If you’re near a laptop and in search of a giggle, go to http://tinyurl.com/6gamb73. Otherwise, let me explain in words: that links you to a gallery of scores of photographs of Muammar Gaddafi in silly clothes. There are images of him in absurd, invented, full military dress, festooned with the gilt and silverware of bogus medals; sashes of every kind, colour and cloth, all gaudy. There are images of the tinpot dictator decked out in purple like a Roman emperor, swathed in silk with turbans, in mid-desert in combat gear, taking the salute in braid and twill, or crowned in gold. Sunglasses of the most bizarre shape and size, a bewildering range of the ludicrous pillbox hats to which he seemed addicted, tiara-like arrangements; khaki and velvet, silk and camelhair… these, it seems, became the ever-expanding wardrobe of his life.
The effect is satirical but from the Colonel’s viewpoint the self-ridicule is unwitting: he honestly thought he looked good in the outfits.
Most of the images are genuine, a few are fake; but it becomes impossible as we view the gallery to differentiate the Photo-shopped grotesqueries created by hostile satirists from the posed pictures he had taken for the benefit of friends. The man became his own comic creation: a pantomime version of himself. Who would have thought, from an early photograph of a neat, unassuming and rather handsome young army officer, that inside that plain and unostentatious uniform beat the heart of a sartorial exhibitionist who would one day leave most drag queens standing?
I was discussing this grisly comedy with friends last week. The debate resolved itself, after the mockery, into a different one: was the Colonel’s fancy dress an indication of the madness of one peculiar individual, or a more general example of the way power and uncritical admiration can corrupt anyone?
I incline unhesitatingly to the second view. No doubt Gaddafi always had a penchant for dressing up, but this hardly distinguishes him from millions of perfectly rational people. The difference was that as his power became absolute he will have become, by degrees, more ambitious in the impressions he strove to create. Medals, after all, befit a military leader. Monarchs and presidents do wear sashes. The image of a desert chieftain in rich and vivid robes was at first consciously aimed for, with an admiring audience in the nomadic tribes rumoured to be protecting him this month; and many urban Arabs hark back to the romance of the desert as a certain class of city-based Englishman is drawn to the rural ideal of gun dogs, plus fours, log fires and muddy boots.
The difference with Gaddafi will have been that when he took things a touch too far, nobody sniggered. The Libyan equivalent of courtiers will have feigned interest in each new medal; the latest sash will have been applauded; the flowing purple silk will have elicited gasps of apparent admiration. ‘My dress sense and creativity is striking a chord,’ he will have said to himself, ‘I am a genuine original!’ For his next creation something even more ambitious will have appealed. And the applause will just have kept on coming. Thus as the years rolled by and his absolutism became entrenched, the costumery slid slowly into parody. And nobody laughed.
We fell to discussing, my friends and I, how the common run of us would react, over time, in a similar vacuum of critical comment. We felt that on the whole the human male could be divided into three types. The first would go spinning off into extravagant exoticism, as Gaddafi has (or Prince, or Michael Jackson, or Gerald Kaufman MP, do or did). The second, quite differently, would begin to fetishise neat conformity until the shoes became unbearably shiny, the umbrella hopelessly tightly rolled, the pin-stripe a marvel of geometry, the creases razor-sharp, and the handkerchief peeking from the top pocket wonderfully discreet. Everything would be just so.
The third category would begin to let everything go. Why shave today? Is it really necessary to polish shoes? This shirt is good for another couple of days. Why iron the next one? Eventually the question would be whether it was worth shaving at all, wearing anything on one’s feet, or bothering with shirts when an old vest would do.
I belong without question to this third category. Were I to win a popular revolution and lead my country — all opposition crushed — for 30 years I should (my partner says) within a decade be wandering around barefoot in nothing but underpants as ragged as a dishcloth, and five days’ beard growth. And — had I the predominance of a Gaddafi — everyone would applaud. As with the emperor with no clothes, no laughter but only praise would reach my ears.
My claque would discern the asceticism of a monk. My apparent lack of vanity would be called saintly by my followers. I would be judged too cerebral to bother with anything so trifling as dress.
Frankly, that is already what I think about myself; but I’m constrained from taking it to its logical conclusion because my friends (and enemies) won’t let me. We are all of us, I think, far more stabilised and kept in check by the human society around us than we suppose. We think we’re complete, self-limiting, equipped with internal restraints, checks and balances; inhabited by an innate sense of propriety and proportion; able to see ourselves to some degree as others see us. We think we drive ourselves like a car with its own steering, accelerator and brakes, and know where the road is and how to keep to it.
But this is not so. The better analogy is with a planet in orbit: the opinion and praise and blame of our fellow humans being our gravitational sun. Without them, we’d fly off into outer space. Leave a man in solitude and he’ll go crazy. Becoming an absolute dictator — the voices of your admiring throng no more than echoes of yourself in a lonely canyon — is in its way a state of total solitude.
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