Columnist Makes Observation

“Along the way he offers banal observations as if nobody had ever thought of them before. He reveals that women menstruate and men do not.”
 — David Brooks is right about the commentaries in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s manifesto, The Green Book. Some of them have indeed been thought of before. But the overall gist of his column in today’s Times

, that “The paradoxical fact is that if you want to stay in office as a dictator, it is better to be a narcissistic totalitarian than a run-of-the-mill autocrat,” seems a little banal itself. This seems like a point made by everyone from Karl Marx to George Orwell to Living Colour. And I’m not even sure why it would be considered a paradox.