They killed Saddam Hussein today. I feel a kind of sadness. Not for the end, exactly, of a man who was a cruel dictator, but for another milestone in an unceasing unfolding tragedy. I've been reading up on Iraq...its leaders seem usually to come to a bad end. Assassination is the usual method, and this was a kind of slow drawn-out one. A dictator who quite successfully played the world game, gathering support from sheiks and soviets, freedom fighters and criminals, secularists and spiritualists, Saddam possessed the personal power found in few good and many bad men. How odd that image of him from 20 years ago of him shaking hands with a smiling Donald Rumsfeld.. It kind of sums up the arbitrariness of the world of bad men who also play that world game.
As tempted as I am to suggest the further execution of the rest of these bad men, and I wonder what my emotional response would be to images of George W. Bush's lifeless corpse swinging from the same gallows, mostly I think, why don't these bad bad men just leave the rest of us alone.
pray for peace.
Welcome to The Cahokian... A thousand years ago Cahokia — across the Mississippi from what is now St. Louis — was one of the biggest cities in the world. Now it's an empty green spot next to the highway. I'm a middle-aged gay man living in New York City, center of the world, future footnote on somebody's future map. Welcome to the new world.
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