Today has been sleep day. Had 2 naps and could go back to sleep now, not awake an hour from last nap. It seems like a week or two of going like usual, then one day I want to sleep all day. In this time of the life I can allow that. I think I've always had that inclination; it's that now I have the flexibility to follow my own rhythm instead the 9-5, M-F rhythm of schedules, which isn't a rhythm at all. It's a calendar with appointment times and dates. Pixels. On the radio news they're talking about pollution permits. Earlier, I was looking at some Remi Gaillard videos on YouTube. I've seen several by now, and some several times. They are moments of absurdity. Then I hear about pollution permits like it's something serious.
And the day's big news: the death of Lybia's Gaddafi. American wars are great geography lessons. This recent attention on Lybia taught me how to spell it. I thought the Y and I were the other way around. Iraq. Who ever heard of Iraq before American might smashed it? Who ever heard of Vietnam before American force invaded? Where can we go next that nobody's heard of? Maybe Togo or Namibia or Zambia. First thing I heard this morning about Gaddafi was somebody saying he, Gaddafi, called the resistance rats, and they found him in hiding in a culvert, "like a rat." Careful what you say. It will come back and bite you in the ass. I read that when they were apprehended, his body guard shot him in the chest, but it didn't kill him immediately. He bled for about half an hour and expired. I found short video on YouTube of him dead from AlJazeera. I think I was 354 to see it, meaning it had only been up a few minutes. By now it's probably several thousand and will soon be over a million. I saw the illicit video of the Saddam hanging too.
I felt for Gaddafi, everything he'd dished out coming back on him in a brief period of time; hate shooting bullets and missiles at him. He'd evidently become so insulated from the world everybody else lived in by his own kingdom. He was something of an Ottoman ruler, gone insane from generations of in-breeding in their case, him gone insane from surrounding himself by flatterers. Shakespeare could have made a good story of it. His secret longing for Condi Rice came to the surface when they raided his house. He created a Disneyworld for himself that one day turned upside down. I heard people saying they wished he'd lived so he could stand trial. That wouldn't happen. Milosevic made very boring news in his time of trial. Then he died. Gaddafi had the good fortune not to have to live in perhaps a prison cell, watched round the clock, and publicly humiliated as long as he lives. His body guard did the right thing. The mob that caught him would have killed him if his body guard hadn't already.
It's kind of like the death of Michael Jackson. What's next? Up there with tsunami on an island you've never heard of. What's next? Assassination of a judge in Belarus. What's next? I have to say it's an enjoyment to hear something on the news besides suicide bombs in Kandahar. From the Middle East to North Africa, Afghanistan to Lybia. All of it killing. If it bleeds, it leads. There is no telling how many different versions of the story of the death of Gaddafi are going around the world reported by different reporters, all of them racing to get the story to their employers first. Leave it to historians to sort out what really happened from all the different accounts. The account I mentioned of his body guard shooting him was just the first thing I heard. Tomorrow it will be something else, then something else and then we'll never hear about it again. Lybia can only be a better place now, if a civil war doesn't come next.
The fun part about the news is there is no telling what will come up next. It's a "crapshoot." That perhaps has a great deal to do with why the news makes an evening soap opera that keeps us coming back to see what happens next. It's an every day mystery. How many dead today? I wasn't cranked up about Gaddafi inside like the issue was something important. But I have to confess when I saw the headline that he was dead, I felt relief, like that's finally over, sort of. It's a very important day in the history of Lybia. We don't know if Lybia will be better or worse off after this. Like was it better to get rid of Saddam and destroy Iraq because the people don't like American occupation? Iraq is not better off after Saddam. It's yet to be seen what happens in Lybia. I'd like to see it thrive and become the vacation capital of North Africa.
The news on the hour is happening. I heard a version of his killing entirely different from the one this morning. This time, his captors were driving him away in a car and there was a firefight and he was hit in the head. Ho hum. His body guard shooting him to save him from capture makes more sense than shot in a car in a firefight. From now on, it will be like that radio comedy show on the weekends, Wadayaknow? I think it is. They ask someone to pick a true news story from two others that are made up. When you have nothing to go by but the story in a few sentences, it's a challenge. By Sunday morning it will be a challenge to sort out which story of the killing of Gaddafi is true. The funny part is there won't be an answer.
*
No comments:
Post a Comment