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Originally Published on August 25, 2006
This week I find my thoughts turning to a scholarly theme: Mel Gibson's drunk driving arrest.
How can it be that one of the wealthiest, most respected, most successful actors in the world takes a few too many drinks on board, then— rather than calling for a limousine or other suitable conveyance to whisk him safely home—insists on driving himself? To make matters worse, when pulled over by a duly appointed officer of the law, he elects to enter into the public record his uncharitable feelings about Jewish people.
What in the world could he have been thinking?
"He wasn't thinking… he was drunk!" you might retort.
On that point there appears to be no question. Reminding us of wise words from the Talmud on that topic, loosely restated as "You can tell a man by what he does when he is drunk or angry or by what he spends his money on." And so, there for the whole world, Mel Gibson has revealed who he really is.
But the "he was drunk" argument only goes so far. By Mel's own admission, his problem with the bottle is of some duration. So, given that his personal capital runs well into the hundreds of millions—an indication he is not a stupid man—why would he have not arranged, in advance, or even as a matter of habit, a chauffeur to cheerily speed him from one shining Hollywood party to another… and then home?
Is he cheap?
Maybe, but I suspect the real reason for his very public mistake has to do with the first deadly sin: excessive pride. Leading, perhaps, to a sense of invincibility. That this sort of thing happens is entirely understandable. After all, the well-documented cooing of sycophants and soft stroking by Hollywood wannabes of the celebrity class would, over time, inevitably erode even a humble man's ability to engage in a healthful level of introspection.
And so Mel most likely ventured forth with an elevated sense of his own self-worth and into the simplest form of trap, one set by a poorly paid public servant. But make no mistake, this was a trap of his own devising.
Will Mel Gibson's career ever recover? Probably not. Like Brando before him, he'll probably now hie off to some island retreat where drunk driving laws are nonexistent—or where his celebrity will actually protect him from same—to eat, drink, and grow fat and odd. But really, who cares? For the story of Mel, as you may suspect, is just my roundabout way of getting to a larger point.
You see, nation states, which are really just an assemblage of humanity, can also fall into the trap of hubris. Britain, France, Japan, and Germany, to name just a few, have at one time or another in history attained a level of success such that it caused their populations—encouraged by officially sanctioned propaganda—to begin to believe that they were somehow special (and, in many ways, they were). But, like the more current example provided by Mr. Gibson, or Matthew Webb, the man who first swam the English Channel only to later drown swimming in the rapids of Niagara Falls, the sense of specialness soon transformed into a sense of invincibility, and that is when the real risk arises.
In the case of the Germans and the French, a desire to show the inferior Russians a thing or two about waging war ultimately led to their rude awakening. And in 1842 the previously invincible British Empire similarly received its own wakeup call with the loss of 16,000 men, women, and children in the hard passes leading out of Kabul.
Returning to more modern times, it is almost certain that a sense of invincibility led the US to decide to steam into Iraq… only to find ourselves pretty much on our own in a battle we are morally ill-equipped to win. If you haven't yet seen it, rent The Battle of Algiers, the exquisitely filmed story of the French occupation of Algiers and the measures they took to suppress the insurrection there (albeit temporarily, as it turns out). Simply put, if you really want to win against an enemy embedded in the population, you have to put on the leather gloves and pull out the car batteries and tooth pullers and get to work in earnest.
But there is much more to it than a greater willingness to engage in war (and why not, how could we lose!). Hubris can also lead to a tendency to wrong-foot yourself in other ways, as well. Some relevant examples:
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We recently had an email from one of our subscribers recounting how his small Canadian firm has been prevented by new anti-terrorism controls in the US from receiving a much-needed technology from the boutique US technology firm that usually provides it. It is not that the Canadian firm is suspect; it is that the Department of Homeland Security is blanketing US technology firms with prohibitions to keep them from sharing their special products with the world. And in the process, causing deep financial pain to the US-based firms—so much so that many are now going out of business. Meanwhile, the rest of the world looks for the same technology elsewhere—and finds it. That's because the same technology is either already available hassle-free from foreign firms, or if it isn't, it soon will be as new foreign companies are set up to meet the demand… defeating the whole point of the exercise in the first place.
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US securities regulators, waving the "we do it better" flag, have now so burdened the directors of US public companies with reporting requirements backed with criminal penalties for noncompliance, including even for those actions taken by lower level employees, that new corporations are looking outside of the US in droves—mainly the London Stock Exchange—for their listings.
And make no mistake, the examples above are just random extrusions of a much bigger iceberg.
Taken together, this reinforcing of our specialness through government dictate and coercion, in all its many guises, adds up to a modern-day form of protectionism. The sort that will, in time, result in retaliation from other nation states and further cripple an already dangerously perched economy. Just as did Smoot-Hawley in 1930.
But it can't happen to us. We're Mel Gibson, god damn it!
That may be so, but I for one am going to continue taking precautions… just in case we as a nation are not quite so invincible as we think.
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