LA Weekly

Photos by Michael J. Totten

Young men who like their comforts, and a dainty table, or who wish to pass their time pleasantly in the company of women, must not go to Arabia.

—Carsten Niebuhr, Description of Arabia, 1772

When you visit another country, it’s hard to get a feel for what it’s actually like until you leave your hotel room, go for a walk, take a look around, and hang out while soaking it in. Not so in Libya. All you have to do there is show up. It will impose itself on you at once.

My Air Afriquiya flight touched down on the runway next to a junkyard of filthy, gutted and broken-down Soviet aircraft in an airport otherwise empty of planes. When I stepped out of the hatch into the jetway, I came face to face with three uniformed military goons who scrutinized me and everyone else from behind reflective oversize sunglasses.

Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, mastermind of the 1969 Al-Fateh Revolution (a euphemism for his military coup), Brother Leader of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, greeted arrivals in the passport-control room from a menacing, almost snarling, gold-gilded portrait. A translated overhead sign (rare in Libya) said “Partners Not Wage Earners.” In other words: Don’t expect to be paid.

A bored official glanced at my visa, rubbed his face, stamped my passport and pointed me toward my first Libyan checkpoint. A man in an untucked button-up shirt, with a cigarette jutting out the side of his mouth, waved me toward a metal detector. He hadn’t shaved in two days. I walked through. The alarm screamed and I braced for a pat-down. He just stood there, took a long drag on his cigarette and stared bleary-eyed into space over my shoulder. I guessed that meant I could go. So I did.

There were no other planes coming or going, so it was easy to find my ride. His name was Abdul. He wore a snazzy black-leather jacket and a Western-style goatee.

(top): The Andes of sand: Grand Erg Oriental

“Welcome to Libya!” he said as he led me into a parking lot the size of an Applebee’s. “We’re really busy right now. This is Libya’s high season.” They must shut down the airport entirely during the low season.

The capital city of Tripoli was an asteroid belt of monolithic apartment towers with all the charm of gigantic sandblasted filing cabinets. The streets were mostly empty of cars, the sidewalks empty of people. I saw no restaurants, no cafés, no clubs, no bars and no malls. Nor did I see anywhere else to hang out. Libya, so far, looked depopulated.

We drove past a shattered former government compound surrounded by a lagoon of pulverized concrete that once was a parking lot. It was obvious when that thing was built. The 1970s were the 1970s everywhere, even in Libya.

Only as we approached the center of Tripoli did traffic pick up. Hardly anyone walked around, and it was no wonder: A mile-long pit on the side of the road appeared to be the place to give juice bottles, plastic wrappers, garbage bags and worn-out tires the heave-ho.

I saw no corporate advertising: no Pepsi signs, no movie posters and no cute girls flashing milk-mustache smiles for the dairy industry. I did, however, see one hysterical propaganda billboard after another. They were socialist cartoons from the Soviet era, the same kinds of living museum pieces still on display in North Korea and other wonderful places where starving proles live in glorious jackbooted paradise.

The Happy Worker theme was a common one; smiling construction workers wore hardhats, and Bedouins-turned-widget-makers basked in the glory of assembly-line work. One poster showed two hands chained together at the wrist below an image of Qaddafi’s sinister Green Book descending from heaven.

Me and the Brother Leader

At the hotel I ran into my second Libyan checkpoint. A metal detector was set up at the entrance. A young security agent sat at a metal desk and showed off his open copy of the Green Book. He propped it at such an angle that I could read the cover, but he couldn’t possibly read what was inside.

I stepped through. The alarm screamed, detecting (perhaps) my dental fillings or zipper. He looked up, gave me a nodding “what’s up, dude” smile, and went back to pretending to read.

I poked around the lobby while Abdul checked me in at the desk.

The gift shop offered a wide range of totalitarian propaganda books and pamphlets in multiple languages. A fantastic selection of Qaddafi watches ranged in price from $25 to $600. I bought one for $25. Qaddafi is shown wearing his military uniform, officer’s hat and sunglasses like a swaggering Latin American generalissimo. It was busted right out of the box, the hour hand stuck forever at 9 o’clock.

The lobby was plastered all over with portraits of the boss in various poses. He wore shades in most of them, but in some pictures from his early days, he wore a buffoonish 1970s haircut instead.

I had to suck down my giggles. God, was this guy for real? His unexportable Third Universal Theory was internationalist insofar as it obliterated any sense that Tripoli was Middle Eastern or African — at least from the point of view of the back seat of the car. I could have been in any former Soviet republic, or even in some parts of the Bronx. But look at those portraits! Now there was something exotic.