For me, part of the pathos of the rise and fall of both Muammar Gaddafi and the Ceausescus (Nicolae and Elena) is that they are both illustrations of what happens when simple peasants find themselves with absolute power over a nation, with all its financial resources. Take Gaddafi, for example:

Gaddafi would arrive at summits of Arab leaders in a white limousine surrounded by a bodyguard of nubile Kalashnikov-toting brunettes. At one non-aligned summit in Belgrade, he turned up with two horses and six camels; the Yugoslavs allowed him to graze the camels in front of his hotel – where he pitched his tent and drank fresh camel milk – but refused to allow him to arrive at the conference on one of his white chargers. Several of the camels ended up in Belgrade zoo.

At an African Union summit in Durban in 2002, his entourage consisted of a personal jet, two Antonov transport aircraft, a container ship loaded with buses, goat carcases and prayer mats, a mobile hospital, jamming equipment that disrupted local networks, $6 million in petty cash, and 400 security guards with associated rocket launchers, armoured cars and other hardware, who nearly provoked a shoot-out with South Africa’s security forces.

This brings to mind the prole gawkers who come home from Branson, Mo., dazzled by the gilded crappers at Shoji Tabuchi’s theater (“Every single week the Ladies Room is filled with fragrant exotic flowers—making it quite possibly the sweetest smelling restroom on the planet.”). It will not surprise the astute to learn that Gaddafi was born to illiterate nomads, and raised in a tent in the desert.

Similarly with Nicolae and Elena, who were born poor Romanian peasants, but who rose through the Communist Party bureaucracy to become the self-styled Genius of the Carpathians and Mrs. Genius. Elena could barely read, but she was given a Ph.D. and declared to be a scientific prodigy. The blood-soaked tyrants lived lives of staggering luxury, but never lost their grubby instincts (e.g., when the Ceausescus went to Buckingham Palace on a state visit in the 1970s, they stole gold fixtures.

That’s the thing about money and power (which are often the same thing): when people get them, they typically only become more of what they really are. Often our decency is predicated on our weakness, which is to say, on our inability to do what we would really like to do, deep down. This is why lottery winners often ruin their lives. All that money brought them great power over their own lives. They could do whatever they wanted to do. But they never really learned to control their desires, or to want the right things. So they bring disaster on themselves.

We all think that this is how other people are, that if we were so fortunate, we would handle all that money (or absolute power) well. I know I do. But I’m almost certainly lying to myself. I wouldn’t live like a Ceausescu or a Gaddafi (OK, so I would bring camels with me on my travels, but so what?), but I’m pretty sure that I would engage in wretched excess of my own, but I wouldn’t see it because it would be “tasteful,” or rationalized by myself and my flatterers in some way. Virtue doesn’t lie in classes of people. It lies, or does not lie, in individuals, who are shaped by their class, family, and circumstances. Ceausescu was no better than the cruelest Romanov, and in most ways surely much worse. Abraham Lincoln was surely no wealthier than Gaddafi or Ceausescu, yet he was a wiser ruler than most kings.

Anyway, this is why I’m so fascinated by the videos of Gaddafi’s last moments, and the Ceausescus. People who had everything, especially the power of life and death over hundreds of thousands, are reduced to the absolute poverty with which they came into this world. They don’t even have the power to save their own lives. Gaddafi’s reported last words were not, “I’m sorry,” but “What did I ever do to you?” In the last minutes of her life, Elena Ceausescu, who was in part responsible for torturing thousands of Romanians to death, chastised her military captors for their ingratitude. Deluded and arrogant and self-justifying to the bitter end. I think the Last Judgment is going to be like this for those of us who have wasted the lives we’ve been given.