Corruption - 10 May 1974

I have a feeling coming on that I am going to talk about a word which on both sides of the Atlantic has started to thunder as rhythmically as the guns at a royal salute. The word is corruption.

However, the moment I start to concentrate on that word, the first thing that comes bubbling up from my unconscious is the memory of a very rousing mass protest meeting that took place in Central Park, New York three, maybe four, years ago. If your memory can reach back so far, to the protests of the early '70s – fashions in protest change with such speed these days – you may recall that the great new word was "ecology".

Well, there came a day when the young of New York – and by the instantaneous osmosis of television, the young also of London and Melbourne and Stockholm – a day they decided to dub "Earth Day". Parades were organised to protest the pollution of old mother earth and to suggest, if only through chanted slogans, doing something about it. There was this vast march into Central Park, of young people mostly, who to their credit felt strongly about defiling the earth and the heavens and the things that grow and breathe under the heavens. It was a large and it was a good-humoured crowd.

They held a big picnic of root vegetables that had never known pesticides, of simple fruits and they pledged their communion, to the cause, with what has become holy water to the pure in heart – namely yoghurt. When it was over, they dispersed in orderly fashion and it came out that it cost the parks department of the city of New York something like, I think it was between 15 and 20,000 dollars to clean up the litter that they’d left. This may stand, I think, as a perennial warning to all idealists of the chronic gap that's likely to appear between preachment and performance.

The same cautionary thought crossed my mind last week when I was cheered, as I am sure we all were, by the immense scenes of jubilation in Lisbon at the overthrow of a 50-year-old iron dictatorship. And without prejudicing the revolutionary forces that will now have to find a new way to run Portugal, we can fairly say that tearing down is easier than building up and that on every good protestor there falls the necessary duty of having to replace a bad system with a workable good one. Or at the very least, when we charge somebody with corruption, of pausing for a moment to wonder what we would have done, in the same circumstances.

What we have lately been seeing, both in America and Britain, recently is a wave of moral indignation against the corruption of public men, by favours they may be tempted to do for private men with private interests. In a way, you could say it’s a protest against the whole business of public relations when it acts as a method of making bribery socially acceptable.

In both countries there are bills pending, stricter than anything we have had before, to make men and women in public office, members of Congress, members of Parliament, publish all their outside sources of income.

There is a rule, by the way, in the United States, whereby the presidents and vice presidents and justices of the Supreme Court, and in some states, governors, move the the moment they assume office to put all their stocks and bonds, their investments, into escrow for the length of their term. But in both countries, we are going further and saying that the voters have a right to know when one of their elected representatives comes to vote on, for instance, a defence bill, an army expansion bill, to know whether or not he owns stock in a company that, say, manufactures army uniforms.

We’ll come to this at another time, for now I’d like to talk about a particular twilight zone of morality through which all public men, by which I mean also, well-known writers, football idols, movie stars, popular heroes, have to try and steer a decent course.

I bring this up because it’s always more convincing I believe, to talk about something of which you have had personal experience and it has to do with the whole art, and practice, of salesmanship, of persuading people to prefer your product, or your contract, to somebody else’s. Salesmanship, which enlists millions of talented and persistent agents in every country, is obviously essential to industry, prosperity, to the very economy.

I presume that even in the Soviet Union the splendour of Russian products is not self-evident. I mean, even Mr Brezhnev has to employ salesmen to invade the beastly capitalist countries to suggest that some things – dynamos, airplanes, automobiles – made in the Soviet Union are better than the similar things we make. So of course the trade of a salesman is an honourable one. It become sad only when a firm uses an influence, a talent, that lies outside its own skill, to advertise that skill. The vulnerability of politicians is clear, and has been made painfully so in both countries lately.

But how about the famous actor or footballer who is prevailed on to say for a flat fee, that your beer or razor blade is better than somebody else’s beer, or razor blade. This is surely just as much an attempt to deceive, to suggest excellence, by association with somebody who is excellent in another field.

