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The Times reported yesterday, “Berlusconi denies wrongdoing and has said he has no intention of stepping down” (“Trial Is Set for Berlusconi in Prostitution Case,” NYT, 2/15/11). While Berlusconi and his heartthrob, the now 18-year-old Karima el-Mahroug, aka Ruby the Heart-Stealer, may not have had sex, the prime minister, according to the Times, “gave her 7,000 euros, about $9,450, the first time she visited his villa for a party last spring.” This tops the $4,300 Eliot Spitzer paid for his first tryst with Ashley Dupré, which included, according to the Wikipedia entry on the subject, a $1,100 down payment to the agency for future work. Maybe Berlusconi should have used the moniker George Fox, as Spitzer did when he checked into room 871 at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. Even worse was Berlusconi’s apparent attempt to get RHS (Ruby Heart-Stealer) off the hook for a theft charge. The Times article explains that “Mr. Berlusconi has said he called the police to avoid ‘an international diplomatic incident’ because he had been told that the Moroccan-born Ms. Mahroug was the niece of Hosni Mubarak, then the president of Egypt.” Perhaps Berlusconi was not being entirely disingenuous. After all, Hosni Mubarak was also someone who had “no intention of stepping down.” Is it possible that Hosni and Silvio are in fact related and share similar genes? DNA analysis is routinely used in rape cases, but this might be the first time it could be used to explain the stubborn and despotic behavior of international leaders. If there is such a gene pool, then Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is probably also swimming in it.
Even the lowliest, most disreputable scumbag thinks he or she is the center of the universe. At least they hold on to that hope. Even the dying patient lives for some tomorrow in which magically, within their shrinking finitude, they will arise like a genie from the miasma of their toxicity. This is the curious thing about the human species. The heresy perpetrated by Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler by using science to show that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe was all the more galling because of the insult to “dark matter,” or whatever it is that’s the building block of the thing called ego. We have tyrants and authoritarian personalities that hold onto power with an almost admirable tenacity and ability to obfuscate. Such is the case of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the recent machinations by which Hosni Mubarak refused to relinquish his increasingly tenuous hold on power. But these despots are only the tip of the iceberg. They are only exaggerated examples of the anthropocentric demon that lies within the soul of all creatures that are blessed or cursed with the human attribute we call consciousness. There is anecdotal material about great men and women of compassion, like Gandhi and Mother Theresa, to support the notion that they were no more freed from the bonds of the self than the destitute and homeless they championed. These unfortunates occupy an ever-shrinking universe in which their own bodily needs or addictions (watching methadone addicts staggering away from a local clinic and hollering to each other with little regard for the pedestrians around them is a good primer in a perverse brand of egocentricity) form the center. And what about the recent revelations about the expansion of the universe that predict that man will one day awaken in a starless sky, the light from distant stars no longer able to reach him?
