Innocence in the land of the rich and powerful
Aformer teaching colleague now does workplace drug and alcohol testing. Hands up if you think that employees who test positive, when presented with the scientific evidence, shrug ruefully and say: ‘‘It’s a fair cop. I done it.’’
Oh, you cynical lot, but you’re bang right.
According to my former colleague they always protest their innocence.
They insist that they haven’t had a drink in weeks, or that though they may have been present when a little dope was smoked they didn’t have a drag themselves.
In other words, he says, they behave just like the schoolboys we both used to teach.
But he might equally have said they behave just like presidents.
‘‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman,’’ said President Clinton. ‘‘Water what?’’ said President Nixon. ‘‘There are no Russian soldiers in Ukraine,’’ said President Putin.
On the subject of Vladimir Putin, how good it was to see him coming out in support of Fifa’s President Sepp Blatter?
Russia is due to host the next Fifa World Cup. Hands up if you think Russia won that right legitimately.
Oh dear, you are just too suspicious. Are you sure you haven’t been brainwashed by the Western media?
Hands up once more if you cheered when the FBI fingered the Fifa collars. Absolutely, yes, me too.
And hands up if you hope there will soon be a finger reaching for Blatter’s collar. Yes, I’m with you on that one, as well. Oh, what schadenfreudists we all are. But you have to admire Blatter’s chutzpah.
It took chutzpah to welcome the attentions of the FBI, and it took chutzpah to ask how he was supposed to have known that his colleagues were on the make when newspapers had been telling him for years, and it took chutzpah in excelsis to stand for reelection on the grounds that he was just the chap to clean this mess up when he’d spent 17 years presiding over it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Blatter was behind bars by the time these words are published.
He’s looking more and more like one of those Shakespearean tyrants whose army has deserted him, whose wife and family fled, yet who vows to fight on.
Secretly, of course, the tyrant longs to be captured and killed because his life has become hollow.
‘‘And that which should accompany old age,’’ mutters Macbeth, ‘‘As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have’’.
Actually, forget Shakespeare. We have had plenty of real-life tyrants in recent years who have asserted their innocence and their grip on power even when their crimes are transparent and all around them things are crumbling.
Then suddenly they’ve cut and run with nothing but the state crown jewels and a key to a safety deposit box.
And the vault in which that safety deposit box is stored just happens to be in gentle orderly prosperous Zurich, capital of Swiss banking, which will always respect the privacy of racketeers, plunderers and other statesmen.
And which is where, by a quite extraordinary coincidence, you will find the world headquarters of Fifa, along with the five-star hotel where the delegates were staying for the annual Fifa conference. Fifa, by the way, is a charity. Banks are not charities but they can be just as naughty.
Only a couple of weeks ago Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Citicorp and the Royal Bank of Scotland pleaded guilty to conspiring to fix exchange rates.
Collectively, they were fined about $6 billion.
Hands up if you think any CEOs resigned. Exactly and well done.
You understand the way the world goes round. Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins said he regretted that ‘‘some individuals... have once more brought our company and industry into disrepute,’’ but added, ‘‘this demonstrates again the importance of our continuing work to build a valuesbased culture and strengthen our control environment’’. In other words, the purest Blatter. And then there’s HSBC. Three years ago the bank was fined a couple of billion for effectively laundering vast sums of drug money.
‘‘Sorry,’’ said the bank at the time, ‘‘but how were we to know that the unshaven Mexican with the sunglasses and the bodyguards and the weekly deposits of half a million dollars in used notes was a drug runner?’’
‘‘The poet and the lover and the lunatic,’’ said Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘‘are of imagination all compact’’.
As indeed, he might have added, are the schoolboy and the president and the banker.
Hands up if you think it’s a wonderful world. Absolutely, yes, me too.