Ken Lay Deserved Vengeance...More Than Saddam?

Are the moralists of the Washington Post Style section really the kind of people who believe Kenneth Lay, the CEO of the collapsing racket of Enron, is a viler historical figure than Saddam Hussein? A review of the documentary evidence would suggest yes. Rich Noyes remembered Style essayist Henry Allen's rather savage take on Mr. Lay last July 6 after he died before justice kicked in:

But now that he's died of a heart attack in the luxury of his Colorado getaway while awaiting sentencing for his crimes, none of his victims will be able to contemplate that he's locked away in a place that makes the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel look like Hawaii; that he might be spending long nights locked in a cell with a panting tattooed monster named Sumo, a man of strange and constant demands; and long days in the prison laundry or jute mill or license plate factory, gibbering with anguish as fire-eyed psychopaths stare at him for unblinking hours while they sharpen spoons into jailhouse stilettos.

Then compare that to Style essayist Philip Kennicott on New Year's Eve, feeling only a marginal distaste for Saddam, who was apparently just a paper tiger manufactured by Team Bush. He was a bad guy, yadda yadda, but he has nothing to do with Iraq now:

Hussein's legacy is being lived out every day in Iraq and will continue to haunt his people for an indefinite bloody future. For as long as he was alive, Hussein was useful for an important American argument about the war. He was a bad guy; we captured him; he would face justice. This miniature narrative, contained within the broader one of a war gone terribly wrong, is losing its force. And with Hussein dead it will likely become almost entirely inert. Another video clip, easily found on the Web, showed Hussein dead, wrapped in a white cloth, with his face clearly visible. The camera lingered over the image for a strangely long time, as if to say, yes, he's still dead.

Saddam Hussein Is Still Dead is not a rallying cry. But the images of his execution and his body seem to point to a new era in the way images are used politically, what might be called a post-propaganda era. So many images that were supposed to have such profound impact on public perception -- the now infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo op or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's bloody head tastefully framed for the cameras -- have failed to connect with the reality of either public opinion, or the facts on the ground. This image means progress, we're told, but there isn't any progress. This image is a final chapter, but the blood still flows. For a public media campaign to work, at least some of the politically calculated captions placed on images must, in the end, turn out to be true.

Would it be a "politically calculated caption" to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer, gassing his own people, torturing children in front of their parents, executing hundreds just to build fear and burying them in mass graves? It is certainly politically calculated to take the death of a monster and turn it into Another Problem for Bush.