My Five Year Plan

My consciousness of a world out there was formed by two defining texts, each equally important. The first is my well-worn copy of National Geographic’s Our World, a factbook with large color photographs of countries around the world (Afghanistan, in my mind, will always be an image of a young boy chowing down on an oversized buckwheat pancake.) The second is American news coverage of the First Gulf War. The missile going down the chimney. Babies removed from their resperators. All these signs and codes and symbols - many of them falsified, all of them simplified, video-game like in their insistence on the superiority of Our Might (the fact that we had the Patriot Missile, even better than the Scud Missile, is something that stood out in my six-year-old conscious).

Saddam has always been a part of my world, and the worlds of many of my generation. Too young to understand the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, to have ever been roped into Cold War narratives of technological competition and proxy wars. Saddam, the invasion of Kuwait, the burning of the oil wells, that damned beret, the mustache. He’s a villain - evil to the core, but he was our villain, our bad guy, our figure of moral depravity.

We built our cultural texts around Saddam, many of them comedic. Jerry Haleva, a sometimes contract lobbyist from Sacramento, played Saddam in five films, nearly all of them comedies. His peculiarities - the beret, the physical awkwardness - are devices we use to distance ourselves from any acknowledgement of Saddam as threat. Instead, Saddam emerges as text, as ironic movie star, as postmodern icon. He was the flamboyantly gay villain of the South Park feature, a film he was reportedly showed by United States military personnel to humiliate him while in American custody, our appropriation of his image used against him, a man who used his own image to instill fear in the Iraqi people. He was the subject of curiosity news - about his four novels, each supposedly a misbegoton sprawl of melodramaitc and conspiratorial Arabic prose. Perhaps the most astute use of Saddam as cultural product comes from the Coens’ Big Lebowski - in that film, Jeff Bridges’ The Dude, a hippie burnout who is the sum total of the competing discourses surrounding him, dreams of Saddam, integrating his legendary image into sexual fantasy. The United States needs Saddam - first we built him to satisfy political needs, and then when he turned on us, we reconstructed him to satisfy cultural needs. And then we reconstructed him to satisfy, based on whosever account you believe, political or economic needs. In the post Cold War era he represented our disillusionment, the end of the grand foreign-policy narrative of the previous half-century - we all knew that as evil as he was, Saddam was nothing more than a provincial bully, a pathetic substitute for the Evil Empire.

And now he’s dead.