Glum

[poliphilo]

I stayed up till midnight- just. Ailz and I stood at the bedroom window and watched fireworks bristle along the skyline.

I got a call from Bolton in the wee, small hours. Happy, shining people wishing me a happy new Year. The lads had gone back to Sara's house and were partying with her parents. 

I'm not a party person.

I keep coming back to Saddam. There's a jolly picture in the press this morning showing him with his neck broke. His executioners (more like a Shia lynch mob actually) jeered him and loosed the trap door while he was still saying his prayers. All through the process he showed courage and dignity. The new Iraq makes the old Iraq (Saddam's Iraq) look good.

I'm so ashamed of what America and Britain have done.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Robert Browning talks about

"That sad, obscure, sequestered place
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul."

I've always liked that.

Yes, I don't suppose that Saddam was essentially any worse than the rest of us. He was a strong, hard man in a brutal, warrior society. Our medieval kings (some of whom we admire) behaved in just the same way.

I read this morning that he was in the habit of feeding the birds and watering the weeds in his prison yard.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

That line of poetry is breathtakingly exactly right.

He watered the weeds? Gosh.

He was, like anyone, scared at the end--easy to see on the video.

He had no empathy, and yet he fed birds? I am perplexed.

Maybe he did have empathy, and was a sadist.

I am very glad I am not God. I don't know what to think.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think he was complex. Aren't we all? Another thing he did that scarcely fits the received view of him is write romantic novels.

Which he chose to publish anonymously- though everyone in Iraq knew it was him.