OK, you try reading about politics from a laptop computer screen while temporarily wearing a black patch over your “good” eye. A dizzying whirl of words flash by fast as Burma Shave signs on the interstate. Almost enough, but not quite, to make me turn to television – shudder – for my daily news fix. But no. Talking Twinkies were never my thing.
Meanwhile, it’s the “Uncle Saddam Show.”
“You know that this is all a theater by Bush, the criminal, to help him with his campaign,” the Associated Press reports Saddam Hussein as supposedly saying.
Did I imagine suddenly the United States handed Saddam Hussein over to Iraq, and he had a hearing for his play-trial next year? Apparently during captivity, he’s lost considerable weight. Now Saddam looks so fit, he must have finally perfected “THE SADDAM SPIDERHOLE DIET AND FITNESS PLAN” before launching it on late-night TV infomercials.
In his pinstriped charcoal jacket, open-collared white dress shirt, crisp dark trousers, polished black shoes, and neatly trimmed beard, the deposed dictator looks like a fashion plate stepping right out of the pages of GQ – albeit handcuffed and chained at the waist.
Yes, Dude seems delusional, as though he’s really running things, a quality he shares with the Bushling.
Silly me, but I’m fighting feeling even a frisson of sympathy for the jailed monster-du-jour Saddam Hussein, despite his being described recently as “demoralized and dejected” in prison.
Oh, please! Take that Kleenex box and shove it.
And yet … when I see a recent headline on AOL, “Saddam Goes to the State Fair,” my first thought was, “Wow, you’re kidding, they let him out for that?”
Certainly news reports portray disgraced tyrant-in-captivity Saddam Hussein as your basic model prisoner – plumping up on American muffins despite worrying about his weight, tending his tiny jailhouse herb garden, writing a reflective, nostalgic poem or two (including one about GWB) – but this was ridiculous … the fair?
Couldn’t you just imagine Saddam at the state fair, big-eyed with curiosity, lurching from Skee-Ball to Wheel of Fortune, in a frenzy, dragging his leg-irons behind him, trying to win an electric frying pan so he could maybe heat up falafel in his cell?
Then, after Saddam fended off the relentless hordes of camera-toting, fair-going tourists and worked up an honest appetite – don’t you know it’s exhausting cavorting around in chains – couldn’t you just see him trying to decide between cotton candy and a corndog, before getting both and blowing his diet?
Sure.
Later on, when Saddam had slaked his lesser appetites, I could see his keepers herding him back into a cage for the night – near the other freakishly fascinating displays, like an invisible dance troupe representing the Bill of Rights – whipping him lightly about his ankles with a willow switch for effect.
Right. These images of a subdued Saddam swirl in my brain. Until, that is, I get the actual AP story, “Damaged Statue of Saddam on Display at Kentucky Fair.”
Ohhhhh.
Basically, Saddam’s head, torn from a damaged statue of the deposed Iraqi dictator, has been displayed at a state fair, on loan from an American military-history museum. Just the head. The body was either destroyed by U.S. troops in a fit of overzealous glee, or is resting, maimed and warehoused, at some undisclosed location.
I don’t know about you, but to me this barbaric jubilation smacks of symbolic retaliation against “the enemy” for all those “live” beheading videotapes.
It’s beneath us. We’re better than that.
Not only is it undignified and atavistic, it sets a bad precedent. “America,” Louisville talk-radio host Francene Cucinello told the AP, “is too good for that.” A state fair, she stresses, is simply not the appropriate venue for such a war relic “representing so many American and Iraqi deaths in the quest for freedom. A museum has the reverence that’s necessary. It’s too important to have on display at a fair.”
Indeed.
The Kentucky State Fair’s characterized by its organizers as “an 11-day sensory overload of rides, exhibits, food, crafts, animals, contests, music and games.” Uh, right! I can just see Saddam being hawked on their Thrillway like a soft-pretzel with mustard.
“Step right up.”
Forget Alfredo Garcia, John the Baptist, the Headless Horseman. How would we feel if some other conquest-crazed country publicly gloated over their wartime excesses like that?
Think it over. It’s really unfair.
