We inhabit an period of persistent shamelessness, and this was its crowning week.
It started with a person in an opulent cape, held up by a bunch of small boyservants, insisting that he had come “to not be served, however to serve” whereas a constellation of noblemen bowed and curtsied to him.
Then we watched a former US president, discovered by a jury to have sexually assaulted somebody, enjoyment of publicly mocking his sufferer whereas his sycophants chortled.
Neither farce boggled the thoughts fairly a lot because the re-emergence and tried rebranding of the scammer queen, Elizabeth Holmes.
Holmes is the disgraced former CEO of Theranos, who was sentenced to 11 years in jail for defrauding the corporate’s buyers. Her true offence was far worse: She deceived sufferers.
By pretending to have pioneered a machine able to conducting a variety of medical checks from a single drop of blood, whereas realizing it didn’t work, Holmes risked folks’s lives. Her jail sentence would have been harsher if her deception had not been uncovered by The Wall Road Journal, and stopped earlier than it may inflict extra harm.
Holmes not too long ago spoke to the media for the primary time since 2016, giving The New York Occasions in depth entry to her life on the cusp of her sentence. The resultant profile appeared in The Occasions’ pages this week.
A lot of the response fixated on the credulity of her interviewer, which is way much less fascinating than the revisionist, self-serving mythos Holmes so shamelessly sought to assemble.
I shan’t rehash all the article (it’s value studying in full if you happen to’re ). Right here, as a substitute, is one anecdote Holmes relayed, apparently considering it believable. It supposedly occurred when she and her husband, Billy Evans, took their youngster to hospital with a excessive fever.
The very first thing the attending physician stated was, “You look quite a bit like that horrible girl.” Ms Holmes checked out him together with her piercing blue eyes, and stated, “I’m certain you’re a greater individual than she is.”
The physician appeared to understand who he was speaking to. She continued: “Then he stated, ‘Are you Elizabeth Holmes?’ And I stated, ‘Sure,’ and he stated, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I stated, ‘Don’t be, all you already know is what you’ve learn.’”
This story reeks of the identical improbability as Meghan Markle’s declare that South Africa celebrated her wedding ceremony to Prince Harry within the streets “the identical approach it did when Mandela was free of jail”.
However no matter. Its veracity is just not the purpose. The purpose is Holmes’ motive in telling it, encapsulated in that quote: “All you already know is what you’ve learn.”
The implication is that Holmes’ fetid popularity, completely earned by her disregard for the small folks in her pursuit of riches, is a assemble of the media. That she has been handled unfairly. That we should always really feel sympathy, or empathy, or something in any respect for the one that would have damage folks, remorselessly, to fund her luxuries and inflate her celeb.
Holmes’ defenders informed The Occasions her downfall “felt like a witch trial, much less rooted in what really occurred at Theranos” than in sending “a message to bold ladies in every single place: Don’t lady boss too near the solar, or this might occur to you”.
They expressed related complaints in letters to the courtroom. Right here, for instance, is a quote from one in all her sorority sisters at Stanford: “There’s an unstated lesson for feminine executives: You might be allowed to achieve success, however not too profitable.”
What. The. F**ok.
It’s the type of stupidity that short-circuits your mind. You search the phrases to mock it and are left mute, impotent, your mouth ballooning open and shut like that of a vacant-minded fish.
How gullible should we be if the Elizabeth Holmeses of the world, the guiltiest of the responsible, suppose us weak to renewed manipulation?
It appears a dumb query. However you then see the flags waving for a secular outdated man in a preposterous outfit who claims a divine proper to rule us. You hear the cackles of admiration for a charlatan politician’s witless, boorish humour.
Folks like this persist as a result of we allow them to. They thrive off our starvation for idols. It’s an urge for food for humiliation, and it by no means appears to fade.
Twitter: @SamClench
