For those who might have missed it, there is a scene from the 2003 HBO film version of Tony Kushner's AIDS epic play, Angels in America. In this scene, right wing lawyer and closeted gay man, Roy Cohn, is diagnosed by his doctor (played by James Cromwell) with AIDS. As you watch both actors' powerful performance, so much is going on and is embodied in this amazing scene, not the least of which is the nature of self-loathing and the pretenses of so many of those in power. For those displaying the hubris of Cohn, they generally are ill prepared for those eventual moments when they experience a hard fall.
And then, from the same film, is a brief scene from Cohn's deathbed, in which he is still "on," still railing against the Rosenbergs, his political targets from when he was Senator Joe McCarthy's attack dog in the 1950s.
Both scenes together show Cohn as in denial of so many things - including his sexuality and his mortality, as well as his own amorality and compassion for others - right up until the very end.
I bring up this example because, in essence, Roy Cohn's very nature had to do with the exploitation of the principle of "divide and conquer," as well as a kind of hypocritical set of double standards, that permeated the politics of the Cold War 1950s, continued through the plague years of the 1980s, in which gays were demonized as AIDS-spreaders, and that continues through our own era of quasi-Christo-fascism (a notion reiterated to me this morning, as I listened to a few right wing callers calling in on C-SPAN to beg forgiveness for moral transgressions committed by leaders of the right-wing party). The characterological ugliness of Cohn (not to mention that of J. Edgar Hoover, another name from the history books) is the characterological ugliness of today's Republican Party, with its various forms of power worship and institutional bigotries and hypocrisies.
What was so blatant about Cohn and his own self-loathing closetedness, was that while those in his own inner circle (including Mr. and Mrs. Reagan) were in on his secret, his public denials of his own sexual orientation were as ironclad and secrecy preserving as is Dick Cheney's management style; is this a constant quality amongst mean spirited Republican attack dogs? And yet, as the film, poetically, makes clear, in the end, Cohn was human and therefore mortal. He was also a victim, of a horrible disease, but he enabled those who sought to blame most such victims for their own victimization.
To me, then, both of these artfully done scenes captures something essential about Lord Acton's old rule about the corruptive nature of power; yet power, like fame or fortune, can disappear, especially as one is dying on a hospital bed or is arrested on a morals charge by undercover police, revealed to the world as being other than how one has presented oneself.