An ode to the silent murderers of democracies
Reflections from the broom closet of the Halls of Power
The current political atmosphere in Paris and Washington awoke fond memories from my “corporate teenage years” at the World Bank, when the fate of Paul D. Wolfowitz or Pamela Cox, for example, was being debated there. In these interstices—usually just a few days between meteoric rise and even faster downfall—the true character of beings is always shown.
I was just a boy, but I now wish I had the talent of LaFontaine or at least some etching skills to render the animality with which my colleagues at the time would peddle for coverage, trading favors, and shifting alliances.
I remember one in particular – a beloved jovial German manager – who had refined the art of lending his abilities to the victorious prince to Médicis-levels. He would, panting, scour the corridors to determine what the powers to be had decided. I was exhausted just watching him - no wonder he died a cardiac arrest days after his retirement. I also remember a colleague in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights – a pro-choice crusader who rushed to take the ticket to meet the Pope I had given up on moral grounds and purchased a black veil for the occasion (the Pope wisely decided not to show up and for some obscure reason I was blamed for it).
I have what my son Eitan would describe as “a true treasure trove” of memories worth of a Netflix show. I even have a title for it: “Bretton Woods”: extramarital affairs, orchestrated leaks, and last-minute betrayal. Sounds familiar? Welcome to the last days of the House of Biden.
It would all be comical, great TV moments if it hadn’t real consequences for the future of our world. After all, Wolfowitz is a war criminal, and Juan Jose Daboub tried to remove all family planning from World Bank projects. So many tears are being shed because of the men and women in the hallways of power, veering for a title, a pension, and, more generally, crumbs from the table of the dominant class.
They are the real killers of our democracy,
I take it as a privilege to be de facto apatride and a mere spectator at the circus in Paris or Washington. I have front-row seats for the downfall of both empires: that was always the privilege of eunuchs. I was never interested in making a career at the World Bank or the UN, which might explain my downfall with Jim Yong Kim. As my father aptly pointed “you rarely attack the Prince and survive in his kingdom”. My great privilege is that I never had anything to win or too little to interest me for long.
And this is the lesson for you, my dear reader: note how the people cheering Biden today have a lot to win and very little to lose.
As one of my friends told me in his kitchen this week - joking, appalled but delighted, “Biden wins/Trump wins; either way, we get richer.” I love rich gay people, but I only trust a handful.
During the pandemic, a gay friend of mine - staunchly anti-Trump - who had decamped to his “farm” in Hudson found out that the city was housing homeless people in a hotel next door to his penthouse apartment. He became enraged, and when I questioned his anger, he told me, “I’d be fine if they had put nice families that fell on hard times there, but instead, I see a lot of people that made poor choices.” Poor choices…
Some wealthy New York gay told me the story of how he had generously given $10K to his mother’s nurse after his mum had passed away and how baffled he was that she spent it on going to Disney with her children instead of saving it. “What Poor people need his financial literacy,” he told me, as he probably had spent that same sum on the ugly Issey Miyakey outfit he wore that day and that his shopper had (wrongly) picked for him. No, dude, poor people need real political representation, fair wages, a redistribution mechanism, and for you to rein in your greed.
I walk daily past the long bread line by the Church on 86th, the Upper West Side, and the homeless people living in the streets of New York, and I see our Instagram stories. Everybody can see what is going on. The violence of our economic system is the greatest taboo of them all. How many homeless people does it take to make a gay billionaire? The violence of the economic system[2] in which many gay people are now complicit. Misery, despair, and death are all around us. Despite the high walls we built to shield ourselves from COVID-related suffering, we still caught glimpses of it, and it wasn’t pretty. So we ran to our “farms” in Hudson and now tell the people what’s good for them.
As soon as straight people gave us crumbs to feed ourselves on, we switched to becoming cookie monsters, too. Marginalizing gay people is often justified by greed, too, meaning the desire to maintain traditional family structures and inheritance lines, seen as essential to preserving and accumulating capital. That should be enough for us to be less enthusiastic about our economic model and suspicious of the people trying to convince us that the candidate that made them rich should be the candidate for the US despite his apparent inability to win a crucial election.
I am not sure the people with something to lose would agree to play "five-bullet Russian Roulette with the U.S. democracy” if we, the silent murderers of democracies, would pause long enough to listen to them.
[1] Just the fact they say “the farm” when nothing, honestly nothing, grows there besides resentments feels Marie-Antoinettish. Marie Antoinette famously had a farm too, known as Le Hameau de la Reine, which was a rustic retreat built in 1783 on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where the queen indulged in an idealized version of country life, far from the rigors of courtly duties and even further from the famines French peasants routinely experienced.