Tony Bourdain’s throwback to Libya, post-Colonel: Check out the ‘Uncle Kentucky Fried Chicken’ in a 2013 outing for CNN’s Parts Unknown that still resonates in 2024.
It’s true what they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Tangier was always going to be a tough act for Tony Bourdain, but from where I sit, he gave it a genuine shot with Libya, another landmark episode that aired in Parts Unknown’s debut season, on CNN in 2013. Ten years ago today, give or take.
It was one of Parts Uknown’s more tense episodes — one reviewer at the time mentioned that perhaps only Haiti could compare in that department — Libya is both strangely disorienting and oddly familiar today, especially in light of recent events throughout the Middle East.
It’s strange, for example, to hear Bourdain say, as he does in the program’s opening moments: "It's amazing arriving here after all you see on TV these days that Libya is, in fact, functioning at all. But it is.”
Fast-forward 10 years, give or take, and it’s hard to figure out what, if anything, has really changed.
It’s still not on the tourist map — I bought a ticket to Libya once, not so long ago, on British Airways, but the flight, insanely expensive by Mediterranean standards, double what it would have cost to fly to nearby Morocco, for instance, never got off the ground — and at this rate, Libya won’t appear on any tourist maps for some time to come yet.
Two years ago, the Libya episode was singled out in Vanity Fair’s excerpts from Bourdain’s longtime director/producer and creative colleague Tom Vitale’s book In the Weeds, and it’s not hard to see why. Libya was not the kind of program one might see on the Travel Channel or Food Network, or even Parts Unknown at that point.
There is little to no fine dining to speak of, save the occasional nod to the salving effects of street food — the fish market in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, for example, where Bourdain gleefully notes the day’s menu is presented as the actual fish you will be eating for lunch, as opposed to the lame, declassé option of listing the lunch specials on a printed menu.
Anyone for barracuda, with the heads?
And while you’re there, do check out Uncle Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s like the colonel, but not actually the Colonel.
Libya is replete with those pithy, uniquely oddball and yet uniquely perceptive observations Bourdain-ophiles have grown fond of over the years, from “Every kid over the age of five seems to have been issued a lighter and a fistful of fireworks,” to, “This is Tripoli after 42 years of nightmare … How to build a whole society overnight and make it work in one of the most contentious and difficult areas of the world, is what people are trying to figure out.”
They’re still trying.
Libya today is presided over — “governed” would be too strong a word, metaphorically and literally — by a mishmash of local militias, most of whom hate each other with a passion reserved for, oh, say Gaza or the Occupied Territories in Palestine, and a national government that appears to lurch ever closer to the not entirely exalted status of ‘failed state’ with each passing day.
The shadow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi — Gaddafi, Gadhafi, or Qaddafi (قذافي, Qaḏḏāfī), take your pick — still loomed large over Libya at the time Bourdain visited, even though the erstwhile colonel-in-name-only had been rudely shish-kebabed in his hometown of Misrata two years earlier. Bourdain again: “Outside Tripoli's centre, there's this one-time axis of all power and untold evil, a huge complex of sinister offices, barracks, and residences on top of a rabbit warren of secret tunnels and underground facilities.”
Oh, dear. Secret tunnels and underground facilities — now where have we heard that before?
Everywhere he goes, Bourdain finds himself surrounded by modified weaponry — “You took it off a helicopter, and you put it on a car?" — and homemade firearms — “So, it’s basically a crossbow … that fires Molotov cocktails.”
Bourdain, unshaven and looking at times more shaken than stirred, is constantly being knocked off-balance, it seems, at one point threatened by a local militia that barks at his crew to stop filming, or else, and things get dicey. “I don't know if you noticed but I'm going full-Blitzer on this shoot,” Bourdain says at one point, showing off his scruffy beard for the camera.
The distinct lack of alcohol — it’s a Koranic thing — doesn’t seem to bother him. At first.
"I've been about a week without any alcohol. I'm enjoying my new clean-living lifestyle.”
Well, that wouldn’t last. Either.
As always — and this is what elevates Bourdain’s work above the rote, the usual, then and now — he spared a thought at the very end for those who live there, and he found a grace note on which to close the hour.
“It's Libya,” he says, with weary resignation. “They were supposed to be the bad guys, a bad country filled with bad people, right? I don't think so. … I wish them the very, very best.”
What the hell, it’s all about the end result, right? And Libya makes for fascinating — if occasionally harrowing — viewing, especially today.
And that fried chicken? Not to die for exactly, but I’ll bet it had its compensations. It sure did look that way.