Ghadaffi is nuts. He is a textbook case of what happens when you stop drinking your own Kool-aid and resort to rubbing the powder on your gums. That being said, his is not a new psychosis. He is the same kind of crazy as any other dictator who has spent decades trying to convince his people they are not “ready” for democracy and that they “need” him. It is impossible, I suppose, to have absolute power for four decades and not become rather self-obsessed.
So, Ghadaffi’s routine is not new. What is new is the context in which we find it. Dictators love secrecy because it allows them to create whatever narratives they want. Propaganda is nothing more than a story with monopolistic status. The countervailing narratives with nitty gritty details of your own people lying in a ditch, having been executed, get swept under the rug. You own the stories of the past. You interpret the present. You dictate the future.
…And then there was YouTube.
Now, at the same time that the Ghad-meister is drolling of incoherent accounts of his family history, people all around the world are watching his hired thugs brutalize the Libyan people. He has lost credibility among every sector of Libyan society and the world at large. Even shutting down the internet within the country is insufficient as the rest of the world can see exactly what is going on and within the country the media crack down is so conspicuous it is self-incriminating. His plan of regaining control through reiterating his egotistically quixotic message would fail even if he were capable of forming a coherent thought. There are just too many other messages (articles, images, videos, tweets) with which to compete.
So the question is: What if we lived in a world with no secrets?
It’s not that far-fetched given that apparently a guy with a flash drive is apparently all you need to get confidential information from the military of a superpower. (Go ahead and convict Assange for sexual assault, but if you do it, do it because you want him to be convicted for sexual assault).
The most obvious answer is that it would be the death of dictatorships. But what if its bigger than that? Isn’t all governance about constructing narratives? George W. Bush and the Axis of Evil. Barack Obama and we are the people we have been waiting for. Partisanship itself is built on narratives, interpretations and half-truths. But a half-truth is half false, and we live in an age when counterpoints come before the point is even made.
All governing, it seems to me, is about telling a story about the world and how we fit in it. Telling a story is about taking a set of facts, a set of observations and insights, and making conscious decisions about how to organize them. We do not live in an age of stories. Stories are dead. Now, there is only the deluge.
The point I am making is that the forces dogging Ghadaffi are dogging Obama. (There are innocent deaths in Afghanistan, too. They are not deliberate and I am not making the argument that they are morally equivalent. I’m saying they look just as bad on YouTube). They dogged Bush. They’ll dog 45. Everyone sounds just as incoherent as Ghadaffi when you splice in white noise.
How, I wonder, does one govern a deluge?
