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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| The Age Of The Celebrity Tyrant |
| 2009-08-31 |
| Move over, Hollywood, Bollywood and all the rest of you glitterati. The world has entered the age of the Celebrity Tyrant. Hardly a week goes by without the exploits of some despot or other snatching the headlines—whether it's North Korea's Kim Jong Il hosting Bill Clinton for dinner and a detainee pickup; Muammar al-Qaddafi celebrating the parole of one of his Lockerbie-bombing terrorist agents; or Burma's Than Shwe milking the hostage-politics racket for a house call from Senator Jim Webb. Not that despots are anything new. But about a generation back, they were a lot less bold and a lot less rich in cachet. What with the 1991 Soviet collapse and the waves of democratization then sweeping Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, dictatorship had become something of an embarrassment. Even just a few years ago, despots were a breed largely beyond the pale, with the late Saddam Hussein hiding in his spider hole, al-Qaddafi trying to placate the American cowboy and Syria's Bashar al-Assad teetering on his dynastic perch. No longer. With regime change off the table, and President Obama dishing out "mutual respect" faster than the rulers of Tehran, Tripoli, Pyongyang or Caracas can spit their contempt right back in his face, tyrants are becoming ever more weirdly trendy. They are globalized, in our face, on the Web, on television—and as New York braces for the September opening of the United Nations General Assembly, some of them, with considerable ceremony, are coming to town. The most flamboyant among them enter a VIP orbit, in which they may be officially reviled, but also eagerly sought after. Recall the banquet hosted by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last September at the midtown Manhattan Grand Hyatt for 1,000 or so of his closest friends. Or remember the gushing accounts two years ago of the invitations sent out, as Time magazine described it, on "creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy," to a select 50 or so American opinion-makers to sup with Ahmadinejad at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York. Whatever the protesters shouted outside the security cordon, it has become an accepted part of New York's fall season that Ahmadinejad and his retinue arrive for a hoopla of motorcades, talk shows, press conferences and banquets. |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #1 Operating with the budgets of billionaires, tyrants travel with entourages that can shut down entire hotel floors, Or lease the Blue Heron Farm resort and shut down the entire village of Chilmark. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2009-08-31 07:32 |