Honest Abe and Uncle Saddam

I just finished watching "House of Saddam", a joint BBC-HBO production documenting the political and personal life of Saddam Hussein in a style which combines the aesthetics and techniques of "John Adams" and "The Sopranos".

These two networks, and next to no others, have a way of forging a connection between the viewer and an on-screen character than said viewer would despise in a real context. Great rappers also possess this skill. And what a revelation it is to understand tyrants as mortals.

The most conspicuous aspect of this series was the presence of the Other side. By Other side, I don't mean to conjure up an amoral purgatory in which Saddam Hussein's sins are excused because of "context" or "extenuating circumstances" or any other such surrender to the insidious elixir of moral relativism.

I mean simply that this series was a shocking reminder of how little we really think about Saddam Hussein's enemies when we appraise his sins. Saddam Hussein did not make Iraq; Iraq made Saddam Hussein. Saddam ruled Iraq because he was better at conspiracy and revenge than all other comers.

For example, let us consider the crime for which Saddam Hussein was executed. He was executed for brutally retaliating against a whole town for an assassination attempt on himself.

In 1982, Saddam Hussein visited a Shia town in the south of Iraq. As he left the town, members of the Da'wa Party, a Shia Islamist Party loyal to Iran, fired 300 rounds at Saddam Hussein's car. Think Lee Harvey Oswald on crack.

Saddam Hussein replaced his slain driver and returned to the town. He gave a formulaic speech about the cowardice of his attackers and the bravery and integrity of true Iraqis. And then he left. And then his men arrested, tortured, and killed hundreds of people.

Of course, this reads as a brutal affair. But what I saw in "House of Saddam" was an appraisal of all points of view, the rarest of things when discussing Saddam Hussein.

It also reminded me that Saddam Hussein was executed for what was deemed to have been a criminally brutal reaction to the assassination attempt by the Da'wa Party. And who was it that executed Saddam Hussein? It was an American-protected government whose Prime Minister was a founding member of the....wait for it.....Da'wa Party.

This does not mean that Saddam Hussein crime's were invented; it simply means that they did not occur in a vaccuum, that their targets were rarely angels, and that the forces that have sat in judgement of Saddam Hussein have no shortage of blood on their own hands, or oozing from their own pens.

Consider: the political leaders of the south of Iraq declare that they are not loyal to Iraq, but to themselves and, indeed, a foreign nation (Iran). The President of Iraq then has 300 bullets fired at his car when he visits the south of Iraq.

Does that not sound like the south of Iraq aims to secede from the nation? That was their plan. Whether their plan was justifiable or not is totally separate from the fact that they attempted to implement their plan. And their target, Saddam Hussein, struck back.

Let us consider Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln has had more books written about him than any other person who has ever lived other than Yeshua Ha-Nostri, aka Jesus Christ. Lincoln is a demigod, as has been idolized by statesmen of rather harsh stripes, from Bismark to Ataturk to Stalin to Hussein.

What did Lincoln do that these supposed devils so admire? Well, he made a statement in blood and iron. That statement read as follows, "in the interest of preserving the unity of the nation, all laws and morals are negotiable".

The south of the United States made it clear that they did not consider themselves a part of the United States, and the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, got a half-million people killed to prove his point that the sanctity of the nation outweighed ALL other considerations up to and including habeus corpus and posse comitatus, which are fancy terms for legalized tyranny. One may agree with this sacrifice, but one may not ignore it.

And how was Saddam Hussein any different? He made the same decision as Lincoln. "The sanctity of the nation outweighs ALL other considerations". Add to that a uniquely artificial nation and a uniquely violent brand of politics, and we get Saddam Hussein.

I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein was a great statesman. But we should never lose sight of the fact that we are not so fundamentally different as Americans as we delude ourselves into thinking.

There are real moral differences between Abraham Lincoln and Saddam Hussein. But the biggest reason for the universe of difference between how these men are evaluated has much less to do with morals than it does with the conspicuous lack of television in the 1860's.

Sup Wit Shoe?

What a bizarre yet simple twist of fate this is. President Bush was never so powerful or popular as he was in April of 2003, when Iraqis pelted statues of Saddam Hussein with their shoes in what was essentially the best 1940's-style newsreel footage of all time.

Alas, we have since grown to understand the Iraqis' rage more fully with the passage of time, and we have realized that they have shoes not just for Saddam, but for us, and indeed for themselves.

As for the attacker, I can not muster any particularly rational argument against what he did. I feel that legally and intellectually and morally, it is hard to argue against any Iraqi's right to attack any servant of the American government which invaded and occupied their country, regardless of professed intentions.

So my problem is not with the attacker. In fact, I admire his courage and his aim. Surely he knew he would go to prison for assaulting the President of the United States. But he did it. And he knew that he could not possible kill Bush. All things considered, most acts of violence are far more cowardly than this one was.

