Word: despotes
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...fairy tale, the grumpy king runs a contest to find a jester who can make him laugh. Unsuccessful contestants go to the block. The winner gets a new suit of motley and the next-to-impossible job of making the king laugh again. In journalism, the dyspeptic despot is usually played by an editor who starts off saying something like "This page is too damn dull. It needs some humor." Serious words are then circulated among the clever headline writers and droll cityroom pinochle players that there is an opening for a funny columnist...
...Ayub regime had based its legitimacy on the promise that it would eradicate the corruption and the oligarchy of the post-colonial regime; but soon enough, Ayub showed himself to be the despot that he was, instituting a system of indirect elections which allowed the regime to manipulate friendly candidates into popular office. This system, in turn, had the effect of disenfranchising Pakistan's overpopulated and impoverished East wing, which had often been victimized by the financial and industrial centers of Pakistan's west...
Like an ancient despot, Hitler meant to commemorate his schemes of grandeur with great avenues and overpowering buildings. In Berlin alone, he planned a three-mile-long street of splendor, with the centerpiece a domed hall that would hold 150,000 people. The man Hitler took into his intimate circle to create these edifices was a fledgling architect named Albert Speer...
...Scientology consciousness. We have the answer. They're trying to suppress us. (Anyone opposed to Scientology is a Suppressive Person.) L. Ron Hubbard's breakthroughs in the field of electronic wave theory must be kept secret, for once the vital wave lengths of the Thetans are known, any despot could jam the signal, so to speak...
Such was the astonishing portrait of Joseph Stalin conveyed by his daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, in her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Svetlana has since had some second thoughts. In her latest book, Only One Year, published this week by Harper & Row, she pictures her father as a despot who brought about a bloody terror that destroyed millions of people-in sum, "a moral and spiritual monster...