'Dictator Style': Rotten to the core with taste to match

Some of the past century's principal villains also had some pretty ghastly ideas about home design.
By WARREN BASS
THE WASHINGTON POST
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree," the poem runs, and some of history's nastiest characters seem to have thought he was onto something. As the British journalist Peter York shows in "Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots," some of the past century's principal villains also had some pretty ghastly ideas about home design.
Cribs of the imfamous
Stalin went from humble origins in a Georgia hovel to a Kermit-green bachelor dacha outside Moscow; Romania's paranoid, germ-phobic Nicolae Ceausescu did the Lady Macbeth thing in an overstuffed bathroom where a baffling array of knobs and hoses may suggest a fondness for colonic irrigation; the Central African Republic's self-styled emperor, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, enjoyed his $22 million coronation sitting, quite literally, in the lap of luxury: that of an 11-foot-high, gold-plated eagle.
None of this, however, quite prepares you for Saddam Hussein's truly stunning cribs; if Martha Stewart were president and decisions about regime change were made on the basis of sheer kitsch, the butcher of Baghdad would have been long gone by 2003. His garish palaces boast leering, sadistic, swords-and-sorcery paintings dominated by serpents, demons and buxom blondes that would make even the geekiest 15-year-old video gamer cringe. (The mere suggestion of showing them in a family newspaper would get us all sacked.)
Coarseness runs its coarse
To be sure, there's something distinctly air-headed about the whole project, from Douglas Coupland's smug and leadenly unfunny introduction to the sneaking implication that the problem with these mass murderers was not that they were evil but that they were tacky. (Speaking of authoritarians: The book, scheduled for a June release, was manufactured in China.)
Still, York's commentary is often sly, and he suggests that coarseness in politics inevitably spills out into other aspects of a person's life. The book even offers some helpful how-to tips: "Big it up," "Go for gold (starting with taps)," "Make it marble" and, perhaps most frightening of all, "Think French."