s. 2:
"Essentially all the rulers of all the nations in the world during the
past century have been men. Despite the advances made by women
during the last part of this past century, especially in democratic
nations, males still dominate the global political scene. Even more
telling, no woman rules as a dictator or wields absolute power. If a wily and persistent Eve could have tempted a rather dull-witted Adam
to defy the Lord’s instructions and eat the forbidden fruit, then surely
more clever and resourceful women throughout the ages should have
been able to circumvent male hegemony in society at large and displace them as rulers, despite being handicapped by the burden of
child-bearing, a relative lack of strength, and the oppressive efforts
of men to keep them in their place."
"No identifiable form of intelligence, talent, genius, or even experience seems necessary for ruling a country. Would-be rulers do not have
to pass qualifying examinations in leadership or demonstrate competence in administration or show skill in diplomacy. They do not
need to have good communication skills or even be popular with
their subjects. While many leaders are imaginative, worldly, and intelligent, others are pedestrian, narrow-minded, and ignorant, which
suggests that demonstrated ability or achievement has little to do
with securing the highest office in the land."
s. 3:
"Throughout history, rulers who attain legendary status often tend
to be those who have conquered other nations, won major wars, expanded their country’s boundaries, founded new nations, forcibly transformed their societies, and imposed their own beliefs on their subjects.
In short, they have killed, plundered, oppressed, and destroyed. Rarely
do rulers achieve greatness who have been ambassadors for peace,
kept the status quo, defended free speech, promoted independent
thinking, and avoided wars at all costs."
s. 4:
"People
may choose to ignore their animal heritage by interpreting their behavior as divinely inspired, socially purposeful, or even self-serving, all of
which they attribute to being human; but they masticate, defecate, masturbate, fornicate, and procreate much as chimps and other apes do, so
they should have little cause to get upset if they learn that they act like
other primates when they politically agitate, debate, abdicate, placate,
and administrate, too."
s. 12:
"In democracies there are no outright physical battles
to establish political dominance among contestants, but something metaphorically equivalent still takes place during elections. It is therefore no
accident that so much military terminology should be used to describe
political “campaigns.” Opponents do “battle” and “face off ” against each
other in debates and speeches. They raise a “war chest” to support their
campaign. They classify others as “doves or hawks.” They do not bare
their teeth or pound their chests or display their rears, but each candidate presents himself as tougher and more qualified than the other. They
try to maintain control over the “rank and file” and keep them from
“breaking rank.” With tough decisions, they “hold the line,” “bite the
bullet,” or “stick to their guns.” Their advisors offer them “briefings.” They
wage a “war of words,” “attack” the positions of the other, or “ride
roughshod” over the opposition. Opponents accuse them of doing an
“about face” or being guilty of “appeasement.” They call out the “big guns”
or create a “task force” to deal with difficult matters and declare “wars”
on poverty or drugs or crime. They resort to “dirty tricks,” use “underhanded tactics,” or “stonewall” the press. The loser “concedes defeat” to
the victor after an election. And then victory celebrations are held. So
although new democratic leaders do not actually take power by physical
force, they engage in symbolic battles through their words. Perhaps that
is why more lawyers than soldiers become leaders in democracies."
s. 20:
"At a less fanciful level, taking the basic physical attributes and mental capacities of higher primates as givens, the process of natural selection could have tried the daring experiment of favoring menopausal
females, who no longer had the responsibilities of child-rearing, as rulers instead of priapic men, dedicated to proving their manhood. That
way, instead of a society in which potentially the dumbest, strongest, or
most ferocious primate could be in charge, the most empathetic, the most
caring, and the most nurturing could be, assuming these traits to be more
feminine in nature."
s. 22-23:
"While being intelligent, competent, well-educated, and emotionally stable
does not bar you from holding high office, you also can be the ruler of a
nation if you have never read a book, do not know how to make a budget, still count with your fingers, take delight in murdering and torturing
people, stay zonked out on drugs or alcohol during cabinet meetings,
pay more attention to the imaginary voices in your head than to your
advisors, or, simply put, are ignorant, demented, or crazy. With notable
exceptions, the one thing you cannot be as a ruler is a woman."
Over the entire
twentieth century, only 27 of the 1,941 rulers from all the independent
countries all over the world have been women. That is only 1.4 percent!
You then have to temper your interpretation of this statistic with the fact
that almost half of these women rulers gained power only because of the
infectious charisma that came from being “widows-of-Him” or “daughters-of-Him”—the “Him” being their martyred or revered husbands or fathers—and because of a desire to carry on their mission. When you
subtract these widows-of-Him and daughters-of-Him from the total list
of women rulers (because their qualifications for high office seem due
more to the people’s admiration for the dead husband or father than to
their own popular appeal), you are left with about three-quarters of 1
percent—0.78 percent to be exact—who became leaders not as standins for the dead but as standalones for their living selves. In other words,
the odds against a women gaining ultimate power on her own merits are
well over a hundred to one.
s. 33:
"Ibn Saud, for example, hired an Egyptian religious sheikh by the name
of Muhammad Tammimi to fabricate a family tree that proved him to be a direct descendent of the Prophet so that he could gain acceptance from
his people after he had defeated three of the more established families
who ruled what is now Saudi Arabia. In an amazing feat of genealogical
legerdemain that likely spanned over sixty generations, even without access to Internet search engines, Tammimi did this persuasively enough
to convince Saud that Allah had entrusted him with the mission of uniting the kingdom to make the Arabs once again a great power and the
champions of Islam. Later, King Farouk of Egypt also hired the same
family-tree maker to construct a suitable religious lineage for himself.
