the human response

Time goes on, eh? Gaddafi is dead, Wall Streets around the world are occupied, and I had my appendix out. Not much to say about that last one except that a friend of mine informed me, laughingly, that appendicitis is an affliction of the young. Laughingly, because to her I am 12 years old.

As soon as I heard the news that Gaddafi was dead, like millions of others I watched the earliest videos on youtube. The videos were up before the event hit the front pages. All the script was in Arabic — no translations, no explanations.The footage was as raw as it gets, the image blurry, but there was no mistaking the head of Gaddafi as his body was jostled about. I was expecting a surge of satisfaction when I saw him so defeated, but there was something about the intimacy of his bare skin, the underside of his chin which revealed the exact line where his beard ended, that made him ultimately a human being, and instead I felt a nausea that sent me to the bathroom. When you get down to fundamentals, the human response is not really ours to control. Had I been there, had my relatives been tortured under his regime, I might have been tempted to kick his head. In any case I would definitely not have been in the bathroom.

So, a spokesman for the UN has said that the circumstances of Gaddafi's death must be investigated. Summary executions are illegal. Ahhh. Who knew? My responses to this would sound childishly sarcastic and ill-informed. For a worthwhile response, one really has to read something like what NR Greer wrote in News Letter this morning.  It starts out:

"CHARGING a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500.” Captain Willard, the central character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now reflected on the idiocy of trying to impose the rules of civil society in the middle of a raging war in a place where all semblance of civility had long gone.

http://www.newsletter.co.uk/community/columnists/nr_greer_why_investigate_gaddafi_s_death_1_3180839

(I'm new to blogging and will hopefully learn how to make these links.)

The fundamental human response? We can only observe. And yet, miraculously, civil society happens from time to time. Thank you, "Occupy Wall Street" — what took you so long? Good  luck!