Saddam and me: Oh, the memories!

I know Americans right now are much more preoccupied with the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Barbaro the Horse, but before the year grows much older, I want to say a few words in memoriam of a man who I feel never got a fair trial in the court of U.S. public opinion: Saddam Hussein.

I write not to praise Saddam, but to bury him. No matter how many times he's been made out to be a monster, once I saw the grisly, grainy footage of the man's execution, it became hard for me to view him as anything but an indignified, helpless human being. I've never been a fan of the guy, but seeing him get killed on YouTube and then made fun of on late night television made me want to prepare this little eulogy of sorts. Because truth be told, I've always felt a curious familiarity with the man.

Part of this has to do with where I was when I first heard Saddam had been captured. I was covering a Sunday morning jazz shift at KJHK, and once I saw the news on the computer, I read a short update during the next break, which I think came between Coltrane's "India" and Brian Eno's "Midnight Rain of Green Wrens at the World's Tallest Building." After the show, I drove through Burrito King to get a tamale, and the guy working the window was quick to tell me the news. "Yep," I said in acknowledgement. "We got him."

The next day, that same phrase was pasted all over the papers. I was entranced by the photos of the man emerging from his so-called spider hole, where he'd reportedly been reading Dostoevsky and growing a famous salt and pepper beard. I kept the special "We Got Him" section of the Kansas City Star in my car, and one night a month or so after the capture I made Jennifer drive down Massachussets Street while I held it out of the window and shouted the news of his capture with all the fervor of a newsie on VJ Day.

My interest in Saddam began in the first Gulf War, when a Marine we had written a letter to wrote back to our class and told us how Saddam was "a shark in the swimming pool of life." He'd killed a lot of people, the letter said, including his own brother. We were suitably impressed, and you would have been hard-pressed to find any 4th grader in that classroom who had anything good to say about the Iraqi tyrant.

Just over a decade later -- long after Saddam had slipped from the daily thoughts of most Americans, but before he was destined to share the stage with Bin Laden as one of the free world's most wanted -- I had a profound hallucination one night that Saddam Hussein was sitting in a parked car outside my apartment complex. I can't say what exactly prompted this vision of a Saddam-Bogeyman, and I didn't actually believe Mr. Hussein had come all the way to Lawrence to pay me a surprise visit, but in retrospect it makes for an interesting harbinger of the political climate to come.

Once 9/11 hit and the beating of the war drums grew louder, I encountered some interesting Saddam iconography. On a winter night in Prague, my friend Adam and I were dining in a non-stop cafe when a haggard old man approached, pulled a pair of wax figures from a tattered gunnysack and set them on the table. They were white candles carved into little effigies Saddam and Osama, and they were for sale. We were too drunk to think of any response to the man, who kept pointing to each of the candles and saying, "Saddam...Osama." Eventually he moved on to an American couple, whose appalled expressions made us giggle in spite of ourselves.

A couple of years later, in Hamburg, my neighbor Khalid from Jordan traded me an Iraqi 10 dinar bill with Saddam's face on it for an American 2-dollar bill. (It was a good trade for both of us. Khalid collected currency, but wasn't sure a U.S. 2 dollar bill existed, and I certainly never expected to have such politically loaded cash in my pocket. Unfortunately, I lost the thing before I could come back to America and do a photo series of attempting to buy propane at rural gas stations with my brand new 10 dinar bill.) Back in the States, I found a series of "exploding terrorist heads" fireworks featuring Saddam's face painted on a fountain cone, along with others resembling Bin Laden, Gadaafi and Arafat.

My favorite Saddam memory, however, was the 2005 news features about his prison behavior. How he loved Doritos, but hated fruit loops. How he preferred Bush Sr. to his no-good son. How he told the prison guard he should find a woman, not too pretty, not too ugly; not too smart, not too dumb. One who can cook and clean. Sounds reasonable to me.

Unfortunately, those good old days are gone, and as Iraq grew worse and worse, the man was taken to an undisclosed location and strung up. It's not that I didn't know it was coming, but I didn't think it would be carried out so tastelessly. And in the face of such greater violence, I don't think anyone was that impressed.

Now when I think of Saddam, I can't help but get Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" stuck in my head, the song which begins with the words, "They're selling postcards of the hanging." Even more chilling if you substitute "postcards" for "videos," as so many astute bloggers did in the days following the execution.

Like I said, I'm not trying to make a martyr of the man. I've read plenty about Saddam, about his squandering of Iraqi resources and the brutal murders of so many of his people. I accept that he is a bully on the playground of life. But the way America and her henchmen handled Saddam's execution didn't make us look so good either. The only difference is, neocons don't make for very cool candles.

photo taken from Welcome To The Blog at http://laurabush.info/ Thanks!