Again, the scholar, in another virtuoso performance, presumably found
enough unsuspected kin to fill in the many generational gaps between
his current patron and Fatima, daughter of the Prophet."
s. 34:
"There is no more fitting prototype for a tyrant than Francois Duvalier,
also known as “Papa Doc,” who unleashed the Tonton Macoutes (“Bogeymen”), a private force of hooligans, to murder suspected foes of the
regime and terrorize the population of Haiti. During the early part of
his fourteen-year “papadocracy,” Duvalier set a target for his government of killing three hundred men a year. But being an extremely ambitious person, he kept raising the bar for himself, so in time he was
sometimes able to match his original quota in a single month. However, this dubious achievement was marred by his cheating, because
toward the end of his rule he stopped exempting women and children
as victims."
s. 37:
"There is no room for pluralism, deviationism,
or individuality in a totalitarian society; the dreams of the visionary are
more than sufficient for all. “I am your dreams,” Kemal Atatürk told his
countrymen, expressing the sentiments of all visionaries, and then informed them about what he had dreamed for them."
s. 39:
"After being elected prime minister of his newly independent country, he was hailed throughout the
world for being a great statesman and peacemaker for his efforts to reassure the remaining white farmers and businessmen that their skills were
important for the economy and they would have a substantial representation in parliament—not that the representation would mean much,
since Mugabe mostly acted autocratically without consulting parliament,
but it was a nice gesture nonetheless. At least in this fledgling democracy,
Mugabe treated both whites and blacks equally. Neither group had much
say in running the government."
s. 43:
"As proof of the democratic process in action, he (Hafız Al-Assad) ordered a public referendum in 1971, which
gave him a 99.2 percent approval rating as president. Buoyed by these
results, he ordered another referendum in 1978, which gave him a 99.6 percent approval rating, and another one in 1985, which gave him a 99.9
percent approval rating. Rumor had it that in the latest referendum he
garnered a 104.3 percent rating, but, at the last minute, his minister of
finance, who was a mathematical whiz, convinced him not to release the
results since that left the opposition with only 5.7 percent of the total
vote—too small a percentage to be credible."
s. 46:
"Conversely, benevolent dictators have brought peace, stability, economic prosperity, and even greater freedom to countries, or have kept
political anarchy from arising. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the people of
the Soviet Union experienced an unprecedented amount of personal freedom. Through military rule, Atatürk was able to lay the groundwork for
democracy and a secular state in Turkey."
s. 54:
s. 56:
"A past king of Benin had
somewhere between six hundred and four thousand wives. The likely
reason for this large discrepancy in numbers was not due to the inability
of his court chroniclers to count but because of his generous practice of
giving wives away to those who had rendered him service, so the numbers were always changing."
s. 57:
"When asked why he had so many wives, King Chulalongkorn of
Sri Lanka said that he could not wound the feelings of the princes
and nobles who were kind enough to present him with their beautiful and fascinating daughters. But there were practical reasons for
his having an estimated thirty-six to eighty-four wives. By making
sure that women throughout the kingdom shared his bedroom, he could ensure that the various ethnic groups throughout the country
had equal representation. This was his creative version of democracy in action."
s. 59:
"Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and a saint-like symbol for many
of his countrymen, who was promiscuous all his life with women, perhaps best sums up the prevailing attitude of all these rulers. Asked once
what qualities he admired most in a woman, he replied, “Availability.” "
s. 62:
"It is not that these leaders decided to forgo sex out of a deep spiritual conviction, as did Morarji Desai,
prime minister of India from 1977 to 1979, who, like Mahatma Gandhi,
took the vow of celibacy but, in his case, only after having five children
and probably being too old to perform."
s. 66:
"[Jean-Bédel Bokassa] named seven daughters Marie after their grandmother, Marie Yokowa; he named four sons
Jean—Jean-Bertrand, Jean-Legrand, Jean-Serge, and Jean-Ives—after
himself; and he used other clever memory joggers for his other children. That way the likelihood of his using the wrong names for his children
and hurting their feelings was greatly reduced."
s. 70:
"Jean-Bédel Bokassa also built the largest industrial
complex at his palace, where government employees made records, bricks,
furniture, and school uniforms, which he generously sold tax-free to the
state. Ever resourceful, he saw opportunities for graft everywhere. For
instance, when President Charles de Gaulle gave him a present of a DC4, he sold the plane to Air Afrique. After the airline repaired it, he seized
it on some pretext when it landed on a nearby airfield and then rented it
to the state for his own use on official trips."
s. 72:
Then, of course, there was Mobutu Sese Seko, who renamed himself
Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngebendu wa za Bangathe, which officially
means, “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and
will to win, goes from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.”
s. 73:
After his pilgrimage to Mecca, Ahmadu Ahidjo was designated
“El Hadj” according to a well-known Islamic custom, so his full title now
became, “His Excellency El Hadj Ahmadu Ahidjo, President of the Federal Republic of Cameroon, Father of the Nation, Pioneer of Negritude,
Prophet of Pan Africanism, Defender of African Dignity.”
