So many contemporary pols—particularly right wingers—seem to acknowledge that throwing red meat to the tigers they ride will eventually be insufficient, their half-hearted embrace of the bullshit they spew seen through and they will step (or be forced) aside to younger, hungrier, more ambitious, and invariably less intelligent contenders. Then they will retreat or retire, comfortable in the riches they amassed while busy for a few years forfeiting their souls. It’s the trade-off many are more than willing to make, and it’s nice work if you can get it (and are capable of living with yourself, during and after).
The next level cases are the sons and daughters (mostly sons) of extreme privilege, who assume never-ending fortune and fame is their birthright. Those who, even or especially if they didn’t further debase themselves in politics, would be wealthy no matter what. Those, like the foppish and fraudulent Boris Johnson, who are not and can never be content merely by their unearned riches; obliged to somehow play out the rest of their existence aware, however dimly and however desperately in denial they remain, that they’re a footnote, an asterisk in subsequent accounts of our time; they will exist solely for satire and as cautionary tales about how the worst of us can ascend to inexplicable heights by embracing those lesser angels within and exploiting the basest fears and frustrations of an ignorant and vulnerable populace—those they ostensibly led. Mostly, they are made to know their legacy is being the butt of jokes, fodder for cartoons, and fantasy for historians with exceedingly sharp knives.
One can hope, assuming the unlikelihood of an afterlife—neither heaven to console nor hell to chasten—their final decades are ones of desperation: a ceaseless effusion of all the faults they suppressed and reminder of every life they consigned to the shadows, the fullest possible accounting for a life ill-spent in the pursuit of empty vanity. Their pitiful endgame: the inability to ever enjoy a peaceful night’s sleep leads to an obsessive hope for infinite slumber to finally end the misery they’ve made of themselves.
