Alain Delon died on August 18 at the ripe old age of 88. He was the most famous French actor of his generation.
It is said his life mirrored some of his more famous gangster roles in that he came to the attention of the French authorities on more than one occasion, not least when it was suggested he could have been involved in the murder of his minder, Stefan Markovic, whose body was found in a dump outside Paris in 1968.
Shortly before his death, Delon wrote the following: “I will leave this world without hearing it. Life has nothing else to offer me, I have seen it all, I have experienced it all. Above all I hate the current era, it hurts me. Everything is fake, everything has been replaced, no respect for the word given. Now all that matters is money and wealth. I know I leave this world with no regrets.”
While Delon might not have been a particularly appropriate role model, he had a point about this era.
Two obvious examples came to mind.
How has America gone from George Washington as president to Donald Trump? The former, it was said, couldn’t tell a lie, while the latter can’t tell the truth.
Just for the record, I looked it up and according to the fact-checkers at the Washington Post, Trump was responsible for uttering 30,573 lies or misleading statements during his term in office.
Notwithstanding all this, come November he could be back in the White House.
And across the pond it used to be a matter of honour that a political leader’s word was his bond. For instance, Sir Randolph Churchill resigned as chancellor in 1866 over the trivial issue of a dispute in regard to the defence estimates. And in more recent times Robin Cook fell on his sword rather than agree to support Tony Blair’s on the Iraq war.
But that was then, this is now.
On Tuesday, when Sir Keir Starmer accused the outgoing Tory government of deliberately misleading the public by leaving a £22bn black hole in the economy, it had the ring of truth about it. Sure, what else is new when it comes to shenanigans and the Tories?
On coming to power, Boris Johnson led a government that could easily be accused of corruption or incompetence, or even both.
His political rap sheet includes the following: attempting to prorogue parliament; attempting to overturn the whole system for maintaining standards in public office to protect his ally, Owen Patterson; availing of a £15,000 holiday in Mustique paid for by a Tory donor; ‘borrowing’ £112,000 from another donor to do up his flat at Downing Street with wallpaper that cost 840 quid a roll: and protecting his chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, who drove from London to Durham during the Covid lockdown when everyone else was restricted to five miles within their home patch.
And let’s not forget either ‘partygate’ or the massive PPE scandal where 500 suppliers with links to the Tory party were, literally, given billions in contracts for what turned out to be some very dodgy deals.
Go figure how BoJo remains the most popular Tory politician of his generation.
However, now let me confuse you totally by suggesting that maybe there’s not that much difference between today’s ‘values’ and the golden era that is always the past.
On Monday night I happened to watch Stolen on RTÉ television, about the victims of mother and baby homes in the Ireland of yesteryear.
Here was a tale of misogyny and viciousness led by priests and nuns of the Catholic Church. Lives were ruined. Families destroyed. And the cruelty inflicted on the innocent babies when they were living – huge numbers of them died from ill-treatment including lack of feeding – was bad enough, but the indignity inflicted them in death was disgusting. Being buried in sewer tanks and unmarked graves was their final indignity.
When I read some of the comments on social media in the wake of the broadcast I realised there are still a serious cohort of people out there who are in denial about all this. Not only was the Church not in the wrong, they wish to see a return to the days where family values, morals and respect for the Catholic Church were paramount.
I am not one of them. I don’t want that ‘golden era’ back.
I suppose one unchanging fact about human nature is that no matter what the era or generation, give people enough power and they’ll abuse it. The priestly collar, the nun’s habit or the politician’s pin-striped suit does not, unfortunately, provide protection against that huge flaw in human nature.
Of course, the protection that is available to all of us is that there’s nothing stopping us from calling out abuse when we see it… all we need is the courage.
