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.