With the imminent release of The Dictator, Baron Cohen's despot comedy this new blog post is a new poem, begun on a flight to Khartoum last October, the day after Colonel Gaddafi of Libya was beaten, mutilated, buggered with a knife and eventually killed by what seemed to be a blood-simple YouTube flashmob of grinning, shouting torturers and liberators. They were certainly occupying the same moral ground occupied by the dictator they had just killed. I half expected to see them chowing down on the remains.
The pictures were everywhere the next morning. They made Saw look like Jackanory. The stills from the YouTube footage were plastered on every front page of every paper that day, probably the most disturbing and gratuitous images to be displayed in public in recent times.
I was flying out that evening for Khartoum, capital of what the Western world describes as an Islamist pariah state, and I was afraid that such a brutal and horrific death of an Arab leader - the quintessential, almost comic dictator of Sacha Baron Cohen's fantasies - would somehow be associated with Western coalitions and Caucasians abroad. As it was, the citizens of Khartoum are gracious and welcoming to an extraordinary extent - as my first HuffPo blog attests.
I wrote the poem on the flight into Khartoum, and it moved silently from notebook to notebook as I pondered whether this was a poem I could write, and then finish, without feeling like an imposter.
The Footage
The footage suggests otherwise,
but we never saw the dust rise
from the dead like it did from you,
Muammar, as if it feared one more
twist in the tale, and you rising up
from the clay with that familiar
stadium riff, bass drum, guns
at the exits, the winds of change
sailing in at jet speed, the ground
shaking like the point of a flame
and we feared it was you, undead,
but it was just your lookalike,
burning fuel for the same appetites,
mimicking the screams of the injured.
Those engines started turning way
before the age of steam kicked in,
the age of copper, the age of tin,
languages waning and waxing
over the body of the Iron Age king
with his useless plastic surgery
and flap of a mouth twisted on a hinge,
thick black crows of blood in his hair
and a buried chamber of torturers
in his face, pulled up from its root,
chord to a billowing parachute,
hands and mouth scrabbling at the sewer
like some torture porn extra pulled
to his feet to meet his maker fashioned
from hot wax and electrical wire, in
the act of prayer. half a million
YouTube hits. Off camera, gunfire.