The balls of the powerful – 01/31/2023 – Elio Gaspari

The late Pope Benedict 16 told one of his biographers that he resigned because of insomnia that afflicted him since 2005. Half true, Pope Ratzinger was also tormented by the effects of pellets that doctors prescribed him to sleep. In 2012, in Mexico, he woke up with blood on his sheets without knowing what had happened to him. It had been the effect of the ball and he had been hurt, without waking up.

What seems to have been an isolated episode is something more common, especially in the world of the powerful. Benedict 16 revealed that he began to think about resigning when he felt that he lacked the strength to carry out the service. This explanation could reduce the importance of the difficulties that plagued his pontificate.

Until recently, Brazil was governed by a president who had problems with sleep. Bolsonaro was an internet night owl. He turned a small room in the residential wing of Alvorada into a base for dispatching messages fired during the early hours. He himself proclaimed himself apnea record holder. An examination indicated that he suffered 89 sleep interruptions every hour. It was now seen that he had a source of oxygen in his bedroom. One day it will be known the size of the relationship between his daytime outbursts and his nocturnal discomforts. It is indisputable, however, that the captain felt good exploding.

The United States has already been governed by two presidents who suffered the consequences of sleepless nights. They spoiled Bill Clinton’s first year in office. Richard Nixon dabbled in Seconal pellets in the 1950s and ten years later was on Valium, depending on them. When the Watergate scandal hit, he complained that Dilantin was no longer working. He took to drinking and, on at least one occasion, appeared drunk when he was just out of breath.

He was like that when his advisers told him that Leonid Brezhnev, the head of the government of the Soviet Union, was not doing well.

Russian was also hanging on the pills, since 1968, before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. As the powerful prefer doctors they can command, Brezhnev was fried. In 1974, addiction overtook him. He slept at the wrong time and couldn’t wake up on time.

What is worrying about this epidemic of pills from the powerful is that after the disasters they cause, the responsibilities end up slipping to the drugs and doctors. Nobody thinks that Hitler did what he did because he was always stuffing himself with medicine. After all, he was a vegetarian, teetotaler and non-smoker. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, ate everything, smoked ten cigars a day and started drinking champagne before lunch.

When Donald Trump presented himself as a successful millionaire (which he was not), he prided himself on only sleeping four hours. With prestige at a low ebb, information emerged that he was taking Ambien pellets to fall asleep. He even distributed them during trips that crossed several time zones.

The world goes better when the powerful are judged by what they do, and not by the drugs they take. Cardinal Ratzinger was called “John Paul II’s Rottweiler”. Resigning, the cardinals elected the Argentine Bergoglio, and Francis took another path.

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