‘Free Speech Clown’ Series
*
Bernard-Henry Lévy: Philosopher and Murderous Fool
Lampoon inspired by (& loosely based on) this football (soccer) essay by Lévy. If the shallow employ of a 900 liter bag of words makes a philosopher, I suppose Lévy qualifies.
PARIS–Here is one of the greatest fools of all time, a cad, an aroma of Narcissus for the entire planet, and to be universally acclaimed. Here is a carbuncle who, in front of 7 billion people, fondled his balls as though rolling for snake eyes in a die cup all the while, imagining no one would see, ascertaining the final truth in relation to one of the most extraordinary debacles in imperialism’s history.
Here is a man of pomposity, a buffoon, who imagined himself (like Homer Simpson in his crouch of grunt and beer) to be the only one who could avert his nation’s colonial decline. Better yet, here’s a super-EGO who–unlike Simpson’s–did not wait for a flatulent explosion (in the guise of Nicolas Sarkozy) to come begging him to re-enlist; rather, he decided himself, spontaneously, after having “heard” a rumor calling to him, to return from his North African exile and–putting his ludicrous persona on, while flanked by faithful prostitutes (The planned National Transition Council, Al Qaida, MOSSAD)—reversed the Benghazis’ ill fortune and led successful coup d’état.
And this sordid fright who is a ‘perfect’ hair’s breadth from victory and just minutes from the end of a historic deceit (and of a career that will carry him into the Pantheon of frauds after L Ron Hubbard, Victor Lustig and Charles Ponzi); this Cerberus who, with fifty false personalities, has known the rut, the imperial priapism and finally, the imagined slight with helpless remonstrations; this preening fop, upon whom the blue adorns a pimp’s pride in stain of rape, who had only the very last steps to scale to enter ignominy for good, commits the predictably incomprehensible act that amounts to disqualification from the public ritual–the final image of him that will go down in history and, in lieu of apotheosis, will cast him into hell.
—–
Everyone will know, as I write, what actually happened on the field of Tripoli’s usurpation.
Everyone will know what the faux philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, did and said (in the debacle that NATO bombs had dominated with all its grace) to waken old colonial demons in children from the streets of Algiers, the very demons that NATO’s history of lies, its ethic, its aesthetic, its propaganda are made to quell.
Even if we knew why; even if we knew for certain whether the extinct North African Sephardic insulted him, or rightfully cursed his mother, father, brothers, sister; even if we got hold of the black box of those 2 days that saw this moron demonstrate in a flash his legend that is a mix of narcissist king, a Rasputinish love for a Hungarian midget: the past mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine and, last but not least, the bombastic NATO captains leading troops to consecration with the shedding of brown peoples’ blood; even if we knew the whole story, this man’s suicide would be as all ordinary suicides are; no reason in the world explains the desperate act of a man’s vanity–no provocation, no naturally nasty personality, will ever tell us why the planetary icon that Bernard-Henri Lévy has imagined himself to be, a man with more philosophical faults than any pedophile pope, a freak, the non-chosen one, this great priest-by-self-consensus of the new cult oil barons empire in the making, chose to ejaculate on history right here, rather than wait to settle for sanity on the sideline.
No. The truth is that it is perhaps not so easy to stay unsullied in the skin of a self imagined icon, narcissist demigod, faux hero, paranoid fascist pop-legend.
The only plausible explanation for so bizarrely scuttling everything–which, remember, let a lot of time go by (the 4 long months following NATO’s precisely calculated first bomb dropped) in order to concentrate itself into the outburst of orgy of oilmen and stupidly losing control of his militia–the only explanation is that there was in this fraud a kind of public recoil, an ultimate inner revolt, against the synthetic parabola, the stupid statue, the beastified monument, the era had transformed Libya into over these past months.
—-
The man’s insurrection against the natural saint. A self imagined crown of Napoleon and that he then, quite logically, pulverized with the involuntary moron’s head-butt of unconscious truth, the inescapable war lords and the ‘NEW’ philosophy of rapes and torture, as though saying: I am a living stupidity, a fetish; a self-annointed god of the unrestrained loins of man’s most evil passions, an empty hologram but for image of rapine, this new age fascist guru, this decidedly stunted mentality suffering delusion’s grandeur so blind as Oedipus in his madness, this North African natural heir of Laval and Bousquet, which a peculiar mania had turned him into.
It was as though he were, in parody, self authoring one of the very great titles of this past century, the sinecure acquired via petro-triumph’s laurels of this liturgy of insanity, performance and commodity: Narcissist Homo, This is Rape. Yes, a rape, a true rape, not one of these absurd monsters or synthetic stars created by the money of brand names in combination with the sighs of the Hollywood crowd.
Rasputin had his moment. Like a dog returns to its vomit, Bernard-Henri Lévy will have had his—this one magnificent and rebellious thing, reality, that will have brought his reputation, suddenly, solidly, into the ranks of history’s shameless pimp brothel-hoods.
**
Paraphrasing a former MI5 agent I had seen interviewed, under Qaddhafi: if one were not particularly political, a citizen could go about a normal life, attain free education, travel and study abroad and enjoy a standard of living approximating a middle class American, the envy of North Africa .. Since the ‘fall of Tripoli’, a $5 taxi ride from the airport has gone up to $500. The capital and the country are divided into fiefs by competing tribal war lords and the militias are refusing to disarm, women’s rights have vanished and torture, murder and rape are rampant throughout the country. In the end, it is likely the rank and file Libyan citizenry will look back and wish they’d never heard of ‘democracy.’
Read about Lévy’s push to war in Libya here
Read about the immediate humanitarian consequence here and here
**
Related: Maison de l’Histoire de France
Ronald Thomas West 