I Know Who My Friends Are

I had just fallen out with one of my oldest friends when I wrote this. By writing it, I managed to piss of most of the rest of my friends. Whoops.




I've always been told that friendship is a good thing, a gift to be valued. Your friends should be the family that you can actually choose. A true friend will always be there to support you, and a group of friends are bound together by ties as strong as blood. History is littered with great and famous friendships that have enriched the world through their strength; Churchill and Roosevelt were good friends. Had they not been, who knows if the US would have entered WWII or if they would have continued their isolationist policies? Coleridge and Wordsworth were good friends. Without the influence of one on the other then generations of people might never have known that a man has wondered lonely as a cloud. The Ancient Mariner might never have troubled us (which if I'm honest is not necessarily a bad thing...).

Yet I've also heard it said that your friends drag you down. That friendship can be a prison and the expectations of your friends are your jailors. Should you ever wish to soar off and explore what you believe to be your full potential your friends will curse your name for abandoning them. The full capacity of friendship becomes the capacity to hate that person. History is again most instructive on this aspect; Julius Caesar was supposedly betrayed by his friend Brutus because of his desire to be King of Rome. In rather more recent and mundane times Tony Blair risks being knocked off the political moral high ground by his continued support and repeated rehabilitation of Peter Mandelson, a man who is gaffe-prone and unpopular. This is to say nothing of the 'Old Boys Network', the main public achievements of which have been to shield certain persons from too much scrutiny only to throw them to the wolves if they become a liability (no doubt Lord Archer and Jonathon Aitkin could explain just how dreadful a thing this is!)

Which of these two statements is true? Is there a grain of truth in both? Or are neither of them particularly relevant, mere idealisations of man's need for companionship? As I have nothing better to do today I'm going to make a (probably vain) effort to decipher this particular mystery.

Before making a start, I'll make a confession of intent. One of my very best friends betrayed me in about as comprehensive a manner as it is possible to do last weekend. He did something that he knew would cause me immense emotional pain and he did so wilfully and deliberately in the full knowledge of what the result would be, and he did so because he wanted to know what it felt like to do so. His behaviour is utterly contemptible by any reasonable standards and I think it's reasonable to say that he is not my favourite person in the world right now. So if by the end of this I have concluded that one's friends are vile and selfish scum who no more deserve compassion than a fat man deserves a girlfriend...well, at least you know of my bias before we get started!

The main example that I intend to use is the friendship between 2 powerful men; George W. Bush (I said powerful, I didn't say anything about being especially bright...) and Kenneth Lay. The former needs no introduction (except possibly to remind his raddled brain of who he is). The latter is the former chairman of Enron, the energy company that has recently been revealed to have done for financial honesty what Enoch Powell did for race relations. Some may question the validity of the friendship between these two; after all, in the murky world of politics friendship comes second to ambition. Yet I believe that there is a strong element of mutual admiration between these two that could be described as friendship, and so it is with these two that I will proceed.

Firstly, if we rewind a few years to when dear old Dubya was running for the governorship of The Lone Star State. Lay (or Kenny Boy as Dubya refers to him) ensured that a lot of money went into Dubya's campaign fund. There is nothing unusual about this in politics of course, but once Bush was elected he returned the favour with bells on. Enron was given pretty much free reign to do what it waned in Texas. In politics, favours are usually given out begrudgingly and are only awarded in the first place because a company has contributed to a campaign fund. Even then, a politician is careful with what he promises because chances are the company or individual will have donated to the opposition as well (as indeed Enron did, though the political party accounts show that the Republicans were the more favoured to the tune of almost $1 million).

The favour that George Bush bestowed was that he trusted Enron to keep their own house in order. When one bears in mind that most politicians are almost porn star-like in their willingness to jump into bed with big business, Dubya's decision to leave Enron to their own devices whilst he got on with the important business of ensuring Texas had the one of the highest execution rates in the world is surprising to say the least. The personal friendship between Lay and Bush seems to provide many of the answers as to why this decision was made.

In a strange sort of way, this shows how friendship between two people can make them greater than the sum of their parts. Without the staunch and unwavering support of the powerful businessman Lay, the political career of Bush (a reformed alcoholic who was even then regarded as something of a simpleton) might have been stillborn. Without the support of Bush, Lay's company might have had to subject itself to greater regulation and control by state and federal government. The one could not have been achieved without the other. The friendship and trust between the two further showed itself by the amount of time the two men spent in each other's company.

Yet things are not quite the same now. The rosy future that the friendship between these men offered seems to have disintegrated for at least one of them. Dubya's trust in Enron to be their own policeman has proved misplaced to say the least. The favour shown to Enron was abused to a frightening degree. As a result of Dubya showing trust and friendship in Lay, a mighty company has been bankrupted by it's own dishonesty. Thousands of people have lost vast amounts of money via their pensions or sharesave scheme. The abuse of friendship has also damaged Bush himself; accusations of cosying up to big business at the expense of the rights of the average man are flying thick and fast at his government, perhaps justifiably so. Yet for all I am a critic of Bush, I don't believe he is an evil man. I don't accept that he extended such trust to Lay knowing full well that Enron would make a mockery of it. I am of the impression that he is genuinely shocked at the extent of Enron's questionable activities and is upset that his friend has betrayed his trust in such a manner and it would seem over such a period of time.

If the relationship between Dubya and Lay was one of convenience then we could be assured that Mr. Lay would be the second Enron executive to commit suicide under the kind of circumstances that keep conspiracy theorists in business. Yet Bush seems to be honouring his friendship with the man who has made his government look like fools, and corrupt fools at that. He was given an easy ride at the inquiry into the collapse of Enron. There is no question that he will suffer any form of censure in terms of criminal or civil actions. Every possible scrap of information that shows Lay as an innocent is being hurled at the media (today the papers make a big deal about the evidence given by Sherren Watkins who was the whistleblower on Enron's financial crisis; she is vociferous in her belief that Kenneth Lay was kept in the dark and was not to blame). Though it is perhaps in Dubya's best interests to abandon Mr. Lay, he is not doing so.

Will the two men still be friends in the future? Probably. I have no doubt that things will be worked out between my friend and I as we have been through a lot together and are simply too fond of each other to allow one incident to make us enemies, and I would expect things to be no different between Lay and Bush. I think what I am saying in all of this is that we should certainly love and cherish our friends, and should always do whatever is within our power to help them. But don't trust them, at least not completely. When someone is faced with a choice of advancement of oneself at the expense of a friend then it would appear we will do so 9 times out of 10.