Dinner with Osama Bin Laden

Too late. But what a good dinner companion he would have been – dignified, handsome, cultivated, rich. And an excellent conversationalist. Too bad you missed him.

And there are other memorable men you missed – avuncular, pipe-smoking Uncle Joe Stalin; amusing Idi Amin; urbane, well-connected Saddam Hussein; erudite Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

What does a modern devil look like?

At a dinner table, just like you and me. Certainly the first time, when he is on his best behaviour and wants to beguile you. Remember the first act of Faust? The second and third times, you may begin to feel a draft of cold air emanating from him and you develop goose-pimples. That’s a sure sign.

Muammar Gaddafi, too, is a charming dinner companion. You still have a chance.

But you have to hurry up.

3 Responses to Dinner with Osama Bin Laden

  1. Horace Krever

    All is not lost. There is still Gaddafi. By the way, does anyone find it interesting that they “murder” but we “kill”?

  2. I do. Interesting also that we eat beef and pork and mutton, while in the fields we have cows and pigs and sheep. In every case, the first word (murder, beef, . . . ) has Latin roots (‘murder’ is akin to Latin mors, mortis: death) and the second (kill, cow, . . . ) has Germanic (Old or Middle English) roots. Further: my dictionary (Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary, Canadian Edition) takes great pains to sort out near synonyms, and has a splendid note discriminating amongst kill, slay, dispatch, murder, assassinate and execute. Significant is that kill is “the general term . . . and [is] frequently extended to inanimate things: frost killed the buds, to kill a story” whereas murder “refers to a deliberate, often premeditated, killing.” Translation: “they” are indiscriminate (= savage, bad), “we” are deliberate (= rational, good).

    • I understand (without being able to do the translation myself) that what is rendered in English as ‘thou shalt not kill’ is actually a prohibition against murder, not all ending of human life. Richard Dawkins, who may not be entirely neutral on the topic, says the original in context meant ‘do not kill any other Israelite’ – it did not apply to anyone outside the tribe.

      As for beef vs cow etc, I thought the explanation was that the English named the animals, but the French named the food.

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