The hanging of Saddam Hussein seems one of those things that people are almost obligated to comment on, even though the real-world impact seems destined to be basically nil, or nil with footnotes attached, anyway. Saddam became irrelevant the moment he was booted from power; the rest of his story was denouement. Though, one can imagine, not to him.
Unencumbered by much thought, much less any punditry career to protect, agenda to promote, or pretense of moral superiority, my own reaction is uninspired: good riddance to bad rubbish. Saddam was an archaic, iconic, almost bitterly self-refuting example of the worst kind of human, a morally scabby man who ran Iraq as means of personal satisfaction first, as tool of ersatz conquest second, and as nation of men and women a distant third. His own sons were perfect demonstrations of the depravity of pure, spoiled power, a lineage corrupted irretrievably, if such a thing is possible, and their own only significant contribution to Iraq was to have the grim decency to die full of holes.
So it is impossible for me to feel any pity whatsoever for the man, not even as one human to another. Live as a dictator, die like one. Hussein managed to get no more or less, from the standpoint of pure moral equivalencies, than he deserved: a petty death for a petty man, no pomp, no grandeur, just men in masks giving him a death so hurried and tasteless, so sickly in tone and moral color, so bereft of significance or meaning that it will inspire nothing. No Marie Antoinette moments, here; maybe something out of Dostoevsky, perhaps, something in a side chapter, a bit character whose death sets a certain tone, but does not advance the plot. As fate would have it -- and fate is a karmic crapshoot, and fate is the laziest of the existential worker bees, an inattentive layabout not prone to give an honest day's work for anyone's dollar -- he got the end most fitting a tyrant, which is a showless and pointless one, long after his life or death would benefit anyone. His hanging was not so much the death of a tyrant as a slightly dressed-up street mugging.
There is a difference, though, between feeling a gut satisfaction with a thing and cheering for it. There is a difference between acknowledging a death and positively celebrating it. And in the end, the only thin reed of redemption I hold out for myself, balancing on that edge, is that while I may feel grim satisfaction at karmic fate finally getting up off its goddamn lazy ass and, for one story out of millions, finally getting an ending right, I at least have the common decency to know that I am wrong.
Because if we -- "we" being that dual combination of American and Iraqi legal pretext that seems to reinvent itself daily, one eyebrow-raising divination at a time, so that in the end the Americans can have the only thing Americans truly value -- paper and ink, preferably in triplicate -- and the Iraqis can at long last don the masks, and we can all make a sporting pretense that there are rules to be followed, even while ignoring half or more of them -- if we were half as civilized as we pretend at being, we would not have executed Saddam Hussein.
That should not be a terribly controversial statement. There is no morality to be gained by killing a man: you can make a case that killing a man who is a direct threat is a wash or a net gain, but rendering a man helpless, then pulling the trigger, or swinging the axe, or popping his neck -- there is no moral ambiguity there. Praise your country as you like, but know that the moral high ground on murder with paperwork is swampy indeed. Or protest about your own Christianity and the clash of religions and the incivility of the other all you wish, but do not pretend that that particular brand of Christianity holds virtues much higher than the supposed infidels. We all assert to only kill for the "right" reasons, after all. We just go about the set decoration a bit differently.
Of all of Christ's teachings, the one Christians rebel against most gleefully is the "turn the other cheek" nonsense that the old hippie spouted: while his similarly troublesome warnings against wealth are at least tortured into uneasy submission by televised preachers sitting on gilded thrones -- literally, gold-painted, intricately carved thrones, chairs that look like they were plucked directly from Hell's sitting room -- the admonitions against vengeance and violence are simply ignored. Dismissed outright, in fact; a mere momentary Biblical brain-fart by the otherwise sensible young man who is God in every respect but that one.
No matter, I suppose. We have a Starbucks in the temple now, so I suppose the morality of purposefully inflicted death can also be wrapped in a branded cupwarmer and sold just as easily, if it proves necessary. Perhaps a new Beatitude is in order: blessed are the masked hangmen among us, for they provide us video footage to soothe the sins we ourselves will not admit to.
If you are against capital punishment, on the other hand -- if you are against, more to the point, killing -- then you get no moral points for the easy cases. It is the hard cases that are the only test. The vilest of the vile, the ones that, no matter how civilized you pretend at being, no matter how much you may protest at being descended from mere animals, put a thin smile on your lips when you imagine their deaths: those are the ones that we are measured by. The Husseins, the Bundys, the McVeighs, the Hitlers, the ones so twisted and corrupted that the only way we can explain away their existence is to pretend they are something other than human, a different subspecies comprised in major part by Evil. But whether murder for vengeance is done by a single man, a frontier town, or a spit-polished nation, it is the same.
So with due respect -- which is to say, none -- don't celebrate Saddam's death with glee and call yourself a Christian. Don't salivate over a snuff videotape and then preach about the moral superiority of a cowardly, fear-obsessed America that prides institutionalized vengeance over even the thinnest scrap of mercy, or feel-good bluster over actual competence, or raw titillation over all the rest of it combined. Neither God nor country nor planet needs Dixie cup moralists with a blood lust right now; God help us, all three have them in spades already.
Some of the most supposedly moral, religious, Christian people I have known have been the most self-satisfiedly brutal in temperament, and they were conservatives all, simply because of the convenient nexus available between their own bigotries and those they presumed of their God. God may hold the only keys to either vengeance or forgiveness, mind you, but nothing smells of sulfur quite as strongly as a man or woman pronouncing themselves the enfleshed arbiters of His conscience. The God I know from his most vocal followers is petty, mean spirited, arbitrary, spiteful, hateful, bigoted, prejudiced, closed-minded, reckless, and ignorant. I learned early on, in my early tunings of my own moral compass, that anyone claiming at a God rough-hewn out of more rancid flaws than I myself carry is not a voice worth listening to; would that even a quarter of the rest of America have the same common sense I had when I was twelve.
So while I felt no pity for Saddam's death, I did at the least feel pity for us, as a nation and as a world, for all our religions and all our laws. The grim celebrations of the event were yet another reminder: we are not who we claim to be, not even the best of us. We have less honor than we claim, and fewer morals than we profess to. Saddam was caught, practically stuffed and mounted already. The killing blow itself was not justice met, just vengeance satisfied.
But my biggest regret is that, at every turn, this new millennium, we have chosen the most regressive paths. We have indeed evolved, as a civilization, over the last few hundred years, but it seems that no matter how high we build the towers, the foundation is built on sand. We can regress to more primitive emotions, and throw aside our own laws, and any clever set of men can play the world like a fiddle, and get any musical notes they want from us.
What a rotten, rotten decade this will be. From "them", and from "us", for every value of them and us available. An entire world led around by the nose by the most primitive brutes among us, on all sides, serial killers in caves meets the Crusades with videotape. Not much different from the fifty years before it, or the five hundred before that.
I can safely say that I have no pity for Saddam. But I have a great deal of pity for us, and I will regret his death only because of the unambiguous moral superiority it would have shown to keep the cretin alive and imprisoned -- a moral superiority that is above us, and will apparently forever remain so.
Saddam is dead. Another tin-cup Ozymandias, another man in history unworthy of the sand that covers him. Truly and without remorse, good riddance. He follows hundreds of thousands of better souls who, unlike him, deserved none of it. Let his requiem be a brief verbal farting of Fox News pundits, followed by the silence of eternity.
May the rest of us deserve better fates.