The Mother Load

First things first: I don't know how to correctly spell this man's name.  Fortunately for me, I don't think anyone else knows either, so my chosen spelling is at least one of the many available online.  Whether you call him Moammar Gaddafi, Muammar Gadhafi, Kadhafi, Qadafi, or Ding Dong Needsabrain, the person we're talking about is the same.  He is the dictator in power in Libya, he is a moron, and the people of Libya are having no more of it.

So, the people of Libya, taking their cues from protests in Tunisia and Egypt, have taken to the streets in an attempt to force Gaddafi out of power, and despite the fact that the entire civilized world sees him as a despicable and buffoonish caricature of a leader, and despite the fact that high ranking officials in his government are resigning and joining the revolution and more and more military personnel are refusing to carry out his orders to attack their own countrymen, the dubious dictator is refusing to step down and says he and his regime will fight to the last bullet and he will die a martyr.

Dear Colonel Gaddafi, your terms are acceptable.  Please hasten your martyrdom so your people can live in peace. And so they can burn you in effigy without worrying about fighter jets bombing them.  And so Saturday Night Live can parody your funeral as well as they parodied your life.  You saw this, right?



This might be a good time to say that this blog post is 25 years in the making.  I don't wish death on very many people...well, outside of rush hour freeway traffic...but I've been wishing death on Colonel Gaddafi since I was 9 years old, and the fact that this event may take place in the very near future has me smiling like a blogger who has wanted someone dead for 25 years and thinks it might happen soon.  (I'm sorry. I can't think of a suitable metaphor.  There is no one on this earth I would be more happy to no longer share air with.)

This is what happens when you're an impressionable American child living in Germany at the time of Libya's bombing of a nightclub in Berlin and suddenly your wooden apartment door is replaced by reinforced steel, your school bus is being tailed every day by fully armed soldiers, and the rumor is that if he orders an attack on your city, YOUR apartment building is the most likely residential target because of its proximity to the military hospital.  When you're a 9 year old living that life and you hear a great big meanie named Gaddafi is responsible for all that, you start to have delightful visions of your father using his field artillery experience to bomb the man off the planet.

My experience of those weeks in 1986 was of a period of constant fear, but it's one that pales in comparison to all the atrocities and injustices done to the Libyan people themselves, all while Gaddafi prances around in his "eccentricity" and tries to make nice with world leaders.

Colonel Gaddafi, your people have had enough, and I pray they continue this fight until you are gone from this earth.  Don't tease us with promises of your death.  Just make it happen.  Yesterday.  If you need ideas, I'm sure my father could teach you what would happen if you stood on the wrong side of a cannon before it's fired.  I think it would be a pretty thrilling way to go, don't you?  You could sell tickets!

Readers will note I have not given the dictator a platform from which to speak on my blog.  That's because no such platform exists.  I doused it in gasoline and set it on fire the first time I even considered putting a video of the real Gaddafi here.  In its place, I have built a platform for his protesters.  Keep fighting, Libya.  Take back your country and make something good with it.  Enough is, truly, enough.