By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, February 26, 2016
I’m not sure I’d ever heard of Jimmy Savile prior to
revelations that he was a monster.
A hugely popular DJ and TV personality in the United
Kingdom for decades, Savile lived a double life as a child molester and rapist.
He abused older victims as well. His victims, many of whom were patients in
hospitals, ranged from five to 75 years old. As a major fundraiser for
hospitals, he had free rein to prey on boys and girls. He assaulted one
ten-year-old boy with a broken arm while he was waiting on a gurney for an
X-ray. He assaulted teenagers recovering from surgery in bed.
All in all, at several hospitals and at nearly every
division of the BBC where he worked, he raped or abused dozens of children —
boys and girls — and scores of teenagers and adults.
Savile also reportedly did things to corpses best left
unsaid.
He was so popular and so powerful, many victims felt
comfortable coming forward only after Savile died in 2011 at the age of 84, to
that point regarded as an esteemed member of the community. Sir Jimmy was even
a knight.
The BBC has just published a nearly 800-page report
detailing its complicity in Savile’s crimes. I haven’t read the whole thing,
nor do I have much desire to. The main takeaway, however, is that the BBC
shares blame for turning a blind eye owing to its “culture of deference” to
celebrities. There was ample evidence that Savile was up to no good, but few
were willing to say anything.
Let’s discuss the culture of deference.
In my book The
Tyranny of Clichés, I wrote at some length about one of the most abused
quotes in intellectual and political discourse: “Power tends to corrupt, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Most people think this is a warning about what happens to
the souls and characters of powerful people. But that is not exactly what Lord
Acton, the author of the line, had in mind. He surely believed that power
corrupts powerful people, but the more important thrust of his remarks, offered
in a letter to a friend, was that power corrupts other people.
In his letter to Mandell Creighton, a bishop and
historian, Acton warned that we should not make moral allowances for powerful
people just because they are powerful. If a common man murdered someone, Acton
explained, he should hang. But when a king or queen murders, we make allowances
for it. “I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious
justice,” Acton wrote.
Now, if the issue were merely the homicidal intrigues of
monarchs of old, we might make allowances for the times in which they lived.
But Acton’s point is much broader, and more relevant, than that.
We are constantly making allowances for “great” men and
women, though we don’t use the word “great” that way. But the gist is the same.
Bill Cosby is believed to have gotten away with his
alleged abuses because he was powerful and famous. The same goes for Bill
Clinton and his many alleged transgressions. The Polish director Roman
Polanski, who fled U.S. prosecution for statutory rape, had countless celebrity
defenders whom a plumber would never have under the same circumstances. The
same was true of Michael Jackson.
While money often plays a role — the powerful and famous
are very often rich as well — it’s rare that such people buy the kind of
protection I’m talking about. The people who forgive, say, Fidel Castro or Che
Guevara for their innumerable crimes aren’t paid to do so. Their defenders
volunteer for duty.
And this dynamic holds for lesser sins as well.
Celebrities behave in all manner of ways that we would find unforgivable in
normal people, including normal rich people. Barbra Streisand is one of many
divas said to instruct the peons on her staff not to look her in the eye. Right
now, millions of people love behavior they see in Donald Trump but would not
tolerate for a moment from a friend or colleague.
Jimmy Savile was a monster, and if hell did not exist, we
would have to create it for him. But his fetid and twisted soul was allowed to
fester, or even thrive, for decades not because of his corruption, but because
of the corruption he inspired in others.
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