What He Thought

I couldn’t sleep. Ana had been over, and I was already drained after the Munich airport. Then I spent the afternoon helping André and his father build a garage, the evening delivering pizzas, and by the time I got into bed, sleep wasn’t happening. The TV was all I had.

I saw it first on a news crawl: Hussein was dead. They’d hanged him. Within minutes, every channel cut their programming, all of them showing the same thing over and over.

The execution video was out almost immediately, everything but the final drop. On Technorati he was climbing the trending list right alongside Paris Hilton and used car dealers. People wanted to see it.

I kept thinking about what went through his head in those last minutes. Walking to the gallows, masked figures speaking at him, did he think about the people he’d killed? His family? Did he know the whole world was watching? He wouldn’t have told the truth if they’d asked anyway.

Whether it was justified, whether the trial was fair—that’s something each person has to decide for themselves. I don’t have an answer. But I know I’ll never watch those South Park episodes the same way.