A Pilgrim’s Digression

Today’s news is preoccupied with the lighter side of war. A Time article titled Inside the Secret World concerns the discovery of Saddam’s eldest son’s house. Uday Hussein apparently lived like an American-style playboy. The picture in Time shows a grinning female American soldier, in full military garb including helmet and M-16, stretched on one of Uday’s beds like a mischievous version of Manet’s Olympe. Another article from CNN, titled Saddam’s ‘Love Shack’ Discovered, details how Saddam apparently still lived in the 1960’s. His walls were decorated with lurid fantasy paintings of naked women and snakes and heroic male warriors that could have come from the covers of the most pulpy of our pulp science fiction novels. There were mirrors on the ceiling and shag carpet on the floor. Meanwhile, Uday printed hundreds of pornographic images from the internet and plastered his walls with them. American soldiers also found his personal supply of heroin, as well as an HIV testing kit. Since taking up residence in Uday’s home, Marines have been feeding live sheep to his menagerie of exotic cats. Some of Uday’s personal photographs have made their way onto the news websites … Uday in shorts, tee-shirt, and sunglasses, wearing what looks like a cowboy hat; he is surrounded by friends in summer garb, such as shorts and Hawaiian shirts. They are all laughing. Uday in a leather jacket sitting on a purple motorcycle with a woman on the back; Uday in tuxedo standing in front of a microphone accompanied by another man with a tambourine (did he moonlight as a wedding singer?). These stories humanize people we have come to regard as monsters. No doubt they were monsters. However, there are a couple reasons these stories only appear after the war is over. One may be that information about the personal lives of these men was not widely known before they were killed in war. That is plausible, though one suspects the government probably knew more than they ever released before: Uday’s email address was udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com, so he didn’t exactly try to assume an alias on-line. The main reason why such information is only coming forth now, though, is that it is more difficult to hate someone who hangs on his wall an airbrushed painting of a busty blonde, with a green demon behind her, pointing a finger at a mythic hero. Such details complicate the story and make Saddam seem more like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons than the Butcher of Baghdad.

All these stories of the personal lives of dictators lead me to think that our soldiers are probably going to do some looting of their own, and before long we will begin to see the personal effects of these men come up for auction on eBay. Supposedly they found Saddam’s boxer shorts in his townhouse. I can see it now: “1 pair Saddam’s boxers, sz L. Pee stained! NR.”