Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is a regular reader of George Will’s columns (and has been for years). He doesn’t quote Will too much here. This is a factor of your Maximum Leader becoming an irregular posting type of fellow as well as the fact as Will gets so much coverage on other sites.

Well… Your Maximum Leader is citing Will today. Not for any specific thing he said in his column today. But rather because of the tenor and tone of the ending of his column today. It struck your Maximum Leader as filled with a deep melancholy - which he shares with Will. Here it goes:

What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

This year’s August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world’s preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film “Triumph of the Will,” has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

Your Maximum Leader remembers George. He remembers and has been mentioning this very fact to his children every night.

Carry on.