Coverage
Woke up yesterday to sleety new snow, on TV a bedraggled man being examined, flashlight illuminating the inside of his mouth. Dan Rather pontificated. It was really too much, so I flipped over to NBC and heard Tom Brokaw recite a line from "The Wasteland." Whimper not a bang. Brokaw pulled it off OK, I thought -- that flat midwestern speech style works as an antidote against cheese.
Not that I've done a thorough check on this, but I've noticed that headlines now refer to the former Iraqi autocrat as "Hussein," which was what the news called him before he became our number one bogeyman. After that, he was always "Saddam," which to American ears sounds like Gorzo the Mighty. Now he's morphed into your local bus station crazy, that tangle of hair the cops were hassling the other night, so I guess the Dark Lord overtones are superfluous.
Watching the coverage, I felt a mix of emotions: relief, curiosity, pity, a sense of justice, malicious glee: the goon got his comeuppance. "I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq...ready to negotiate," he's said to have told the soldiers that dug him out of his rathole. An attempt at dignity? Fatalistic humor? This is a guy who'd have people tortured and dismembered and then extort bribes from relatives if they wanted the body parts back. Said, by his ex-deputy Tariq Aziz, to have been out of touch with daily administration lately, focused on writing his series of romance novels. Theme: a just but firm ruler, and his troubles.
5:37:48 PM 
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