More on Gadhafi’s Children

I’m really quite fascinated by how “western” and familiar the Colonel’s children really are. They could show up at any party of Charlie Sheen’s and no one would notice the difference.

And it is amazing how common it is among the children of the mighty. Consider the sons of Kim Jong-il and Saddam Hussein. (One of the former, Kim Jong-nam, famously lost his father’s favor by sneaking into Japan to visit Tokyo Disneyland. They say that when he was stopped by the Japanese authorities, he was dressed in universal-world-kid fashion, with a gold chain and black slacks.)

One wonders if it isn’t inevitable. Given the temptations of the world, we succumb. Or, to put it another way, Baron Acton was right, but incomplete. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But consumer goods… those too have power, and those too can be corrupting. And just as absolutely.