The Joke
October 14, 2008 | Author: Paul Sullivan | Filed under: News
I am as fascinated by high-profiled hypocrisy as anyone I know. When Eliot Spitzer was disgraced by his low-life high-jinks, I was absolutely gleeful. It couldn’t have happened to a more self-righteous, hectoring guy! I felt repulsed when the news came out that John Edwards had been screwing around on his wife. Most of that revulsion came from the fact that his wife is dying of cancer but a good bit of nausea flowed from his Clinton-like choice.
But we live in the age of hypocrisy. A.I.G. celebrates its $85 billion government bailout by throwing a $400,000 party for its top earners and then asks for another $37 billion – which it receives! Robert Steel, chief executive of Wachovia, scuttles his bank on a raft of bad lending and expansion but gets a lifeline from Citigroup – albeit one that wiped out most of the bank’s equity. A week later Wells Fargo, which had dropped out of the initial bidding, comes back with an offer that guarantees some $225 million in golden parachutes for senior Wachovia executives. Of course, he goes with them!
But there was a tidbit in today’s paper that struck even my cynical heart as too much. Milan Kundera was a Communist Party informant. The novelist who wrote so passionately about individuals living without fear of having their every action monitored allegedly told the Czech secret police about a man he suspected of being a spy. On that information, the man served 14 years hard labor, after narrowly escaping the death penalty. Kundera has denied it and hopefully his denial is honest.
An apologist could explain this away by saying he was a young, college student and haven’t we all done things then that we regretted later. Gunter Grass, the German Nobel laureate, got himself out of a similar pickle – being in the Waffen S.S. as a blue-eyed boy – by admitting it before anyone could out him.
Yet if what has been alleged about Kundera is true, it’s far worse than any hypocrisy a politician or financier could indulge in. A Florida Democrat paying a mistress $121,000 in hush money doesn’t matter even though he won his seat from a Republican philanderer: he doesn’t matter in his state, except to supporters looking to collect on favors; he doesn’t matter in Congress, really; and he definitely doesn’t matter to the wider world. He’s insignificant to everyone but his wife and kids, who could quickly learn to get along without him. Kundera, on the other hand, matters immensely. He has connected with millions of people through his books. He’s been held up as an paladin of virtue in the face of totalitarian absurdity. In turn, he has accepted his place among those moral men and women who have risked so much to be heard. If it turns out he once was a Communist informant and now will admit to it, civilization has been dealt a serious blow.
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