From the AP:

“SIRTE, Libya (AP) — Dragged from hiding in a drainage pipe, a wounded Moammar Gadhafi raised his hands and begged revolutionary fighters: “Don’t kill me, my sons.” Within an hour, he was dead, but not before jubilant Libyans had vented decades of hatred by pulling the eccentric dictator’s hair and parading his bloodied body on the hood of a truck.”

Upon reading these words and seeing the bloody corpse of  Gadhafi on the TV, I thought immediately of my Dad’s favorite poem.  What I find interesting about it now is that the sonnet was written in 1817 by Percy Bysshe Shelley.  It is set in an “ancient land” – and yet it seems that the message remains the same and could easily be substituted by the name of Gadhafi, or Hussein, or….

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ever was it thus in the Middle East.  Who will be next?  And why do we think that we can possibly do anything to change it?  I just thank God that we do not have to a) deal with our leaders for more than eight years and b)we get to rid ourselves of them in a more civilized manner than having to drag them out of a sewer pipe and parade them around half dead on the hood of a truck.  Say what you will about Wall Street, welfare systems, religious freedom or lack thereof, blah blah blah blah blah.  I’m glad I was fortunate enough to be born in this country and am frequently aware that my  life and the life of my children could just have easily been very, very different had I been reincarnated in, say, Libya.

The king is dead, long live…freedom, or at least our feeble and imperfect attempts to achieve and maintain it.