What He Was Thinking
I never cared much about the man. I laughed at the South Park episodes where he turned up as Satan’s delusional boyfriend, scheming from hell with all the menace of a middle manager. I’d heard the stories—the power, the terror, the body doubles and the paranoia—but they always felt distant, something happening to other people in another world. This morning I woke up and Saddam Hussein had been hanged.
I hadn’t slept much anyway. Ana had stayed over two nights ago, then we’d been at Munich airport together, and since she left I haven’t been able to quiet my head enough to sleep properly. Yesterday I spent the afternoon helping André and his father work on the garage, then the evening delivering pizzas. The kind of day that should knock you out. It didn’t. So I ended up in front of the TV at some bad hour, channel surfing into history.
Euronews had it first—a red ticker scrolling the news in multiple languages, sending the death out into the world in English and French and Arabic simultaneously. One by one every news channel broke from their regular programming. Meanwhile, somewhere else on the dial, N24 was still mid-segment on used car dealers, followed by something about Paris Hilton.
By the time the execution video surfaced online it had already cracked the top ten on Technorati. "Saddam" and "Saddam Hussein" sitting at number one and two. Of course. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go looking anyway—the same pull that makes you slow down at accidents.
Was any of it necessary? Did it end something, close something, make anything better? I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone does. What I keep coming back to is the simpler question: what does a person think about in those last steps? When the masked figures are saying whatever it is people say in that moment—do you think about what you did? The specific faces of the people you had killed? Your family? Your country? Does the mind go completely quiet, or does it flood? He wouldn’t have told you even if you’d asked. I know that much.
Whether the execution was justified, whether the trial was clean—everyone’s going to answer that differently, and I’m not sure my answer matters more than anyone else’s. I just know that some South Park episodes are going to hit differently from here on out.