It Takes a Special Kind of Stupid - Democratic Underground

alcibiades_mystery

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Wed Jan-03-07 04:00 PM
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It Takes a Special Kind of Stupid

It takes a special kind of stupid to make Saddam Hussein into a sympathetic figure, but the incompetent American administration and their out-of-control Iraqi Shiite puppets may well have accomplished it.

On the Today Show this morning - yes, that most mild and sycophantic of American news outlets - even flavorless Matt Lauer and his utterly vapid co-anchor Meredith Viera were cringing at the sight of the Hussein execution. Who could blame them? Mr. Hussein was handed over to a group of leather-jacketed masked men who looked for all the world like a bunch of Russian mob guys about to rob a Canarsie jewelry store. It didn't help that the room in which the hanging took place resembled something out of Saw III; that the aforementioned thugs chanted not only obscenities at the condemned, but even the name of a man indirectly responsible for hundreds of American deaths (perhaps more than Mr. Hussein himself!); or that Mr. Hussein, crafty and possessed of a hyper Pan-Arab masculinity complex to the end, insisted on proceeding sans hood, thereby drawing on what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called the ethical expressivity of the face. No, none of that helped.

In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, his classic study of the development of modern penal thought, Michel Foucault makes a somewhat stratling claim about execution. He opens the book with the pitiable spectacle of Damiens, a regicide, executed in the old medieval way - hung, pincered, disemboweled, drawn and quartered, etc. The whole horror story. Why does this go away? Liberal thought pretends that we have progressed as a species, and that we abolished capital punishment, or moved it into secret chambers and sought painlessness, because we have the adjudicated public torture morally untenable. Foucault doesn't think so. Rather, he argues, the "spectacle of the scaffold" became an inefficient form of power. Under monarchical regimes, or "sovereign power," power is exerted through visibility, the many looking at the one, whether it be the grand spectacle of the King, or the spectacle of the condemned. But this also establishes an object to resist or identify with; and, indeed, even the regicide Damiens had the crowd on his side before he finally expired, and was burned to ash and fed to dogs. The execution disappears from public because it is inefficient: any power that shows itself is less efficient than power that operates without providing an object. This is why the modern penal system, thought to be kinder and more moral than execution, emerges. It may be kinder, but it is also a much more insidious form of power.

Back to Mr. Hussein, then. Whatever we think about execution itself (I have come out on these boards against execution in ALL cases, no exceptions), I think we have to nod to Foucault on this one. From the perspective of power, public execution is an absolutely stupid way to convey a moral message, not because it is "immoral" or any such nonsense, but because it draws sympathy to the condemned, who he or she may be. That's why it was eliminated in the first place. Any public execution of Saddam Hussein whatsoever would have produced this effect; the fact that THIS particular execution was so tawdry only heightens it. So, even on this, the administration and their Iraqi cohorts couldn't get it right. Even on this simple thing. You'd think you could kill a brutal dictator without much backlash. You'd think. It takes a special kind of stupid to get the result we got...