Like many folks, I've been thinking about Saadam's death and the public broadcast of his hanging. Today's NYT editorial speaks to a lot of my feelings on the matter: I'm surprised by the shockingly cruel manner of this whole process, the mob atmosphere of the event, the lack of responsibility claimed by anyone. It's hard to conjure up compassion for this man, yet death is a blow in and of itself.

What stands out to me, however, is the first line of the editorial:

Saddam Hussein deserves no one’s pity. But as anyone who has seen the graphic cellphone video of his hanging can testify, his execution bore little resemblance to dispassionate, state-administered justice.

There's an interesting cluster of ideas--dispassionate, state-administration, and justice. The flipside, of course, would seem to be what Saddam experienced: passionate non-justice. I guess we could go down the usual line of critique about phallocentric cool reason constantly outmatching the feminine passions, but I see something different to say in this cluster. Could we be onto something important here?

A while ago, I commented on the tendency of lefty-types to fight what they saw us "unjust" rhetoric with extremely passioned responses. (Think of that Minutemen protest at Columbia, for example.) The shouting, emotives, and passionate displays seem, well, less than effective. Ann Coulter owes her career to the folks who shout her down during those expensive campus talks. Could it be that dispassionate action/rhetoric is a powerful tool that we have chosen to abandon because of its association with the traditional rationality/emotion binary? If so, how do we reclaim such a tool?

• jenny's blog
• Login or register to post comments