A Good Day

The problem with capital punishment isn't that it's not fair. It's that it's too fair. The responsibility of human beings is to be as just as possible without losing our humanity in the process. The death penalty smacks of ritualized, fetishized premeditated murder. How people can eat hors d'ouvres at American executions is beyond me.

But today, one of the world's great tyrants was sentenced to death, and here's what I absolutely do not want to happen: I don't want people to use the immorality of capital punishment to further lambast what they see as a loud gesture of American imperialism. There are 25 million Iraqis who were going to be free of their torturer regardless of his sentence - who have been free for several years. And they must know in stronger and bolder language than has been provided that the American government has no plans to colonize their country.

Saddam Hussein will be served with justice. Would I prefer him to spend the rest of his life whithering away in a prison cell, far from his instruments of torture and underground palaces, with no power besides walking (or crawling) across the very small floor space to pick up his dinner? Sure. The worst punishment for Saddam Hussein isn't to be dead. It's to be incomparably pathetic and small. It's to be common and pennyless and unimportant and abandoned only to memories of sadism. As it happens, the man has at most several months of consciousness (factoring in the appeals process) in front of him before he enters the abyss. There should have been many, many more. But it wasn't going to happen. And I'll go out on a very reasonable wing and say this is a good day no matter what. There are children dancing in the street in marvelous mockery of their former leader, who could not have done that a decade before. The incompetence of those who orchestrated and orchestrate the war in Iraq can (and should) be discussed tomorrow and for many days after. But this is their day, and I'm glad they can't hear the cynicism already being leveled at these proceedings.