A number of people here and abroad and a lot of non-Sunnites were happy with the news that Saddam Hussein, killer of many, would himself be killed by a rope around his neck.

I have long held a horror about hanging.  But, then again, I have had a horror of being restrained and murdered by people who do so in the name of the U.S.A or any permutation of national authority speaking for the people of a country, nation or polity established by communal cooperation.  I include all these names because there are many levels of authority from National to the ugly gang who comes with a rope to perform a lynching - or with a gas chamber, a poison needle or with a guillotine. One correspondent reminded me of impalement. If you go into this deeply you must remember stoning as well as cursing with death.

Mr. Hussein would probably deserve to be an exception to the rules adopted in many countries against capital punishment.  I have written about this before but as the days go by and his appointment with a hangman approach, I have begun to question the adequacy of that rope to be appropriate in measuring against his crime.

In the marvelous book (hard to catalog in one category or another) The Stand by Stephen King, he has the villain of the piece create a cage made of welded pipes into which two of his opponents were placed. These two were sent from an other directed old woman who sort of ruled the “free world” on the other side without weapons to deal with the devil.  The world had been decimated by the mistakes of a secret government group experimenting with deadly biological agents that were set free by accident.  The two in the cage were to have handcuffs attached to chains which horses would pull in different directions to dismember the unfortunate negotiators sent by that mystical old woman.

There have been many ways to legally kill opponents of the people.  All of them are legal in the sense that courts have been set up to try and prove they deserve their fate.  In many “modern” countries the death penalty has been abolished.  I think this is a good thing – except for the exceptions of monsters such as Saddam Hussein.  That is the weakness in being human in times when humanity unleashes insanity – of majorities dealing with minorities among them.

In one story I read such criminals were sent one way back in time and isolated in a pre-historic place somewhat like an impossible to get in and out of Devil’s Island. That might be good.  We do have among us monsters given birth by humans.  But what are humans to do with the ones they catch? All in favor of killing: raise your hand.