Life at the top can be hard on the senses. Money, power and fame can distort human perception just as surely as any drug or mental illness, leading to disorientation and delusion.
The evidence has emerged this week on both sides of the Atlantic as leading citizens of France and the US — the former French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the American television anchorman Brian Williams — have struggled to maintain their grip on reality.
So weird did the world scene become in recent days that your humble narrator — in the spirit of empathy, not judgment, I assure you — found himself reaching for fictional parallels to make sense of the facts.