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Consider her profligacy in another way. What is the purpose of riches? To buy freedom--to purchase choices, immunities from the will of others, or of fate. If Imelda kept a collection of 2,700 pairs of shoes, it was not because (as some candle-snuffing moralists might think) she should be expected to wear them all, and must be judged a wastrel if she did not, but because the 2,700 pairs gave her options. Her step no doubt grew lighter in the knowledge of such freedom. Did she display her shoes the way that Jay Gatsby reveled in his wonderful shirts?
Or were the Marcos shoes, like the billions of stolen dollars, merely grotesque? The Russian word poshlost suggests the transcendent vulgarity at work in the Marcos spectacle. Poshlost is something preposterously overdone but without self-knowledge or irony. It is comic and sad and awful. An 18th century French merchant of great wealth named Beaujean came to the same dead end as Marcos with his Swiss gold and his ruined kidneys. "He owned amazing gardens," the historian Miriam Beard wrote of Beaujean, "but he was too fat to walk in them . . . He had countless splendid bedrooms and suffered from insomnia . . . a monstrous, bald, bloated old man in a bed sculptured and painted to resemble a gilded basket of roses."
Children often have delusions of omnipotence, and perhaps adult megalomania derives from that, with a sinister admixture of the child's spirit of play and exhibitionism. As the economist Robert Heilbroner wrote, "Analysis finds . . . that even after the child separates the world outside from the world within, he continues to endow outside things with the magical property of being part of himself. To put it differently, he sees his personality as contagious, shedding something of itself on objects of importance. His possessions are part of his self."
Wretched excess comes in many forms. Theologians distinguish the excess called avarice--the sheer, mean taking and hoarding of things--from the excess called prodigality, which is a messier and more full-blooded fault, a form of generosity, almost, but one that has come unhinged. Ideally, world-class plundering should try to pay its way as entertainment. The Romans had a genius for transforming loot into colossally vulgar display, ostentation on an imperial scale. The Emperor Elagabalus, it is said, ordered his slaves to bring him 10,000 lbs. of cobwebs. When they finished the task, Elagabalus observed, "From this, one can understand how great a city is Rome." Louis XIV of France wore a diamond-covered coat that, at the turn of the 18th century, was worth a dazzling 14 million francs: the Sun King got up in the splendors of Liberace. And so on.
The Marcos plundering seems ultimately a cheerless affair, covert though sometimes ostentatious, avaricious though often prodigal. Christ said, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." Marcos did not wish to wait. He turned Christianity upside down. He took nourishment from the mouths of the poor and transformed it into his treasure on earth. Such venality is not a matter of either Freud or metaphysics. It is just a brutal habit, the crocodile reflex of a man too long in power. It is a subdivision of the banality of evil.