On leadership

"This is not a democracy. At best, it's a benevolent dictatorship."

I first heard that saying - in that instance, explaining an editor's power to make decisions - in college at The Oklahoma Daily. Loved it then, love it now. It's all about leadership, which always fascinates me, be it good or bad.

Which is why I am not ashamed to admit I love - LOVE - Parade magazine's annual top 10 list of the world's worst dictators. It is the US Weekly equivalent of Amy's weekly must-have celebritnews. It came out today.

Thing is, this year's list was really depressing. They're all genuinely bad guys. Really, just about every entry includes words like torture, execution, starvation, stoning and so on. Grim stuff, to be sure.

The list just hasn't been the same since Saparmurat Niyazov died in December 2006. He did some shady stuff, to be sure, but he also reportedly did flat-out crazy, relatively harmless, cult-of-personality stuff such as:

• Shut off cable television to his country after a documentary he did not like aired.
• Rename months and days of the week after his family.
• Order physicians to give up the Hippocratic Oath and to swear allegiance to him instead.

"I admit it," he once said, "there are too many portraits, pictures and monuments. I don't find any pleasure in it, but the people demand it because of their mentality."

Now, 14 months after his death, it sounds like Turkmenistan is, well, not much different than it was when he was around. Read about it here.

Perhaps Parade's dictator issue offers a little perspective as our political process plays itself out, and does so with a large contingent of voters more enthusiastically involved than my generation has ever seen before. Still, somehow, some are calling the buzz around a certain candidate a "cult of personality."

Sigh.