Hyperlinked Humans

“I think it’s interesting, because there seems to be a lot of concern about the last two minutes of Saddam Hussein’s life, and less about the first 69 years, in which he murdered hundreds of thousands of people. That’s why he was executed.” – White House spokesman Tony Snow, on the controversy over the way Saddam Hussein was taunted before being executed.

Set aside for a moment the reasons Mr. Snow does not want us to dwell on the "execution" of Hussein. Once again, let's move the spotlight from the pseudo-event of the execution to what we, as hyperlink-happy audiences, make of it. In the midst of a holiday season in the United States, in the midst of a solemn and beautiful state funeral given to former U.S. president Gerald Ford, come the ugly pictures of the hanging of a brutal man. Something about the timing of it all tells of the dulling drama of our lives. So, was the timing contrived, a friend asked me at a swimming class last night. I don’t know, but it does give us something to go online and do a search on.

I have tried to avoid mulling over the maniacal execution, not to bury my head in the sand, but, in fact, to retrieve it. Here’s another instance of the imagery catching up with us even if we wanted to let a death be just that – a damned, wretched, state-sponsored death. At a Tully’s coffee shop in Seattle the morning after Hussein’s hanging, right next to the deliciously enticing posters of steaming holiday brews and oozing chocolate-chip cookies, the newspaper racks lay heavy with imposing front-page pictures of the tyrant who was hanged. Joy to the world. The juxtaposition of fear and consumption, once again, promised to help us navigate through the holidays and the hype.

The man and his deeds make me shudder, but so does the fact that we have no other way of dealing with killing than killing itself. And, having dealt with it, we try and make sense of it all through the pictures of the prey. Just like the terrorists of 9/11, the guard who took cellphone pictures of Hussein’s execution knew we’d be waiting for the photos to arrive.

The act, its imagery and the voyeuristic clicking on video streams that show us the macabre delight over the death of a madman makes me feel like a helpless, hyperlinked human. I don’t want to click, I just want to close that window, shut that page for now.For your sake and mine, I will not provide any hyperlinks with this post.