Gaddafi and the desecration of the dead

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s hard to escape the grisly death photos and videos of Gaddafi. A flamboyant figure who was photographed often during his long and very public life, his well-earned enemies have made sure that his death has been especially well-documented, too.

But I haven’t looked at the photos, other than an unavoidable glance as one or the other image pops up on my screen. I feel very uneasy about them. I would have preferred that he met his end in a process similar to what happened to his fellow tyrant, Saddam Hussein.

My reluctance to gaze on Gaddafi’s dead face or to watch people mistreating his corpse has nothing to do with any admiration for the man. I have little doubt that he’s perpetuated many murders and kept the people of Libya under his brutal and capricious yoke for four decades, and that their rage at him is justified.

However, the moral stature of a culture and its people are judged by many things, and one of them is the way the bodies of the dead are treated, even the most hated and reviled dead on whom they understandably wish to wreak revenge. What happened to Gaddafi’s body does not bode well for the future of Libya (but then, not a whole lot does, although I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this):

A video on al-Jazeera shows Gaddafi wounded, but alive. The network quoted a fighter saying that he begged for help. ”Show me mercy,” he was said to have cried. There was little of that, in the video at least.

One fighter is seen pulling his hair and others beating his limp body. Two fighters interviewed by al-Jazeera said someone struck Gaddafi’s head with the butt of a gun…

In one, broadcast by al-Jazeera, his body is half naked and bleeding on a pavement. Even more dramatic is a video posted on YouTube. Jubilant fighters surround his corpse, which appears to have been washed. Clearly visible is a gunshot wound to his forehead.

Plus there’s this (warning: graphic footage at the link, of the type I’ve been talking about):

His bloodied corpse – eyes half open, a bloodied mouth and blood on his head – was displayed on live television and beamed all around the world yesterday.

TV footage also showed Gaddafi’s corpse being dragged through a Libyan street.

Dragged through a Libyan street—when I was a child and read the Iliad, one of the most memorable and terrible images in the entire book was what happened to Hector’s body after his death:

Achilles, choosing with his eye a vulnerable part where the armor leaves the neck uncovered, aimed his spear at that part, and Hector fell, death-wounded. Feebly he said, “Spare my body! Let my parents ransom it, and let me receive funeral rites from the sons and daughters of Troy.” To which Achilles replied, “Dog, name not ransom nor pity to me, on whom you have brought such dire distress. No! trust me, nought shall save thy carcass from the dogs. Though twenty ransoms and thy weight in gold were offered, I should refuse it all.”

So saying, the son of Peleus stripped the body of its armor, and, fastening cords to the feet, tied them behind his chariot, leaving the body to trail along the ground. Then mounting the chariot he lashed the steeds and so dragged the body to and fro before the city.

Later in the story there is quite a bit more dragging of the body around, but you get the general idea. It is not a passage that reflects well on Achilles, despite the fact that he was the victor and a hero (although flawed and impulsive). Hector was also a hero, as well as the more sympathetic of the two.

Of course, Gaddafi should not be considered a hero of any sort; au contraire, he was a villain. But that really is not the point. This issue is not Gaddafi at all, nor anyone in particular—it’s about how a society behaves. There is a word for this sort of thing, and that word is “barbaric.”

Why are these cities so empty?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are the five emptiest cities in American today.

Anyone know why these particular ones (I’m busy today and don’t have time right now to do the research)? Were they especially overbuilt in terms of housing during the go-go years? Are they particularly job-depressed now? Are some (such as Tucson) mostly second-home cities? I really thought Detroit would be among them, but it’s not; it checks in at number 8.

Herman Cain, Republican du jour: perceptions, the press, and the public

The New Neo Posted on by

Herman Cain is the Republican frontrunner for now among Iowa’s voters:

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Iowa caucus-goers shows that Cain is in front with 28% followed by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney at 21%.

One Republican who has consistently polled ahead of the others has been “generic,” and each candidate has taken turns filling in his/her shoes. Remember Bachmann as frontrunner, remember Perry? It’s a bit like when a person who’s married daydreams about the perfect match; the one we can imagine is almost always better than the one we have. Then, after the breakup with Mr/Ms/Wrong, the new person seems really great when we are basking in the glow of new-found love, and before we start to know all their quirks and foibles and annoyances and flaws.

The press is cooperating in the process by doing its level best to destroy each candidate in turn. Cain is already feeling the fire, although I think he’s a tough guy who won’t let it faze or change him. Case in point is the flap about his remarks on “these small insignificant states around the world,” words that Joe Klein cited when calling Cain “a jerk and an ingnoramus”.