Still, I took absolutely no joy in seeing this spectacle, though I'm sure that many Bush-haters did. The reason I did not find this entertaining in the least bit is two fold.

The first is that I do not hate George Bush. I hate very few people, in fact. And this occasion reminded me of the few things I actually respect about Bush, specifically his physical prowess and his sense of humor.

I admire the fact that Bush keeps in shape, and let me tell you, no other president we've ever had (except for the one we're about to have....yes the fuck We Did) could have dodged that shoe. Bush was on some cougar shit there. And he laughed about it afterwards. While I don't respect Bush's brand of humor, I respect that he appreciates the value of laughter.

The second reason for my sobriety around this YouTube riot is that this was a physical assault on the presidency and I was extremely unimpressed with the quality of the security.

I understand that the media room is supposed to be the "safe area", when the security work is essentially done because every person has been thoroughly searched and nobody else can enter. I get that but, not to be impolitic, when you're in fucking Baghdad in a room full of Iraqis, you might want to step your game up and assume ill will from everybody in the room.

The simple fact is that a man assaulted the president with something that could have injured him, but not killed him (but that could not have been know as the attack unfolded, in this age of the shoe-bomb) and the line of sight between the attacker and the president was unbroken even as another object was hurled by the same man.

I don't know enough about professional security to know whether my critique has any merit, but I know enough about my own intuition to know that it unnerved me.

It takes not a leap but a simple skip in imagination to consider what would've happened if that first shoe had struck the president squarely in the face, visibly exposed blood, and knocked him off his feet. I'm here to tell you that wars have started over less.

All those overly-wrought nerdy analyses aside, it somehow just made perfect sense. An Iraqi man physically assault the President while condemning him for civilian casualties and calling him a dog, and Bush's honest response was to smile and turn the whole thing into another act of persecution in the test of trials that all great men must navigate, all the more proof that he was right all along and shall eventually be redeemed.

The Nature of Things

I was talking recently with my right hand man about the relative virtues of the Greek and American minds. Our consensus was that while the American mind matched and eclipsed the Greek for at least the first one and a half centuries of our nation, it has recently been bureaucratized and inundated and OMG'd from divine revolution to soul-less but competent management to moral, ethical, and intellectual decrepitude.

The American mind has been utterly disaggregated with technocracy, with myths, with virtuality, with an endless inundation of images and sounds imploring us to borrow, to buy, and to never settle for anything, including our first wives. In a sentence, we have lost our ability to recognize the Nature of Things.

The Greeks, due to the conspicuous lack of YouTube, TacoBell, iPods, or even billboards, had plenty of time to sit and think. The American mind no longer has this time, and this is evident in American actions. The Greeks were able to get to the Nature of Things.

Deliberation before action made for inordinately great political thinkers and actors in Greece and early America. But when America became swamped in an endless deluge of information, gossip, entertainment, and consumption all blended seamlessly into an inseparable goulash whose whole is even more worthless than its mostly useless parts, deliberation came to be seen as vaguely pathetic, as a sign of a jellied spine and a European (read: gay) orientation.

American actions now are not based on the Nature of Things; instead, they are based on a foundation of self-imposed delusion which holds that an American hand at the tiller is enough to defy the Nature of Things and to superimpose ideological solutions onto problems whose Natures are willfully ignored.

For example, 9/11 was an attack by a stateless entity, and the Bush administration responded by overthrowing two states in set-piece battles (in which the enemies of the American Army had decidedly few "pieces"). The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad would have made a sick newsreel in 1945, but as a response to 9/11, it fundamentally ignored the Nature of the threat.

We now have the issue of the big three American car companies and whether we should bail them by confiscating the wealth of other citizens. The Nature of the problem, of course, is that the world no longer exists where an American company can make cars nobody wants and pay folks 50 bucks per hour to do so. That world no longer exists. That is the Nature of Detroit's problem, yet most proposed solutions ignore this obvious truth.

My heart is literally heavy at the thought of all those folks losing their jobs, but did not the candle makers all get laid off when we invented electricity? That's the nature of progress; victims are a part of the equation, just as surely as beneficiaries are. If we spend the peoples' money on the car companies, how is that different from spending my money to bail out VCR companies after the DVD was created?

It seems that we need to get back to the Nature of Things, which will require the renunciation of the myth that we can have a perpetually and universally wealthy, healthy, and safe society. That is a myth, and it is a myth whose misguided attempts at implementation have caused more misery than anything else in the history of the world.

Spare the Rod

I know that I am not alone when I say that my consumption of news has trickled to a pittance since the November Revolution. Partly this is due to exhaustion and relief. It is also due to an urge to not have My President's victory cheapened and cliched beyond redemption before he even takes office.

