The Saddam Sex Tape

After Saddam Hussein was lynched by mocking thugs who, to judge by their dress, intended to follow the execution by knocking over a convenience store, a grainy cell-phone video of the tacky, disgusting affair zapped up to the internet and began making--pardon the cliché--the obligatory rounds.

Others have already noted the masturbatory glee of our domestic necrophiliac squad, but noting their sado-sexual pleasure alone doesn't make explicit enough the aesthetic connection between Saddam's execution and Paris Hilton's bored hotel-room tryst, or between Saddam's execution and Colin Farrell's embarrassing hooker tryst ("Yeah, baby, you've got my breakfast, lunch, and dinner."), or between Saddam's execution and The-Dude-Who-Played-Screech-On-Saved-By-The-Bell's scatalogical tryst with a couple of bimbos. Just one more video of a guy getting fucked.

Fareed Zakaria, author of such children's classics as Illiberal Democracy, wrote:

The saga of Saddam's end--his capture, trial and execution--is a sad metaphor for America's occupation of Iraq. What might have gone right went so wrong.

It is simply not true. America's occupation of Iraq could no more have gone right than a Vegas date with a coked-up hotel heiress or a motel encounter between a Hollywood star, a black hooker, and a video camera. It is not in the execution that things went awry; it's the thing itself that's wrong. There's the old expression about putting lipstick on a pig, and that certainly holds here. But more to the point, Saddam's snuff-film execution and the occupation that occasioned it show that some people--too many people; too many powerful people--are as careless and insensate about killing as the rich and tawdry are about fucking.