Word: bedouin
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...center of his loosely related narratives is the Oregon farm, which serves as both the setting for pastoral romances and a pit stop for the wrecked and restless. Old Pranksters pass through on their way from nowhere in particular. The proprietor can be as hospitable as a Bedouin, but not when he is accosted by footloose youths smelling of "sour unvented adrenaline...
...movie reel of his imagination, he sees himself standing alone in the desert, silhouetted against the moon, swathed in traditional Bedouin robes, a farsighted prophet of Islam and the mighty creator of the Great Arab Nation, stretching from the warm Persian Gulf to the dark Atlantic Ocean--a nation that would eclipse the West in power and glory and purity. Muammar Gaddafi is not a man of modest ambitions. Nor one without a sense of backlighting...
Gaddafi's cause and the means with which he pursues it are the result of his desert youth, his early military training and his scattered reading of utopian and anarchist writers. His father was an illiterate Bedouin shepherd, and Gaddafi was born in a goatskin tent in the desert near Surt. "The desert teaches you to rely on yourself," Gaddafi has written. "The values I learned there have remained with me all my life...
...designed to eradicate all forms of the nation's bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. His revolution was based on three slender volumes of his own self-taught philosophy titled The Green Book, Gaddafi's equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book. The books outline Gaddafi's combination of Islamic zeal and Bedouin socialism in a system he calls the Third Universal Theory. The premise is that all contemporary political systems are inherently undemocratic and divisive. Gaddafi contends that capitalism benefits only the elite, whereas Communism stifles the individual...
...glass of camel's milk for breakfast, a regimen he has kept since he was a boy. He says he likes Western classical music, especially Beethoven, and that his favorite book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. With a kind of adolescent romanticism, he thinks of himself as a Bedouin Byron. "I am a poet," he told a German interviewer. "From time to time, I weep, but only when I am alone...