Death to the weird

There is nothing more queer and terrifying to witness on the week leading up to Halloween than the spectacularly ugly death of a once powerful and poisonous Main Freak like Moammar Gadhafi . . . or is it Moammar Khadafy . . . or Muammar Al-Gaddafi? Qaddafi, Khaddafy, Gaddafi, Gadfly Khadaffy Duck — we never got his name right, did we? He was the iron-dick Supreme Ruler of politically scrutinized Libya for 42 strange and violent years; the fourth longest-serving non-royal leader since 1900, edging out the crooked Little Big Man of Gabon, Omar Bongo, and next only to the three most powerful — and communist — dictators of the 20th century and beyond: Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung; Leninist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of China; and the Big Beard of Cuba, Fidel Castro — and we never figured out the proper way to spell the poor bastard’s name. Incredible.

Opie, from the Opie and Anthony Show on SiriusXM satellite radio, tweeted “Gadhafi is dead — someone reach into his wallet and look at his driver’s license so we finally know how to spell his last name!” But even that won’t help. The brain-freezing confusion over the spelling of the dead tyrant’s last name will unfortunately haunt us forever, because, according to The Washington Post, the problem stems from a lack of unified consensus. . . . No shit. Now we are doomed to cope with over 100 different versions of this evil little prick’s name — but to hell with that, I like Gadhafi, so I’m sticking to it. 

As I was saying before that brief but rude tangent about the spelling of Gadhafi’s name momentarily scrambled my train of thought, if you really want to terrorize civilized homeowners on Halloween Eve, then wear nothing but a gold jockstrap and Gadhafi’s Death Mask — the one with the blood-crusted goatee and the bullet hole on the forehead. The sight of you will melt pumpkins and trigger heart attacks on the spot. Pregnant housewives will break their water as soon they open their front door and kittens will hiss their fangs at you in total fear. You will be a freak show, for sure, like the Bearded Lady of Geneva, or the Frog Boy of Malabon, and you may not get any candy from it, but it will be fun. And that is what Halloween is all about, isn’t it? 

Maybe not. Maybe Halloween is truly and exclusively just about fear, in which case the Gadhafi Death Mask will be just as effective. It will scare the living shit out of anyone who sets his eyes on you, because it will accomplish nothing except conjure up images of a man that nobody — except maybe Hugo Chavez — wants to remember, and a brutal killing that although was celebrated and hailed around the world as the long-awaited end of a disgusting tyranny, was a brutal killing nonetheless — and brutal killings are never fun. 

Human death is never funny. Absurd, ludicrous, sarcastic maybe; but never funny. Gadhafi was a born clown and a despicable pimp that deserved what he got, but that doesn’t change the fact that the way these revolutionary fighters went to work on him on the last hour of his life was so frightening it made your stomach knot and your throat ache. It was medieval. It stunned you with a warning and a reminder of the oftentimes ignored notion that what goes around will come around, and that if you prod a pony long enough, it will eventually kick your head off your neck with both hind legs. 

Jesus, did you see the video? Those vengeful, blood-hungry Libyans were so enraged and full of hate they wanted to tear Gadhafi’s body apart after dragging him out of a drainage pipe like a wounded rat. One of them even tried to sodomize him with a Bicketti. He wept and begged for mercy, hoping beyond hope that his sons would save him, even though one of them, Muatassim, was also killed, and the other, one-time heir apparent Seif al-Islam, had been captured or wounded, according to unconfirmed reports. They dragged him by what was left of his knotted hair, pistol-whipped him with his own golden gun, then strapped him onto the hood of a truck and paraded him through the streets of Sirte like wild game shot in a hunting safari. Then, after shooting him point-blank in the face and in the gut, they again strapped his body to a car and paraded it around the nearby city of Misrata, pumping meat cleavers in the air and screaming, “God is great!”

It was literally a bloody mess. But can you blame them? Forty-two years of barbaric and senseless oppression and torture by a criminal dingbat like Col. Gadhafi, who ran Libya like a crank tweaker, with his random idiosyncratic laws and erratic behavior, is too much for anyone to bear. The human rights atrocities were unspeakable at the very least. He exterminated opponents without trials and jailed anyone who made a fuss about it. He hung people in public squares and stadiums and broadcasted these morbid spectacles on TV during the holy month of Ramadan. His notorious death squads hunted down defectors and silenced his critics. He ordered the killing of 1,200 political prisoners in an Abusleem prison. He funded terror groups that bombed a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, a French jet in Africa the following year, as well as a German disco in 1986.

He was a certified monster and a rotten egg that took too long to crack. But aside from all of this he was a flat-out whacko, and his dangerous weirdness inevitably took the better of him. He had a pronounced borderline personality disorder that made him quirky and unpredictable. According to a former US congressional staffer in a report from The Lookout, a typical visit to the man’s surreal desert hideaway would find him “walking in with white linen pants, loafers with no socks, and a big flowy print shirt, wearing make-up, eye liner . . . and I thought, Caribbean night in the Libyan desert.” The former staffer said he had been advised to bring a gift to the leader. It was suggested that an appropriate gift was “hair products — upper class, high-priced hair products.” He traveled with a phalanx of sexy female bodyguards, made up and dressed in military fatigues. He always received visitors in a full Bedouin tent, even erecting one in Bedford, New York, in 2009, on property rented from Donald Trump. 

According to Jerrold Post, a political psychologist at George Washington University, “His language was extremely narcissistic, ‘My people, they all love me, they all love me, they will protect me.’ He found it inconceivable that his people did not all love him.” When the Libyans began uprising against him, Gadhafi claimed they only did this because their Nescafe had been spiked with hallucinogenic drugs.

So there you have it. Moammar Ghadafi’s hideous exit last week in the hands of revolutionary Libyan rebels was the result of a National Acid Freakout. His colorful, attention-grabbing outfits were simply too frightening and confusing for any man with a head full of LSD to accept, so they whacked him in broad daylight and gold pants. A very bad trip indeed. The world will be a notch less stranger and a lot safer without the Lizard King of Tripoli around, which is why I nominate him as this year’s ultimate Halloween bogeyman.