4 —- Sunday, April 7, 1991 - North Shore News Egos and hubris in high office: Vander Zalm’s tragic denouement THE STREAK in human nature that is most often associated with high tragedy and farce alike is hubris, the wild exaggerated sense of self-confidence that leads people (o their doom. Another good term for the same attitude is paranoid gran- diosity, the tendency to believe that one has fantastic powers, that one is driven by destiny, that the work one is involved in has vast significance. To some degree, of course, none of us can survive a day in the rat race without a certain amount of hubris, even paranoid grandiosity. But most of us have only a small dusting of it. Just enough to get us through. The trait really shows up in men like Winston Churchill and monsters like Adolf Hitler. It is not just statesmen and dic- tators who are prone to secing themselves in nearly cosmic terms, artists are likewise easy victims. Pablo Picasso, who became an in- satiable beast not untike the Minotaurs that strode through his paintings, is an excellent example. Shakespeare’s characters were invariably driven to their destruc- tion by their own hubris. From MacBeth to Caesar, their inflamed sense of their own infallibility and greatness pushed them beyond the boundaries of reasonable behavior. We have two terrific examples of men destroyed — or in the process of being destroyed — by hubris before us. Far away, there is the spectacle of Saddam Hus- sein. Close at hand, Bill Vander Zalm. Although the situations are Good friends make great “We were just married last year and since most of our friends and relatives live in North Vancouver, Cedar Village was the ideal location for us. 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STRICTLY PERSONAL vastly different and the damage and suffering caused by their out-of-conirol egos occurring at a completely different magnitude, the source of their tragedies re- mains the same. It is that peculiar psychological warping that presents a picture of themselves to their own minds that sets them apart from — and above — the common herd. Now that the Hughes Report is in, and all the various political chickens have come home to roost, the most remarkable thing about Vander Zalm -- a man who could, after ail, balance books and steer one of the saner fiscal courses of any province in Canada — was that he would take the kind of bizarre chances he took while in the full glare of the medié spotlight. Did he really think that he could tive in the glass house that a premier inevitably inhabits, sur- rounded by sworn enemies and hostile reporters on every side, all armed with stones, and somehow pull off gigantic con- flict-of-interest real estate deals without getting caught? If one was to try to create such a character in fiction, one would almost be forced to work ina death wish, which of course wouldn’t be conscious. There is a school of thought that says you don’t win fights so much as the other person decides to lose. Vander Zalm’'s blindness to the oblivion he was setting up for himself ranks right up there with Saddam Hussein, carrying on as though awesome and totally unbeatable forces had not been mustered against him, so lost in his own distorted self-image that an unbridgeable gap opened with reality on the other side. I mean, neither man could be truly stupid, could he? Brutal or selfish or self-aggrandizing or rapacious, sure. But in the process of getting into power, they had to be competing against a lot of other brutal and rapacious and at least somewhat intelligent people, no less selfish or self-aggrandiz- ing. But surely it takes a modicum of brains to get to the top. At least that’s what I’ve always assumed. Maybe the lesson here is that U'm wrong. Maybe truly stupid people can blunder their way into the highest offices in the land. Maybe it’s not that power rots their brains, that all the bowing and scraping by the Munkies they surround themselves with twists their heads -~ maybe, just maybe, they were dumb, dumb, dumb to begin with. In which case the only conclu- sion we can come to is that they both operated in systems that did not screen out idiots. For Vander Zalm, sheer idiocy is not too strong a word to apply to his heavy-handed wheeling and dealing in so high-profile and sen- sitive a position. From what I get out of the Hughes Report, he was apparently under the impression that as long as no one knew what he was up to, there was no conflict. Conflict only occurred when his scams came to light. In other words, the man who wore his religion on his sleeve and preached Catholic moraiity to lesser beings did not have the faintest clue as to what constituted morality in polit- ical office. His hubris drove him to make a fool of himself in pudlic, embar- rassing his family and possibly costing his party control of the government, thereby affecting British Columbia’s history to the marginal degree that a change of bosses in Victoria can affect things. Oh well. It could have been worse. He could have been Sad- dam. neighbours. Secure, affordable, and friendly If you're renting, you'll probably find it makes financial sense to apply for a Cedar Village mortgage, available with nominal qualifications. If you own al- ready, but are looking for a new lease on life, you'll find that moving to Cedar Village will open up an ex- citing future of new friends and exciting activities. 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