The Island of the Lost Autocrats

By LANCE MORROW

The Emperor Nero entered his Golden House for the first time. He inspected the statue of himself, 120 feet high. He saw the enclosed lake surrounded by buildings that were designed to represent the cities of the empire. He admired the pillared arcade that stretched for a mile, the dining rooms paved with porphyry, the ceilings of gold and fretted ivory inlaid with jewels. "At last," he said, "I am beginning to live like a human being."

Eventually, Nero's armies revolted and the Senate condemned him to be flogged to death with rods. He decided to resign from office by stabbing himself in the throat. At least suicide spared him the fate of some other toppled rulers -- the long twilight of exile, the sort of haunted afterlife endured by Napoleon, say, or the wandering Shah of Iran. Exile is not necessarily a fate worse than death, but there is something poignantly ignominious in the spectacle of the once all-powerful turned out to graze on their memories, their paranoid retrospections, in obscure pastures.

Napoleon's young aide-de-camp, General Gaspard Gourgaud, left a journal describing the Emperor's last years on St. Helena, a speck of British territory in the South Atlantic. Gourgaud's entries, unintentionally hilarious, record the great man's stupendous banality after he lost the thing that made him interesting -- his power. "October 21 (1815). I walk with the Emperor in the garden, and we discuss women. He maintains that a young man should not run after them . . . November 5. The Grand Marshal (Montholon) is angry because the Emperor told him he was nothing but a ninny . . . January 14 (1817). Dinner, with trivial conversation on the superiority of stout over thin women . . . January 15. I fetch the Imperial Almanac. The Emperor looks up the ages of his brothers. 'Josephine faked her age.' (He) looks at the names of the ladies of his court. He is moved. 'Ah! it was a fine empire. I had 83 million human beings under my government -- more than half the population of Europe.' To hide his emotion, the Emperor sings . . . January 27. We read Paradise Lost. The Emperor wants to buy a cow, but where shall we keep it?" The imperial party acquires a cow, but someone turns it loose. "February 4. The Emperor is in a very bad humor, and full of the cow incident. At dinner, the Emperor asks (his coachman) Archambault, 'Did you let the cow get away? If it is lost, you will pay for it, you blackguard!'. . . His Majesty, in a very bad humor, retires at 10:30, muttering, 'Moscow! Half a million men!' " After dinner a few days later, the Emperor remarks, "I should enjoy myself very much in the company of people of my own fortune."

Exactly. Not every deposed "strongman" and dictatorial Alldaddy ends up as shattered as Lear on the heath. Napoleon was comfortable enough. He had a girlfriend called Rosebud and spent much of his day soaking in the tub. But no doubt a peculiar loneliness descends upon the autocrat condemned to live out his days in one of the upstairs rooms, like a mental case in the family. He is the Wizard of Oz, bereft of his wonder machine.

At one time, an overthrown Big Boy almost invariably expired along with his power. Now, in the era of telephone and television (to keep track of how close the other side is coming) and the helicopter and jet (for rapid extraction when the front door gives way), there is building an exclusive international brotherhood of exiled Big Boys with leftover lives to kill.

The membership is scattered. Ferdinand Marcos will evidently settle in Hawaii. "Baby Doc" Duvalier has moved to the French Riviera, at least for the time being. Uganda's Idi Amin has managed to make himself all but invisible in Saudi Arabia. The Central African Republic's Emperor Bokassa has found a home near Paris. And so on. But such men are rarely welcomed, and never feel at home, in the places where the jet stream has deposited them. They keep out of sight.

Like Napoleon, some of the deposed might enjoy the "company of people of my own fortune." Instead of shuffling these men around uncomfortably, it may be time to consolidate the arrangements, to establish a home for them, a sort of Island of the Lost Big Boys, a Club Med for the undone.

The mayor of Honolulu has suggested settling Marcos on the island off Oahu that served as a set for the television series Gilligan's Island. That bears exploration. The others could join him. There is something to be said for Alcatraz, which shut down its penitentiary 23 years ago. It is secure. The decorators responsible for Caesar's Palace might redo the prison in red velvet flocking and gilt. Still, the island is small, the night air chilly and the foghorns mournful. Strongmen from sunnier latitudes might find themselves depressed.

A better choice perhaps would be the Dry Tortugas, just below the Florida Keys. Once a haven for pirates, an old prison island surrounded by shipwrecks, by sharks and barracuda and stingrays and poisonous fantasies of treasure, the place shimmers with the right sunny-sinister atmospherics for the brotherhood.

Bullion extracted from Swiss banks would pay to remake the Dry Tortugas. Pastel villas for the Big Boys. A grand hotel for their rich friends. The bar would offer drinks like "the Caligula" or "the Vlad the Impaler." Imelda Marcos and Michelle Duvalier could meet by the pool for a "Lady Macbeth." The Big Boys could swagger around and try to seduce one another's wives. Steam baths, massages, the camaraderie of the locker room. They could shoot pigeons and get drunk, and now and then they could pretend to have one of their flunkies taken out and shot. Or better yet, the victim could just vanish, without explanation, without a trace. The good old days.

Would the Big Boys enjoy one another? A sentimentalist likes to think so. They, more than anyone, should be able to appreciate one another in a professional way. But the wise mother knows that only children do not necessarily get along with other only children. Sociopaths have trouble socializing. Could they play together? Would they interact? What statues would adorn the hotel lobby? Who would laugh at whose jokes? Who would be primus inter pares among these sullen husks?

The collisions of ego might be wonderful -- gridlocking motorcades as they move from villa to casino, colossal bribes to get the best table in the restaurant. St. Helena with a dozen Napoleons on it, huge solipsisms crashing into one another, interpenetrating, great weather balloons of malignant ego drifting in the subtropical breezes.

The dayrooms of mental hospitals are famously filled with Napoleons. The Dry Tortugas might be the same sort of place. If, like Napoleon, the Big Boys consulted Paradise Lost, they would find there the words that Satan uttered: "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell." Most dictators are not so self-aware.