Take a look at what Cain actually said and the question he was answering:

I agree that it wasn’t diplomatic of Cain to have called a state such as Uzbekistan insignificant, but his larger point is true. His answer was much more about the MSM and its ways of getting at candidates it doesn’t like by asking them relatively trivial questions and then pouncing on them when they don’t have all the facts at their fingertips then it is about anybody’s foreign policy decisions.

Note that Cain adds, “When I get ready to go visit that country, I’ll know who [its leader] is.” I think that’s true. But will others believe him, especially after the MSM really sinks its teeth into the idiosyncratic and non-generic Cain? This is all just the warm-up act.

I’ve read many criticisms of Cain’s Uzbekistan remarks, and I’ve yet to see one that mentions the incident Cain is clearly referring to, where the press played an advanced game of “gotcha” with candidate Bush when he was frontrunner during the 2000 campaign:

The Republican presidential front-runner [Bush] sat down Wednesday with WHDH-TV, the NBC affiliate in Boston, and was asked to name the leaders of four current world hot spots: Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan.

He was able to give a partial response to just one: Taiwan.

That drew immediate criticism from the camp of Democrat Al Gore, which said the vice president could have answered all four correctly.

“I guess we know that ‘C’ at Yale was a gentleman’s ‘C,'” said Gore spokesman Chris Lehane, referring to the way Bush has described his academic record.

The Bush campaign brushed off the incident.

“The person who is running for president is seeking to be the leader of the free world, not a Jeopardy contestant,” said Karen Hughes, Bush communications director.

It’s ironic that President Bush, as opposed to candidate Bush, was known for his foreign policy rather than the domestic policy he probably would have preferred to focus on. And though, like Cain, Bush was considered a jerk and an ignoramus (and much worse) by the likes of people such as Joe Klein throughout his entire presidency and beyond, there’s no question that Bush learned a great deal about those leaders before he actually had to deal with them as president.

Gaddafi captured, Gaddafi killed?

The New Neo Posted on by

We’re getting conflicting reports, but something seems to be going on in Libya with Gaddafi. He appears to have been either captured or killed:

National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters earlier that Gaddafi was captured and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a convoy which NATO warplanes attacked.

“He was also hit in his head,” the official said. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”

There was no independent confirmation of his remarks.

It’s impossible to tell what is true and what is not, but I suppose it will emerge pretty soon. In the meantime, these details seem like they may have been somewhat embroidered:

The former Libyan dictator was reportedly found cowering in a hole in the ground at the centre of Sirte…Rebels said he had been armed with a golden pistol when he was found…

A golden pistol? What could that be about?

My mother and the telephone

The New Neo Posted on by

I call my 97-year-old mother every couple of days. We talk, but the talks have a certain ritual quality.

They nearly always begin with her asking me, “How are you and where are you?” Then they segue into old reliable, the weather. Then I ask her what she’s been doing and she is politely vague—perhaps to cover the fact that she can’t recall, or that she hasn’t been doing all that much. “Oh, been keeping busy.” “Can’t complain.” “This and that.” I tell her any news I think she might be interested in: about my son, or her nieces and nephews, or a trip. Then she hurries to sign off, usually with some affectionate words. If the conversation lasts two minutes, it’s a long one.

It’s clear she’s happy to hear from me. But it’s just as clear that she’s no longer comfortable talking on the telephone. This is quite a change from a woman long-renowned (and teased) for her extreme love of the medium. For much of my life she called me every day or nearly every day, and we’d often have long talks.

But a couple of years ago the phone calls from her end stopped rather abruptly. It seemed that it was just something she didn’t think to do any more, rather than something she didn’t want to do, because she still always seems happy to hear from me. It’s just that initiation of actions has become much less likely. Whether it’s “out of sight, out of mind” or something else (her increasing deafness?) I have no idea. But it’s still a shock that I’m the one having to call my mother rather than vice versa.

This last time we spoke she ended with an interesting sign-off: “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.” Yes, I suppose she will. But it depends on what the meaning of “can” is.

In the meantime, it’s up to me. I’m just grateful that she knows where she is, who she is, who we are, and seems to be pretty happy, all things considered. At 97, that’s quite a bit.

What do Americans know about the Republican candidates?

The New Neo Posted on by

Probably not all that much, according to this WaPo/Pew poll. Large percentages of respondents answered “no opinion/other” when questioned as to whether they had a positive or negative opinion of Cain, Perry, and Romney.

That makes a lot of sense to me, since I can’t quite imagine that most people are closely following the race or the debates at this point.

