The Legacy of Robert Ludlum's Randolph Gates

Considering the figure of Randolph Gates in Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Ultimatum, and especially what his career as attorney and legal scholar meant as summed up his former law professor Judge Brendan Prefontaine--his, as a fighter against antitrust law, serving the rapacity of the financial community, participating in making a nation where "privacy is obsolete, free thought suspended by censorship, the rich get richer, and for the poorest . . . the beginnings of potential life . . . have to be abandoned in order to survive" is a different thing in 2025 from what it was in 1990. Thirty-five years ago it was common, and not just on the left, to look at what it was common to sum up as the attitude of "the '80s" in all its selfishness and grasping and irresponsibility and callousness with disgust and imagine that subsequent years would see a measure of corrective--with this reflected in Ludlum's novel in how the traitorous Gates, faced with the end of everything he had ever worked for, reforms himself and goes over to fighting the good fight on behalf of the public against those who had made him a superstar of the legal and scholarly world.

Of course, thirty-five years on it is all too clear that no corrective ever came, that, indeed, all of this just continued--with what seemed to be simply underway then an accomplished fact now. Thus does the media, in reporting data breach after data breach, never question the fact that companies are permitted to traffic in individuals' personal data, not only violating their privacy but exposing them to constant dangers--a reflection of how the pressures to censorship, and self-censorship, have only mounted upon it, reducing a press that never had a golden age to its current, rather repugnant, condition. Thus have the rich gone on getting richer as the poor gone on getting poorer--and "the beginnings of potential life . . . abandoned in order to survive" not merely by the poorest, as a generation, scorned by the elders minutely proving how right Thackeray was about how people excuse their nasty behavior toward others by calumnying them, find that even when they do everything right and go to college and finish college and land a job the combination of low wages, student debt, obscene and worsening price rises for housing, cars and everything else means that a home of one's own, marriage, family at the age when their parents had them, and maybe ever, humble as they may seem, are impossible aspirations. Gates did his job, delivering what was wanted--all as what has happened to date can seem merely the beginning, all systems go on this effort as the world falls apart.