Dead Tyrants

So Colonel Qaddafi is dead. He is one dead tyrant. The image of his beaten, broken self has been plastered across the internet. His brains have been plastered across the libyan sand, after his discovery, like all good fleeing tyrants these days hiding in an ignoble bolt-hole. This one was a set of industrial measure pipes. He joins Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein on the list of terrifying bogeymen now despatched by the gallant lads of the Western World. Kim Jong Ill must be rather quacking in his jackboots.

How did you feel with the news Osama had been snuffed and then thrown into the sea? Belief? Relief? Incredulity? What does it mean these days, when the Sheriff gets his man? Is it redundant to rant on about the nature of our media and the lies we are apparently told? It's all too confused and confusing. We don't know if it was right or wrong. We might firm up an argument, were we a publishable journalist, yay or nay, but we would still only be arguing from the parapet of our prejudices. Good old us and our kangaroo courts, God Bless Nato. I say this with due deference to the fact that Qaddafi was done by a young rebel of his own country, so perhaps we should feel no sufferance of guilt on that count.

Not that we do. Why should we care? If you stopped to consider whether the man's fate was vulgarly contrived by duplicitous politics or not you might have noticed the demerit of the Lockerbie bombing marked against him. Perhaps that was just cause. Funny how he had become a more cuddly figure of late, a deranged gigolo feasibly on political par with Silvio Berlusconi, just before crisis came to a head in his nation and the West stepped in with political and military force. There is always the factor of the insurgency of the people, too, and we all (us liberal types) turn a little bloodthirsty when the sexy rebels and revolutionaries have their way. Perhaps we are living vicariously, stable democracy that we so enjoy or not.

Why am I writing about this at 2am in the morning? Why not research it and write something more credible? Well it doesn't matter it's only a blog innit. It just occurred to me how I used to worry with genuine fear about these figures. Saddam Hussein was a nightmare demon to me as a child, armed to the teeth with nuclear muscle and the capacity to land a bomb at my infant door, should the whim and inclination take him. I remember being unreasonably scared by the Kosovo 'incident', having not enough understanding not to fear a World War. This is the effect the ignorant combination of basic history (yes, WW2) and media frenzy had upon my child brain. Worry and petrification. These dead tyrants that we are having these days would have caused a sigh of relief in me in my younger more naive incarnation, and I just wonder what we are supposed to feel now, when those wet-nursed illusions have been stripped away.