Muammar al-Gaddafi
March 2, 2003
by David E. Reiser, MD.
 ©2003 KATRINA REISER |
Perhaps you remember him. I certainly do. I first encountered him in the 1970’s, when I saw his face for the first time on the evening news. The segment was focusing on Idi Amin’s atrocities in Uganda and mentioned that “Libya leader Muammar al-Gaddafi” was among Amin’s staunchest supporters. You do recall Mr. Amin, of course, already well established a charter member of the Global Tyranny Club (GTC). This Gaddafi fellow was the new kid on the block, but he was definitely an up and comer. We could tell immediately. Charisma. When it comes to being a genocidal monster, you either have the right stuff or you don’t. It’s something you’re born with. It cannot be taught. Thanatos must give you the nod. During the civil war in Chad, as I recall, Gaddafi got another big break—a small photo in Time Magazine. He was showing two traits that distinguish all members of the GTC—a genius for ferreting out the evil in every conflict, and the brazenness to champion it zealously.
I obviously had enough information to know that he was no friend of world freedom, but I do not recall cringing at his sight initially. He had panache, somehow, a certain j’ne se quoi. He was memorable. Mostly I think it was his face. He had large, limpid brown eyes, fine features, and thin sensitive lips. His jaw was square and strong. He was Rudolph Valentino with a John Wayne chin. A wistful poet-despot, a melancholic dictator-artist.
Especially, he was clean-shaven, a deft PR touch for any tyrant who aspires to rise to the status of “prominent Middle Eastern Leader.” Shaving distinguished Gaddafi from all the other nameless pretenders, whose swarthy visages were always enshrouded behind headgear and thick droopy moustaches. Gaddafi at least gave the impression of being accessible, and that was far from inconsequential. Just stop and think about it: When someone hides his face, he removes critical beacons that guide people to the truth. To discern that truth, we all rely a lot on the subtleties in a person’s face—a fleeting dilation of pupils, a momentary pursing of the lips. These nuances, of course, don’t tell us what a man is thinking. They tell us what he is feeling. His words, as we all know, just claim to tell us what he’s really thinking. Words lie. When we can get a bead on what a person is feeling, on the other hand, then we can start to line up the coordinates. We come closer to deciding whether to regard someone with a skittish and easily extinguishable hope, or as an enemy whom we fear and dread.
So, initially, I gave Gaddafi a brief period in which he might prove himself. Which he did. He quickly established himself as the most wildly erratic and unpredictable despot in the entire region. In the Middle East, that’s going some.
I’m sure he was sending out shockwaves among the elite of the GTC, too. Imagine—
“Hey! Eat your heart out, Idi Amin!”
“Have you seen the latest popularity polls, Pol Pot?
“Ho, Ho Chi Minh,
What ever happened to your shit-eating grin?
Can those be tears, Dr. Fu Manchu?
What has Gaddafi gone and done to you!”
No, Gaddafi wasn’t just a loose canon. He was a battalion. Entire divisions terminally zonked on PCP.
The man with the smooth shaven face went on to become the biggest mystery of all. And I must confess— to this day, there are few people on earth whom I find it more impossible to comprehend. Hussein was bad enough, let me tell you. My deep sea sonar readings on that guy’s brain seemed for the longest time to be totally unintelligible. Then, I realized that I had made a blunder. I had assumed that the garbled readings I was getting must be artifact (they all said, “Heavy algae and muck, fathoms deep”). I figured that some kind of contaminant must be throwing my calibrations off. Finally, I understood. There was nothing wrong with the equipment at all. It was picking up signals from algae and muck. The signals finally made sense—“borderline intelligence,” “brute,” “primitive,” “street thug,” “afraid to leave Iraq,” “hasn’t got a clue about what’s going on in the rest of the world.”
