President Mike Pence and secretary of state Mike Pompeo were “in the loop” about the attempt to shake down the new president of Ukraine to personally benefit Trump’s re-election chances, good or bad?
Sondland, Trump’s wealthy vanity appointee as U.S. Ambassador to the EU, revved up the impeachment bus’s engine and ran over everyone in the administration that he could, stating “We followed the President’s orders.”
Sondland also invoked his own family’s escape from the Holocaust, so he could not have been totally ignorant how awful and historically resonant that “following orders” line is.
Just another astonishing moment not to mention the fact, that as one Democrat questioner at the impeachment inquiry brutally emphasized, it took three separate tries for Sondland to admit the cui bono truth that it was Trump who would stand to benefit from the pressuring of Ukraine to investigate one of his Democratic rivals.
Unless Sondland’s “truth” leads directly to presidential impeachment, Sondland will eventually be forgotten, good or bad. His reputation will be “meh.”
Ah reputation. It’s a tricky one to permanently manipulate, despite the spinmeisters who get paid a fortune to do so. That’s because reputation is not just what a person says or does, it’s what others think of what he or she says or does. The digital age makes reputation more amplified and fungible.
Tina Brown, former editor of both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, a maker and breaker of celebrity reputations, wrote in her most recent memoir The Vanity Fair Diaries, that the late author Tom Wolfe (Bonfire of the Vanities) had suggested to her a monthly column called Reputations. She regretted she had not taken him up on it, but really, these days any column devoted to a single newsworthy reputation undergoing a seismic shift would have to be updated on an hourly basis.
So, should anyone buy stock in Prince Andrew’s reputation in the hopes that it will rise again? Pfft. Why bother?
As for Donald Trump, wouldn’t we all like to have the deceitfully dismissive memory he has about the people who cross him? As the President so often says, “I barely knew the guy.”
You could say Trump has created and sustains the bull market in reputation.