Defiant To The Last Weeks' Chip Wrappers

[This is a week of consideration, no interweb and busy, busy work late.]

It was Bonfire Night in the UK: ‘Remember, remember the 5^th of November, gunpowder treason and plot… I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot…’ So we let off fireworks and perhaps burned effigies of Guido Fawkes, a terror suspect from the 17^th century, but mainly doing the whole early autumn leaves and lumber rite, ooh, ah, wasn’t that a lovely rocket? - baked potato? Mmm, thank you, getting a bit nippy out isn’t it? kind of thing… except it was all ruined this year by the news that we had an enforced new effigy for the bonfires, as Saddam Hussein, the Arab bogeyman we managed to catch, was Sentenced To Death By Hanging…

The ghoulish insistence on reiterating the method at every opportunity [he’d asked to be shot by military firing squad, so maybe it was all a bit of knife twisting, metaphorical, that not only are you for it, Sadders, but there’ll be a short drop at the end of a rope and probable ex-dictator big white underpants soiling, not the swift chest bared and last cigarette number that would probably make a bitching mural for martyrdom…] seemed designed to emphasise a display of power, ours. ‘Don’t fuck with us, puppet leaders…’ This assertion of control is a bit feeble, it harks back to the original anti-anti-war argument, ‘Should we leave him in power, then, do you want that?’ which was rubbish then and is even more rubbish now “We” have removed him from power and Iraq is, by any criterion, totally even more fucked.

He did some reprehensible things as a leader, but this is unsurprising, given that that’s what people handed the big stick do [c.f. every head of any state ever, really, c.f. esp. our own Premier, T Blair, whose reminder of the ‘total and barbaric brutality’ of Hussein’s regime entirely overlooks the matter of the fact of his own part in being responsible, according to
which source you go to, of at least as much brutality against Iraqis – either in direct action or by proliferating a situation in which various factions have apparently free rein to run amok, to use the tabloid parlance - as Saddam Hussein was…]

The media coverage also seemed an attempt at finality, ‘closure’, e.g. the potted history the news channels were all running a version of, going from his entry to power, through our support, the now famous Rumsfeld handshake with ‘Our bastard’, as someone said about someone, Hussein’s whole shabby history as a chemical weapon lobbing despot – and where did he get those from again? - to the inevitable ‘strutting on the beaches of Kuwait’ cod-Hitlerian equating nonsense, [and if, by the way, anyone has a copy of a Thingy pamphlet from 2003 with that pic from the Sun that they talk about in that last link, I'd be grateful, etc...] through the first Gulf war exercise in half-arsed military showing off, the full sordid tale of this amplified gangster [we at the controls, turning him up to 11 then leaping back clutching our ears theatrically to the feedback and doing a pantomime search for the plug] to his closing court room denunciations, now ‘Defiant To The Last’ (© Everyone In The World, Nov 2006), as if he was actually removed from the court room and strung from the gibbet the second the judge banged the gavel.

My overriding thought through all of this charade was simply, obviously, I cannot share this glee. I do not support the death penalty. It misses the point, that if it’s a crime to take a human life, taking another doesn’t establish parity. It diminishes our humanity, whatever we view as humanity, if we consider ourselves special enough to make laws sanctifying human life by prohibiting the taking of it and then have the taking of a human life as the sanction for doing so. It does not serve justice, it only emphasises our chimpish viciousness.

At least Blair, when harried, admitted he didn’t think SH should die... But getting up last Monday to the press reports – including the Metro, with its big picture of a noose on the front page, I fucking ask you, exercising the bounds of taste and engaging in some incomprehensible and irrelevant collective exorcism of a ghost of a monster people do not believe in, a monster which has perhaps always just been an abstract to we of the west far away from Abu Ghraib [a Saddamite stronghold of nastiness and butcher’s hooks before the Americans moved in and got into the Overlook Hotel styled bad juju]… made me feel proud to be part of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known. We swept out the ashes with smug grins.

By last Wednesday, it was chip wrappers, today as I post this, it’s been superseded with more casualties on all sides in Iraq, deaths in Gaza, Israel, Sudan, you name it, and it’s all a bit shit, people getting interrupted for no good reason other than we can’t get it together enough to enjoy the sheer stroke of luck that fetched us up here, 93 million miles from the sun, in a prime spot for looking into the cosmos and going ooh, ah, wasn’t that a lovely rocket? Piss.