But my self-imposed exile from political news is also because of people like Rod Blagojevich. I had never heard of this douchebag before today, but I knew he existed nonetheless. Still, attributing a face and a few sordid details to the archetype that I knew existed was rather illuminating in a pathetic way.

First of all, LOOK at this guy. He looks like a cross between a 1980's game-show host and the bad guy from a Karate Kid movie. He's just a mess. And I don't mean that in the sense that he is not handsome by our decadent and materialistic standards; I mean that in the sense that you just KNOW this guy is a scumbag.

Scumbags, of course, are commonplace among alpha males, and one might even argue that certain crises can only be effectively managed with a certain dose of scumbaggery. But Blagojevich wasn't even a big-picture scumbag; his ambition was so narrow, and his greed directed towards such pedantic lusts, that I almost would have felt better were he more devious.

This man has the authority to appoint the successor to Barack Obama, who is the most popular human being on the planet at this moment. Now, assuming Blagojevich were purely cynical and ambitious and sociopathic, what would he do? Well, he would look at this purely as an opportunity for personal advancement.

Which is what he did. And which is what, frankly, most politicians would have done. But how did Blagojevich DEFINE personal advancement? On on the one hand, he could have ingratiated himself with the most powerful person on Earth, who would have owed him one. On the other hand, he could risk the ire of that man as well as his freedom, his job, his reputation, and his property for some money in an envelope.

And what did he do? Well, we know what he did. Our system has so much room for legal corruption, that when a politician is caught in such a flagrant act so far out of our corrupted "legal" norms, it is nothing less than an act of ethical pornography. Selling Senate seats. And leaving the house in the morning with that hair.

This is the fragility of Obama. We're all in that secret club now. We feel different. We don't know why exactly, but we know it's real. But I also know that I despise nearly every politician I know of. Obama's revolution cannot survive him. Blagojevich reminds us of the rule to Obama's exception.

Poor Us

Before the election of Barack Obama, eggheads and rednecks alike pontificated on how radical a thing it would be for a black man to be elected President. And while Obama's election was, in my mind, the greatest single event in our history as a nation, it was not as revolutionary as many might think. Indeed, another barrier, no less formidable than race, has been eclipsed by several American presidents.

It is bemusing and a bit irritating to hear knee-jerk leftists bemoan the lack of non-white presidents among our first 43. "Look at all those white faces" they drone as they scan the visages of our first 43 presidents. This fixation, however, is ignorant to realistic expectation and common sense and it entirely misses the larger point of how far America had truly come even before the election of Obama.

From the founding of our nation until about 40 years ago, 90% of American citizens were white. The white majority is not now nearly as large, and it will continue to shrink, but it is a matter of historical fact that, for the huge majority of our history, whites were 90% of the population. Given that simple fact, what other color could our first 43 presidents possibly have been? Of course they were white!

"What about the blacks?" one might retort. America's sins against blacks need not be catalogued here, but if you can show me a country that has elected a member of a 10% minority to lead it, I'll show you a war that George W. Bush has won. In other words, the whiteness of America's first 43 presidents has been drastically inflated in importance. The lack of women, in fact, is infinitely more relevant, since they represent 50% of the population and 0% of presidents.

That issue aside, we must ask ourselves what this race-obsession obscures. Specifically, it obscures class. And the issue of class is where America made huge and unprecedented strides which were real and historically important before Mr. Obama arrived. Put simply: since World War II, Americans have much more often than not elected men to lead them who were born poor.


Let us consider our presidents since FDR, since the office of the American President became the most powerful office in the world. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. 12 men. And only 3 aristocrats. Only in America.

Think about that. Only 25% of our imperial presidents were born into status and/or wealth. Just three men from aristocratic dynasties, the Kennedys and the Bushes. The rest, the other 75%, were born normal and nameless men and rose to become, for their own respective moments and by their own respective merits, the most powerful men in the world.

This is a moral revolution in government that I have not heard anyone address amid all the hoopla surrounding Obama. Yes, he's black. But he was also born poor. And that has as much to do with his worldview as anything else.

Indeed, the huge majority of post-war American presidents were born poor. Poor. And look where they ended up. Again, ask yourself, as one must do often with America, "what other country in the world...." To ask the question is to answer it.

So, the next time we look at that row of photographs of our presidents, let's go deeper than race. Let's consider the fact that to look at these men and see an indistinguishable white mass is simply racist. Let's consider the fact that Ronald Reagan was raised by a single mother in a poverty very few Americans can imagine. Despite what one may think of the man's politics, was Reagan not evidence of the promise of America?

We should not diminish the importance of Barack Obama's election; few things are more important. But neither should we diminish the edifices and boundaries that we had collectively shattered long before that day but received such little credit for. It took a while for a white country to elect a black president. But it took much less time for a rich country to elect a poor president. We deserve credit for both.