What seems most relevant for understanding Qaddafi's reaction to the protests today, though, is the concept of "Jamahiriya," which he invokes, with a vague, insistent mysticism, to say that representative government does not exist in Libya — indeed, government does not exist — because the people's will is one and the same with his: "The authority of the people is achieved, the dream is realized.
Like Drake's claim over the valuable cultural objects he pursues, the sense of pedigree and authority he invokes by aligning himself with Sir Francis Drake probably sits more or less comfortably with players depending on their worldview.
Though doctors do their best to save Dorothy, Aaron finds himself at a place he invokes later when, talking with a friend who is planning a marriage proposal, he reflects, "No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker".
I've written here recently about his mastery of melodrama as a modern, ironic variety of tragedy, and about the powerful visual style with which he invokes that idea.
Elsewhere he invokes a state he calls "union with the kinds," and it is plausible that he is invoking the same adaptiveness.
He invokes that situation again in "Inshallah," with its "sad boats" and "anxious eyes".
He is invoked with Shiva at weddings and is described as Kameshvara ("Lord of Kama – pleasure, desire etc").
IN his quest through the federal courts for the right to use a golf cart on the PGA Tour, Casey Martin, who suffers from a serious and progressive circulatory disorder in his right leg, became an appealing symbol of the law he invoked, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Fantasies of invulnerability are suggested, too, by the cyborg, a stock figure in science fiction, which Lee Bul invokes with bionic body parts made in sleek, white porcelain.
More recently, in his own cause, he invoked his human rights – with respect to privacy – to frustrate attempts to access correspondence that might shed light on a tax exemption thought to have cost millions to the exchequer.
It's therefore more than appropriate that in his last book, Travels with Herodotus, he invoked the first famous travel-writer of this kind: Herodotus, "the father of history".
