Tripoli, 1973

It was Friday, so we were going to the beach as usual. As in most Muslim countries, the weekend was Friday and Saturday – and we were none of us so devout that we objected to working on Sunday. But Friday of course was the big one, the Muslim holy day.

One was very conscious of Friday in Libya; the place I lived was called Suq-al-Juma’a – Friday Market. Once a sleepy little village with a large square where camels and goats were traded, it was gradually being absorbed into the city: white concrete villas like mine springing up among the prickly-pears and the old mud-brick courtyard houses. Next to our house was a small mosque; the call to prayer went out five times a day, every day, starting at 6:00 am in the summer – though it was on tape. The elderly Hajji who owned the dusty little store opposite our house and doubled as the imam was no longer expected to drag his old bones up those steep, narrow stairs.

Anyway, back to the beach. I and the two other young unmarried male teachers (we had little else in common, but Libya had thrown us together) had planned to meet at the school as usual with our swimming and snorkelling gear and pile into my yellow Renault for a day at the ‘40 km beach’. I never did find out what the locals called it, but it was a popular spot; a long bar of sand with a grassy bluff a couple of hundred metres back from the sea, on which stood a small shrine to a local wali (saint), a low white structure made of whitewashed daub with a dome and crescent on top, like a miniature mosque.

But I don’t recall seeing many of the numerous Libyan families who flocked to the ‘40 km beach’ on Fridays and Saturdays paying their devotions to the wali. Instead they would all gather on the beach, the men in their bathing trunks and the women in their thick blanket-like barrakans that covered every part of their bodies, leaving only a Cyclops-like hole around the bridge of the nose to squint through. While the women took care of the young children, the men and older boys would barbecue immense quantities of lamb in between dips in the sea, before finally piling into their Datsuns or Toyotas to drive back to the city.

On the way to the beach we stopped, as we often did, at a small café-cum-gas station to get a coffee and to buy some Fanta. On the television – there was of course only one channel, and it was in black and white – the country’s new young leader Colonel Gaddafi was holding forth in his usual elaborate, ritualised, impassioned and rhetorical style. The few customers in the bar were watching, respectful and slightly baffled.

My Arabic wasn’t good enough to understand most of what he was saying, but I guessed that, like most of his speeches, it was about the unequal relation of the Arab world with the Western powers, especially the British and the Americans: Palestine, oil, Saudi Arabia etc. Plus, of course, the history of Libya itself, a backwater Italian colony up till World War II, and an Anglo-American protectorate from then till 1969. The Italians never found the oil, but the Brits did in, back in the 1950s: with its pro-Western puppet monarch Libya had been a safe haven for BP, Shell, Esso and the rest – and the Americans even had a huge air force base right on Tripoli’s corniche, a mere 8 km from the city centre. The West had taken the place for granted, and it was almost undefended when that unknown 27-year old junior officer staged his military coup. Almost the first thing he did, of course, was to kick out the Americans.

We drank up our coffee and left fairly hurriedly – the atmosphere was never too friendly during Gaddafi’s speeches, and spent a pleasant day frolicking on the beach. On the way back I stopped for gas, and when I went in to pay he was still speaking – which made six or more hours non-stop, outdoing even his great hero Nasser. (The Egyptian revolutionary leader nationalised the Suez canal, provoking the disastrous Anglo-French invasion of 1956; his many-hour-long speeches were broadcast on outdoor loudspeakers all over the Arab world, causing grown men to stop in the streets and burst into tears of pride and passion.)

Over the year and a half or so that I was there, Libya gradually became less and less hospitable to Westerners, as the populace got to know more of the history that they’d never learned in school (those who’d even gone to school). There was a huge amount of natural grandeur and beauty to the place: incredible Roman and Greek ruins, awe-inspiring desert landscapes, and of course those astonishing, endless, largely deserted, sandy beaches, but I was glad enough to leave all the same. This wasn’t primarily because of the politics but the enforced celibacy and the lack of alcohol and merry-making – the lack of pretty much anything, in fact, in this vast country three times the size of France, with a population then of less than 3 million. I had my life to get on with, and I went back to London to get on with it.

That was more than half a lifetime ago: then I was a young man in his early 20s, and now I’m an old geezer heading for retirement age. And Gaddafi is still there, madder, crueller and more despotic than ever. Who else was in power in 1973, and is still there now? Not even Robert Mugabe, or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni; in 1973 the unshiftable Silvio Berlusconi was still crooning ballads on cruise ships.

But come to think of it, there is one head of state who’s lasted even longer. When I came back to London Queen Elisabeth II’s face had already adorned Britain’s coins and banknotes for 22 years – and, like Gaddafi, she’s still there now. I wonder, if the Brits tried to overthrow the Queen, and she was hunkered down in Buckingham Palace surrounded by tank traps and anti-aircraft guns, would Gaddafi send his air force to support the Republican cause?

An idle fantasy – next year (let’s hope) Gaddafi will be gone, but the Brits will be throwing garden parties to celebrate the Queen’s 60 years on the throne; little paper flags will be waved all over the country, and hardly a protest will be heard.

The people that walked in darkness

Marcus Anthony speaks in a recent video blog (http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/other-side-of-hong-kong.html) about the beauty and tranquility of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, and how few citizens are willing to unplug themselves long enough to explore them: Shopping for clothes or the latest electronic gadgets is a much more popular Sunday pastime than hiking in those lush and soul-healing green hills.

