“How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?” – Raymond Aron, “The Opium of the Intellectuals” (1955).
ALICE WALKER’S PBS SOURCE: Yesterday, I wondered how Alice Walker could refer to any “good works” Osama bin Laden can be credited with. A reader reminds me of a PBS documentary in which the following was said: “NARRATOR: In the Sudan, bin Laden set up a host of businesses, among them a tannery, two large farms and a major road construction company, and he reportedly paid for 480 Afghan vets to come work with him. The Sudan liked this wealthy Saudi who was enthusiastic about investing in their fledgling Islamic state. When bin Laden finished a major road construction project, President al-Bashir treated him like a national hero. ” Ah, the moral achievement of road construction. Where have we seen that before?
CLINTON’S REGRET: In last Friday’s New York Times, an anonymous close friend of Bill Clinton’s reflected on the former president’s mixed emotions after the WTC Massacre: “He has said there has to be a defining moment in a presidency that really makes a great presidency. He didn’t have one.” A reader points out how similar these feelings are to another character in history as captured by the Roman historian, Suetonius: “He even used openly to deplore the state of his times, because they had been marked by no public disasters, saying that the rule of Augustus had been made famous by the Varus massacre, and that of Tiberius by the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae, while his own was threatened with oblivion because of its prosperity, and every now and then he wished for the destruction of his armies, for famine, pestilence, fires, or a great earthquake.” To whom was Suetonius referring? Caligula.
The Dish 