In the critically acclaimed 2003 German film “Good Bye, Lenin” there is a stunning sequence — one of the best I have seen in any historical European movie — of a statue of Lenin being airlifted under the carriage of a combat helicopter on its way to a dumpsite.
The movie was set in the year 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and during the reunification of East and West Germany. Consequent to the reunion of the two Germanies into a democratic republic, all statues of Lenin were taken, literally and figuratively, to the trash heap of history. Not just in Germany, mind you, but most everywhere in the former Soviet Union.
The movie is a striking disquisition, not only on the catastrophe that was Communism, but on the fleetingness of fame and the illusion of personal greatness. Lenin, hailed as the architect of a New World Order that promised liberation for the laborer and equality to all, was the subject of a huge personality cult that ended in 1991. Not only were his statues removed, but the residents of Leningrad — Russia’s second-largest city and its Tsarist capital — voted overwhelmingly to return it to its imperial name, St. Petersburg. A quicker and steeper fall from grace cannot be found in modern history.
The fate of Lenin should serve as a cautionary tale to those in our government now who strut and fret as if they owned the country and their prerogatives would last forever. To think that Lenin was a great man in the sense that he changed the history of the world in a manner and to an extent few other people could be said to have done. Our officials, on the other hand, are temporarily elected officials in a small, developing country who cannot even change the upward-spiralling course of inflation.
There is something about having power that changes a man for the worse, especially when one is weak. Having worked in government for an aggregate of nine years, I have personally witnessed otherwise good people become tyrants and dictators, even in such lower-level positions in the city government of Manila. There seems to be a misconception after one tastes power that only will official wherewithal paper over abuses, but that such endowments will last forever.
That is why there is much wisdom in the practice of the Caesars — whenever they paraded around in public in Imperial Rome after a victory in war or in jubilation for signal accomplishments, to the wild cheers of their subjects — of having a factotum standing at their back on their triumphal chariot, whispering this reminder to them in the midst of all the adulation, “respice post te, deus non es, homo est memento.” (Look behind you, you are not a god, you are but a man.)
I have a similar reminder to me in the office, in the form of a painting by the celebrated artist Fidel Sarmiento. It shows the front page of The Manila Times with President Estrada on it, and a few pieces of daing or dried fish. It serves to remind me that sometimes, in the course of my career, my picture may hit the front pages of newspapers, but the next day my face will be but convenient packaging for dried fish for a market vendor.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley hit the notion squarely in his work “Ozymandias,” where he relates about a traveler chancing upon a decrepit sculpture in the middle of a desert, that of a once-powerful ruler, with the inscription:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Verily, as the saying goes, sic transit gloria mundi. Thus passes the glory of the world. No need to get sick in the head over such a momentary state.
