FROM THE SPIDER HOLE TO THE GALLOWS

I can't believe that I actually looked at my webpage yesterday and said to myself, "Oh, me. Oh, my. Whatever shall I write about?" And then I continued to look at the blank white page, thinking about starting the writing with a little quotation from Ernest Hemingway about a blank white sheet of paper being one of the most daunting enemies one will ever face--a la writer's block. Amazing. The biggest news to come down the 'pike in a coon's age is staring me right in the face and I was prepared to write a post about the...what was I talking about, again? Something. About. A. Block. In. My. Muse's. Digestive. Tract?

Fuck it. I'll start off with a quotation from Papa Bear, anyway: "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." For Whom the Bell Tolls--1940.

The despot was executed yesterday. Saddam Hussein. (As an ancillary question, does this count as the third corner in the Celebrity Triangle of Death? Will Saddam be forever linked with Gerald Ford and James Brown? Or does the death have to be a natural one? I'm not really up on all the rules of the Death Trifecta board game. Fuck it. Saddam Hussein?! Come on down! You're the next contestant on the Triangle of Death!

Said the Devil.)

It warms my heart to see a man so-deservedly reap what he had sown. It truly does. Call me barbaric: I fully support capital punishment, in some instances. Saddam is the poster child for the justice of capital punishment. The son-of-a-bitch actually deserved to die thousands of times, but the laws of anatomical physics strictly forbid killing someone more than once. It's bullshit, but it's a law that we have to get behind: Once you're dead, you're dead. (Please don't ask Rasputin that; he would probably beg to differ.)

(I wonder if it would have been considered barbaric if they had brought Saddam to the edge of death umpteen times before finally extinguishing the fat spider's life. Probably, but ask the Kurds, and also ask the relatives of the men, women and children that Saddam had had killed during his career as an insanely violent dick. Er, dictator. They might have differing views on the situation.)

Remember the good old times, when Saddam was pulled from his "spider hole," the despot dirty and unshaven and twitchy with fear and anxiety? I do. That was the last time I felt anything akin to support for this infernal war. But I musn't get off-topic, here. (Too much material, not enough time. Plus, that Patriot Act has me biting my tongue in some instances. Patriot Act. Huh. Unintended irony, brought to you by the chimpanzee, Curious George. Now back to your previously-scheduled broadcast.)

Saddam took his execution ostensibly as a man. He refused the death-shroud and clutched a holy book before he was offed. The fucking gall of the man. When had he been devout? When had he been religious? Had it been when he gassed the Kurds? Had he been religious when he'd had his two sons-in-laws killed after promising them quarter if and when they came back to Iraq? Were his gaudy palaces his way of showing his devotion to his Lord? Living a jet-set lifestyle as his countrymen suffered greatly under the U.N. sanctions to which he refused to bow?

The man called himself a martyr before he was hung by the neck until dead. What a snake. What a fucking snake. Good riddance and all of that. With this boon to the war effort, we Americans should be out of that hellhole by 2029, at the absolute latest. Nothing like racheting up the timetable, eh?

By the way, Middle Easterners have a problem with feet. It's something like the height of insult to show a man the bottom of one's foot. With that in mind, Saddam? That foot at the top of the page is brought to you, with undying love. Non-peace, sir.

Saddam, rest in horror, dude. May the road rise up to grind you into meat and may the wind always be razor-sharp and bludgeoning at your back.