Base instincts kept at bay
As I jostled the respectable blonde next to me in order to move forward in the EasyJet queue at Rhodes Airport, the equivalent in August of a circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, I could quite see myself throwing bricks at a store front in the midst of the London riots in order to walk off with some loot. It would have been the Etro store on Bond street rather than Footlocker and its Nike trainers. Still, the veneer of civilisation in all of us is barely skin deep.
Take a look at the Financial Times, where Robinson Hambro authored an editorial on the Financial Services Authority and its excessive interference in the running of the boards of banks.
Or read the article in the text below:
The passion of the convert is a frightening thing. Be it former smokers who cast glances of derision at office staff puffing away on the pavement or, more specifically, the regulatory backlash on the back of the financial crisis, converts allow little room for a nuanced approach.
How the mighty are fallen! Not only Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF head who allegedly sexually assaulted a chambermaid, or former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
There are a host of others: one of the world’s foremost Israeli football agents, a household-name UK broadcaster, plus a number of European chairmen. Last week they were all at the infamous Mayr Clinic, whose mission it is to clean out its residents’ guts to restore them to health and energy via a quasi-liquid fasting cure. One would imagine the conversation would range from the FIFA scandal to Greek debt restructuring.
It wasn´t just Emperor Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. Two other political figures come to mind.
Post World War II, Charles de Gaulle was preoccupied with "la gloire" for France and, rather less admirably, for himself. At the time, the French were starving. In the summer of 1945, the country had less than two weeks´ supply of grain, while the winter was much worse. Malnutrition was such that the generation raised in this period were to be shorter than the previous one. With some humour and a large degree of exasperation, the governor of the Bank of France, Emmanuel Monick, told a foreign diplomat that Belgium was handling its affairs far better than France.*