Yep. That’s Saddam, all right. He positively scares the shit out of me, too; but at least I know what I am dealing with here—a sociopath, a hooligan without of intelligence or mercy, a beast. The Middle East’s Luca Brazi
Gaddafi? I still can’t fathom him. He’s from a place called “Libya.” He’s a “dictator.” He sometimes cavorts in a Supreme-Over-the-Top-Generalissimo-and-Dictator-for-Eternity costume, the kind that all the heavy hitters in the GTC favor. He speaks about the sovereignty of his “people,” and their determination to crush that Imperialist Dog, America.
Still, I wonder—who are his “people”? I can sort of see them, but they blur in my mind with so many millions of others in that region. The best I can do is to conjure up a charcoal image of them—humanity’s wraiths, the wretched of the earth. They are innominate and socket-eyed, too far gone to weep. They are hopeless, helpless, deprived, and doomed. It helps to imagine them together as families. I can connect better then, especially when I picture the children. I know that these parents love their kids every bit as deeply as I loved my son, back in the days before I lost him. That thought does bring me comfort. It grounds me. When I can get in touch with the love I feel for my son, even though he is now long gone, the incomprehension that cuts me off from these mysterious people recedes. I am once again in touch with human beings. People just like me who right now are suffering enormously. My heart breaks.
They are so hideously broken, too—people with lives, hopes and dreams, people who love—now being expended as cheaply as canon fodder. If hell pours down from the skies over downtown Baghdad in the coming weeks, I, for one, will not rejoice. I will view it with grim stoicism. I will silently pray. I will beseech God that it all may be over with quickly.
Oops! I just got mixed up. I had been talking about Gaddafi and then derailed onto Hussein. But that’s the problem. These regions, their people, their tyrants—it’s so damned hard to get a good grasp of them. They are phantasms somehow, photographs in magazines, choreographed crowd scenes, always staged in dream-like settings, in towns with improbable names. They are human props set in place to rally for some state-sanctioned cause or other. They amass not from shared conviction, but from fear. Their ideological passion is inspired by the barrel of a gun. In the photos, I see enormous Technicolor propaganda murals. They are everywhere. They dominate these cities. I behold an airbrushed two-hundred-feet-high Muammar Gaddafi. He glows in a corona of airbrushed gold. Saddam Hussein, seven stories high, beams down on his “people,” crowded into the market-stalls, where there isn’t any food to buy. I see Arafat’s “people,” Bin Laden’s “people.” Big Brother is watching alright. Is he ever! His giant eyes bore holes into the night. I can only weep.
The Middle East: Vast windswept deserts. Sand. Camels. Oases. Bazaars. The Pyramids. The Tigress. The Euphrates. Palestine. Jews. Christians. Moslem. The Old Testament. The Koran.
The Old Testament. The Koran. The ultimate riddle, the quintessential yin-yang of messianic religious zeal, amalgams that have wound up mixed together but will never, ever meld. How many lives have those two religions claimed on this planet? Billions? Trillions? One thing’s for sure. The count is going to go up.
The Middle East. Mosques. Mohammed. Malnutrition. Misery. Muammar. Oven heat. Cruel desert skies that never rain.
Gaddafi. Pan Am Flight 103. Training camps for shadow terrorists.
Military regalia. Arms merchants. Hitler qua Rimbaud in the form of one Muammar al-Gaddafi. Mystic. A poet’s countenance. An assassin’s heart. Sultan’s tents, incense and silk. Who in the hell is he?
My surreal sense of him finally impelled me to research his background. While this was admittedly not an exhaustive search, I was impressed with how little information there actually is. Who is he? I still don’t know.
To be continued...
David
E. Reiser, MD.
David E. Reiser is a writer and physician. His books and articles in the 1980s addressed medicine's urgent need to make education and patient care more humane. Along with others, he quietly changed the way students are taught throughout the world. The New York Times described his book, Medicine as a Human Experience, as a textbook that revived "a long-lost skill" in physicians--"compassion."
In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