However, a great many respondents knew at least one salient thing about each of the three men. Cain? “Businessman.” Perry? “Texas.” And Romney? “Mormon.” And a significant number of people (15%) mentioned “idiot” or “idiotic” to describe Perry, as well as “flip-flopper” for Romney (13%), whereas Cain’s highest negative descriptor (12%) was “not experienced.”

HCR: repeal and replace

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m glad to see that Republicans are busy strategizing how to repeal Obamacare after the 2012 elections. I hope they aren’t assuming that Republicans will have to win both Congress and the White House in order for that to occur, because I believe there is grave doubt about both but especially the latter.

I’m also glad to see that the “replace” part of the equation is not being neglected:

Other conservative healthcare experts are developing an alternative to the law, an effort that could protect Republicans from past critiques that their healthcare plans left tens of millions of Americans without medical coverage.

“The window for action comes and goes,” said Tom Miller, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, one of several conservative groups involved in the effort. “We need to be ready.”

When Republicans were (briefly) in charge of both the presidency and Congress, they should have tried harder to put their own solutions in place. If they had succeeded (and it is unclear whether they would have), the HCR debacle might have been pre-empted.

Contrary to leftist rhetoric, Republicans do not thirst for the deaths of granny or the poor; the problem is that there is no free—or even inexpensive—health care lunch. From now on, Republicans had better be a lot more smart than in the past, and a lot more focused. But if health care insurance reform had been easy to design without massive expense, it would have been accomplished a lot sooner.

Happiness and pain: Shalit returns home

The New Neo Posted on by

Looking more like the 19-year-old he was when he was abducted rather than the 25-year-old he is now, Gilad Shalit has returned home.

I’ve already written about the conundrum such cases represent. But one thing that cannot be doubted is how happy his parents must be to see him, and how relieved he is to be home, although he’ll have a lot of healing and adjusting to do.

As for Netanyahu and Israel, it’s considerably more mixed:

Netanyahu told reporters that the case of the abducted soldier was among the toughest he inherited when he assumed office 2 1 / 2 years ago. He said Israel had paid a “heavy price” to secure Shalit’s release.

“On this day,” Netanyahu said, “all of us are united in happiness and pain.”

…Israeli officials offered a subdued homecoming ceremony for Shalit, reflecting their concern about the Palestinian militants who were being freed…

Meanwhile, for the Palestinians and the Arab world, it’s unalloyed happiness—and triumph. Everything has worked out exactly as planned, and hostage-taking has been richly rewarded, as it has many times before [emphasis mine]:

The first busloads of released Palestinians, including women, crossed the border into Egypt around the same time Shalit was handed over to the Israelis. The Palestinians were taken to Gaza and the West Bank, where jubilant crowds awaited them…

In Gaza, buses transporting the freed prisoners arrived about midday. Crowds of Hamas fighters, including some of the men who kidnapped Shalit in 2006, were among the well-wishers. Relatives swarmed over the buses looking for their loved ones.

The crowds in Gaza City exhorted militants to seize more soldiers for future swaps, the Associated Press reported. “The people want a new Gilad,” thousands chanted at a rally for the freed Palestinian prisoners.

Now, that’s a cycle of violence—and appeasement.

Death at the Speedway

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never liked auto racing, but I know that millions love it. But back when I was in college, I plowed through a biography of Stirling Moss, Formula One racer, because for a time I had a boyfriend who was a huge fan and I wanted to try to get with the program.

The only thing I remember from the book is a fact that you racing fans think may think is completely obvious, but to me it was not: Moss observed that the difference between dying and winning a race can be to take curves a tenth of an MPH faster or slower, while the difference between winning and losing the race can be the same.

To me it was chilling, but to those who love the sport it’s thrilling.

I had occasion to think of this again when I heard of the crash at yesterday’s IndyCar, one of the worst in history, involving 15 cars and causing the death of Britain’s Dan Wheldon, 33, in the fiery wreckage.

Why did it happen? I haven’t watched the video and don’t plan to, but even if I had I don’t understand racing well enough to know. But this seems like the best possibility:

Asked about speed after the crash, Wheldon’s former boss Chip Ganassi said, “There’ll be plenty of time in the offseason to talk about that. Now is not the time to talk about that.”

And Franchitti said: “I agree. We’ll discuss that and sort it out.”

But driver Oriol Servia didn’t mince words: “We all had a bad feeling about this place in particular just because of the high banking and how easy it was to go flat. And if you give us the opportunity, we are drivers and we try to go to the front. We race each other hard because that’s what we do,” he said. “We knew if could happen, but it’s just really sad.”

What is too high a risk of dying in a sport such as auto racing, and what should be done about it, if anything? When does sport turn into the Roman Coliseum?