In his "1984", Big Brother is the good guy

The elaborate farce that was the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea remains off-topic here, so I apologize in advance. Still this story is too jaw-dropping not to mention, not just for Lorin Maazel's headline-inspiring knock on Spielberg but the near-sociopathic vanity he shows elsewhere in the interview:

He had an epiphany after the performance after he saw the reaction of the North Koreans, saying, "They were completely moved, the orchestra patrons were on their feet, and their eyes were glowing. Theirs and ours. In that moment I understood: It had happened like that because they had waited for 50 years. An appointment that the entire country wanted, and like this, the poor of the country had to reduce their intake of electricity for four days to guarantee that there would be sufficient power for us."

The tears of a hallful of apparatchiks of the most evil bureaucracy on earth justified the four-day privation on the country's already-agonizingly-beset people? Maazel is, apparently, not horrified but pleased to have been the cause. What a man.