THE TYRANT COLLECTION

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I was walking down London’s Cecil Court—the haunt of people of slightly Aspergerish disposition who collect rare, though not the very rarest, books— yesterday, when I stopped at the window of a seller of banknotes from around the world. I have always liked banknotes as physical artefacts, and have kept one or two from the foreign countries that I have visited (I am not so much a collector as an accumulator).

There was displayed in the window what was called “The Tyrant Collection”: six colorful banknotes marked with the portraits of various tyrants. It was cheap and I decided to buy it, which is really against my principles. Normally, I keep only banknotes of the countries I have visited, from the time I have visited them. Among them, of course, are banknotes with portraits of tyrants: Baby Doc, Julius Nyerere, Mobutu Sese Seko.

I went in. A very pleasant lady asked me whether she could help me. I asked whether the Tyrant Collection were still available. She said that it was, and then turned to the other assistant in the shop.

“Can you pass me a Tyrant?” she asked, and he did so in a transparent plastic envelope.

Among the things I accumulate are striking utterances that express a great deal in a few words, and among them now, engraved on my mind, is “Can you pass me a Tyrant?” Could anything better express the fleetingness, the vanity, the absurdity, of great power? Furthermore, it told me that the Tyrant Collection was, relatively speaking no doubt, a commercial success, and that I was far from alone in my taste.

“Are you a tyrant yourself, sir?” asked another customer.

“No, sir,” I replied, “I am not.”

“An aspiring tyrant, perhaps?”

I told my fellow-customer that I was not an aspiring tyrant.

“A domestic tyrant, then?”

“My wife is with me, she can answer for me.”

If I had been a tyrant I should, of course, have said “She must answer for me.”

In addition to the tyrants in the collection—Idi Amin Dada, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saparmurat Niazov, Saddam Hussein, Mao Tse Tung, and the one who makes the others seem like soulmates of Rand Paul, Kim Il Sung—I bought the last banknote issued under Colonel Ghadaffi’s regime, with a picture of the Colonel himself, dressed oddly as ever, with a kind of sheet over his head almost like a medieval wimple, à la Rogier van der Weyden or Roger Campin. Neither could I resist a banknote for Zimbabwean $50,000,000,000,000. Oddly enough, I remember a time when the Zimbabwean dollar was worth as much as the US dollar, and the design of the banknote had changed comparatively little since then: I have it still.

To read the complete article, see: From Sir, With Love (takimag.com/article/from_sir_with_love_theodore_dalrymple#axzz30zAWjeYy)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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