A few months ago a juicy offer came my way to do a 30-second commercial for an airline. I was assured by an eager public relations man that I wouldn’t be seen, only my voice would carry the message. And I trust it’s not coy to suggest that he wanted my voice only because it’s the voice which, by dinning repetition over the years, is recognisable for itself. And maybe some of the things I have said with it have been persuasive, at least the PR man thought so.

But I use my voice to vent my own ideas. They wanted to hire it, to persuade me to express their ideas. Now this is only a single example, and sometimes the offer seems so nice, so guiless... maybe you really are a big fan of the product, maybe you use no other razor, travel on no other airline. I don’t think it has anything to do with the case.

To be truthful, rarely a week goes by without something coming in that is occasionally attractive, even amusing, always lucrative, and the offers are made by well-meaning advertising agencies doing their job.

I maybe a fond and foolish old Jeffersonian, sharing some of his delusions, not all, I hope, about the goodness of "the people" but I do believe, I fervently hope anyway, that the mass of people are not fooled. Some months ago, I stopped to buy petrol in a one-street town, out west. The attendant recognised me, said a few nice things and in the course of the following chat, he mentioned his surprise in having watched a big football game on the telly, at recognising the voice, not even sight mind you, but the voice, of an actor of international eminence doing a plug, as we vulgarly say, for some domestic product – shaving cream, camera, I mercifully forget what it was – well, I said he was probably paid the earth, the attendant interrupted his wiping of my windscreen, "Oh sure enough," he said "but, I have always thought of him as a great actor, and this sort of, er, lets him down you know what I mean?"

Lest some of you are sagely nodding your heads, I ought to add that the fees paid for even one minute, ads by famous people endorsing something that has nothing remotely to do with their talent, are huge beyond the imagining of most people. A movie star I once knew who shared my fussiness on this topic, suddenly lapsed into a television advertisement for coffee – she was not, by the way a coffee drinker – but she told me later, a little shamefaced, that she could use the money. Who couldn’t have used the $200,000 they paid her for thirty seconds? Of course, if your wife and children are starving, I guess anything goes.

I mention this to show people who are beyond such invitations that resistance to this sort of temptation is harder than it sounds at first hearing. And I have noticed that people with no public reputation to endanger are the first to condemn hints of corruption in public men. Not out of superior character, but out of nothing but envy.

It comes down, in the end, I believe, to every man’s, every woman’s, conscience which is a flexible organ. And one should not certainly attribute ones own peculiar standards to other people, but I still believe that the Catholic church was supremely wise, in making the number one sin, not greed, or sloth or lust, but spiritual pride – feeling that you are better than other people. And so by that test, the condemner could be more of sinner than the greedy one he condemns.

While this row is going on anyway, we might all, in judging the motives of other people, remember the old Biblical injunction, judge not least ye be judged. But, after all, the only conscience you can live by is your own and if you feel this way, you better, for your own comfort, act by it. Comes a point, of course, when a man may be so devoid of conscience that society has to move in and exercise a conscience for him and that is what is now beginning to happen in the legislative bodies – both of the Congress and the Parliament.

The whole thing for me, was put, in a rather high-flown manner I admit, by George Bernard Shaw, a writer, I am told by the young, who is now probably at the lowest point of his fame or readability by anybody under 40. Well, in his time, he was thought to be a great – the greatest – English-speaking playwright. Though, today, many people may agree with the late James Agate, that Mr Shaw’s plays are the price we have to pay for his prefaces.

In one of those tremendous prefaces, or rather in a published letter to a friend which preceded the preface to Man and Superman, Shaw ended with, and I quote from memory, this sentence, “The only true joy in life, is the being used for a purpose, which you recognise to be a mighty one, as the only true tragedy is being used by personally-minded rich men for ends that you recognise to be base”.

Well apart from the fact that it must be very hard for ditch diggers, coal miners, and the people making biscuits on an assembly line to see themselves as being used for a mighty purpose, the main warning of this great sentence, still stands, for my money. Pardon me, for my self respect.

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