But then, in order to acknowledge their need for that healing, people would first have to acknowledge that they have souls – that they’re not just biological gadgets, wired up and ready to serve the global corporations that constitute a kind of nightmare distortion of the benign world government that futurist thinkers dreamt of 100 or so years ago. And there’s an exact parallel between those soul-extinguished Hong Kongers and the tepid, slow-motion response of Americans to the Louisiana oil spill catastrophe – as if that black, sticky, toxic ooze had somehow got into people’s minds and hearts as well as destroying some of the country’s finest landscapes and killing millions of innocent fellow-creatures. (It will probably start to affect Florida – America’s no. 1 holiday playground – soon.)

It’s true that President Obama has reacted with characteristic restraint and caution to a situation which probably didn’t call for either of these qualities, but we can’t expect our leaders to feel the passion and reverence for life on our behalf that we’re not willing or able to manifest for ourselves. The problem is, as I mentioned in a previous blog, we’ve sold our souls for oil, and we can’t claim them back at a moment’s notice just because we’re feeling a bit queasy about the bargain – all those hocked souls are in safe deposit, well locked away.

The two most valuable corporations in America are, appropriately enough, Exxon and Apple: oil and gadgets, at over $225 bn. each of market capitalization – if the combined value of those corporations was shared equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child would have $1500 worth. But of course the value isn’t shared equally, or anything remotely like equally: a tiny number of people derive stupendous wealth from them, and the rest of us little or nothing. Only the negative effects are shared out equally: the oil when it’s spilled spills on everyone and everything, while the negative social effects of IT addiction are down to “society” as a whole to deal with.

It doesn’t look like a great bargain for what we’ve given away, does it? Maybe it’s time we started to reclaim our souls, even if we have to make do with fewer gadgets and less oil. We can only become wholer, saner and happier in the process.

The terror and the pity

There's no better example of the intrusion of primitive limbic emotions into the political domain than the "debate" about terrorism in the English-speaking world, especially in the United States. A mentally disturbed young man attempted (and failed) to set light to his underpants a year or so ago, and a mass outbreak of psychosis was triggered throughout the world of air travel - passengers traveling with young children were forbidden to go to the bathroom in the last hour of their flights, while the TSA contemplated spending further billions of dollars on even more intrusive body-scanning equipment.

Now the equally unsuccessful and laughably amateurish Times Square car bomb has set off a similar wave of knee-jerk paranoia and political grandstanding, such as this comment from Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Republican, of course) of the House "Intelligence" Committee: "We're going to get much more aggressive and perhaps more creative in terms of how we gather intelligence to find the plots and find individuals to stop them". (As if we could ever protect ourselves against isolated mentally disturbed sociopaths; as if labeling them as "terrorists" helped in any way.)

Meanwhile in Louisiana, millions of gallons of oil are bleeding over precious and irreplaceable wetland reserves while fishermen's livelihoods are destroyed, perhaps permanently - and much of the political establishment is trying to play it down and de-dramatize it. The governor of Texas, bless him, even called it an "Act of God".

Evolutionary scientists often argue that we're "programmed" to respond to the dangers we face when physically threatened as individuals (hence the response to "terrorists"), but that we lack the mechanisms to respond to collective and non-imminent threats such as climate change, poverty and overpopulation. This explanation is as fatalistic and mechanistic as the model it proposes: precisely the point is that human evolution is, necessarily, a conscious process.

Only by adopting a witness stance toward reflex and atavistic emotions and embracing a wider and more inclusive vision of who "we" are can we move toward a less dysfunctional world that the one we currently live in - one with far fewer profit opportunities for oil companies and manufacturers of security equipment.

Oil, blood and poetry

As Natalie Merchant observes in the notes to her (wonderful) new album "Poets are our soft-spoken clairvoyants. They tell us about the things that have made us and keep us human."

Not so many people read poetry these days - gone are the days when any educated person could quote dozens of poems by heart, when people like Whitman or Tennyson were national heroes. Poetry now is marginal; it lives on the far fringes of academia and commercial publishing, on what scraps it can gather. Not replaced by a more contemporary form, just cast aside; the unacknowledged legislators of today's world are economists or TV hosts.

Interesting, and very sad, since poets are the ones who know what the treasure is and where it's buried. Economists can't help us when we go astray on a soul level as we have over oil. The treasure, it turns out, wasn't the oil we pumped, but the landscapes which the oil is about to bury, and which they all told us had less value.

And in Louisiana of all places - the land that the white man tore from its occupants, where he exterminated the native vegetation to grow cotton, where he made money from earth, money from blood. Louisiana, sold by one group of white men to another, including the bodies of the red men who lived there and black men who worked there.

But then there's New Orleans - songs of love and joy from America's most wounded region, wounded yet again by Katrina, the Federal Government stepping in to little too later just as it has with the oil slick. No surprise there; we've all lost touch, we don't recognize our treasure any more, so we let it bleed away, blow away, become swamped and fouled with heavy sticky oil.

Anyone who can still feel will have a heavy heart today - trapped like a bird in a slick. We can't go on using the planet like this.

If only we could see that it's poets, not oil, that we really depend on.