BEAT THE DEVIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000404110001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 22, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 26, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000404110001-2
Superflend
MTMLEAP p THE NATION
CNPA6E 26 April 1986 FILE ONL
BEAT THE DEVIL.
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
It is not surprising that the Qaddafi obsession should have
sprouted so luxuriantly in the mulch of President Reagan's
imagination. Reagan thinks almost exclusively in terms of
myth and symbol and has identified Col. Muammar el-Qad-
dafi as the latest incarnation of that ancient and familiar
stereotype in popular culture, the superfiend. His instinct
was sure. Only when we examine the roots of the Qaddafi
obsession can we understand why press coverage of the Lib-
yan leader has been so consistently appalling.
The function of the superfiend is to act as receptacle for
fantasies of an imperial, military, racist and sexual nature,
with the fantasist experiencing no moral qualms about his
reveries, reasoning that when it comes to absolute evil, nor-
mal standards of evidence and behavior may be cast aside.
This moral self-absolution is nicely represented by the
phrase "mad dog," which the President used in his last
press conference to describe Qaddafi. Everyone knows what
happens to a mad dog. George Will stated the theme back in
1981: "Can the Western world be taken seriously in its
rhetoric about terrorism, and indeed in its determination to
survive [!], if a mad dog on the streets of the world, such as
Gadaffi, is allowed to go on like this?"
Stress on Qaddafi's "madness" has the added function of
reminding people about evil. Any devotee of trash culture
over the past hundred years knows well that the dividing line
between evil and madness is all but invisible, and super-
fiends are absolutely evil or absolutely mad or absolutely
both depending on ethnic origin, religious faith and the ex-
igencies of the plot. Chinese superfiends tended to be hor-
ribly rational, as did the Jewish villains in anti-Semitic fic-
tion. Constantine Schuabe, the Jewish superfiend in the
British best seller of 1903 When It Was Dark, had eyes that
were "coldly, terribly aware, with something of the sinister
and untroubled regard one sees in a reptile's eyes."
Chinese and Jewish villains were superfiendishly cold.
Arab superfiends were, and are, hot, as befits men of fanat-
ic faith, desert origin and uncertain but ardent erotic pref-
erence. Back in 1973, Shana Alexander touched on some of
those attributes in a column in Newsweek: "Kaddafi, son of
a barefoot Bedouin. dreamed as a child of overthrowing the
evil King and leading his people out of poverty and back to
the fierce purity of Islam." The phrase "fierce purity" has
the correct ethno-sensual frisson, which sends us back to
T.E. Lawrence's reflections on Bedouin sexuality in The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom and to that great best seller of the
1920s The Sheik, by E.M. Hull. The theme of The Sheik
was the subjugation of proud, upper-class, Western Diana
Mayo by a fierce son of the desert, himself of impeccable
lineage, as memorably established in Diana's tumultuous
self-discovery:
Quite suddenly she knew-knew that she loved him, that she
had loved him for a long time, even when she thought she
hated him.... her heart was given for all time to the fierce
desert man who was so different from all other men she had
met, a lawless savage who had taken her to satisfy a passing
fancy and who had treated her with merciless cruelty. He was
a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality,
and superb animal strength. And he was an Arab! A man of
different race and color, a native; Aubrey would indiscrimi-
nately class him as "a damned nigger." She did not care .. .
she was deliriously, insanely happy.
The superfiend has, naturally enough, a superplot. And
where Qaddafi is concerned, Western popular culture has
not failed its task. In an excellent article titled "Qaddafi,
Man and Myth," in Africa Events for February, John Hai-
man and Anna Meigs make some incisive observations. There
is, for example, the close identification of Qaddafi the super-
fiend with the superfiends of James Bond movies and simi-
lar stereotypes in the great tradition.
They cite recent comic strips that seem to have been man-
datory reading in the National Security Council. In one of
them King Cybernoid plots world domination. His plan: kid-
nap the greatest minds of the free world-the commander of
NATO, the chief F.B.I. agent, the United States' top nuclear
scientist and Dr. Gustav Nemhauser, "the bacteriologist
genius." The kidnappings go well, and it takes all Dr. Solar's
ingenuity to rescue the cream of the military-industrial com-
plex and thus save Western civilization. As Haiman and
Meigs point out, "The extreme puerility of the pseudo-sci-fi
trappings of this tale accords with the equal puerility of its
political and social assumptions. Yet, while we dismiss the
first as merely silly, we find, surprisingly, that with the sec-
ond we are on familiar and thus respectable ground." Qad-
dafi, as in The Fifth Horseman, becomes the "nut with
the bomb," stand-in for all the nuts in the world who
actually have the bomb, sewage tank for fears of nuclear
obliteration.
Qaddafi's great contribution to the anatomy of su er-
fiendishness has been his deliberate and indeed joyous ac-
ceptance of the role thrust upon him by Western fantasists,
right down to a cultivation of sexual ambiguity Sometimes
he gives interviews only to women journalists or makes a
pass at me a arcos; at oth er times he as Tes aabout in
campy mi itary attire or unisex ca tans. (melda Marcos told
George Bush about the pass, and Bush urge her to give
Director of central Intelligence I11 1 tam Casey a " e ne -
ing," or blow-by-blow account. Finally, Casey and his men
as her w ether she'd gone all the way with the super-
fiend, at which-according to William Deedes's report inn
the Lon on Spectator-she laughed and said, "What a
question to ask a girl.")
Bottom line, in terms of myth and symbol
Qaddafi i
,
s a
youthful portrait of Reagan, the aging Dorian Gray, em-
bodying in his eccentric person the old actor's own charac-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000404110001-2