Before I post the journal writing for today, let me begin with a couple of photographs of a young couple I met as I trudged around some oak trees looking for grotesque images for the BLOG. The young man asked, “Are you a photographer?” I admitted that I am one. The young woman asked if I’d take pictures of them. I did. I gave them the BLOB Web address and told them they’d find photographs of them tonight, so here they are:

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REQUIEM FOR A MAD MONSTER

Muammar Gaddafi has been on my mind since news of his death dominated Internet, television and print media. I don’t remember what I thought of him when he led the coup that overthrew King Idris al-Mahdi al-Sanusi in 1969, the year I moved with my family to Singapore. What I remember about him is that the world expected great things from him. In news reports he was invariably called “the handsome Gaddafi.” Within a few years after he became Libya’s supreme ruler, he had become a pariah among world’s heads of state. The world did business with him because the world needed his oil and because he was a ready customer for the world's war machine merchants. By the time the revolution that ended his reign and his life began early this year, he had lost touch with reality.

Lately, I’ve been reading the teachings of the great teachers and prophets, and all of them taught that vengeance is an inappropriate response to the heinous crimes even of monsters. They warned that when we seek vengeance we become what we say we hate, what we don’t want to become. I’ve been trying to imagine what might have been the reaction of Jesus, Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. if they had been on hand last week to see and hear the details of Gaddafi’s final hours and gruesome death.

His Pathetic Nothingness

He was homeless
and didn’t know it
until he crawled into a hole
under the road
he had owned
because
he owned everything
so it was impossible
to imagine
deprivation
but he didn’t know
he had been deprived
of humanity
for so long
he
couldn’t
remember
what it was.

His Pathetic Nothingness
who who who
had ruled
with iron madness
was finally
dragged out
by the people
Who were supposed
to love him
but never had
at all at all at all
wanted
anything more
than to see him
brought down
humiliated
with an iron pipe
up his ass.