Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Dance of the Assassins
Posted on July 23, 2003 in Crosstalk Justice Scoundrels
Jeanne d’Arc remembered the day in Berkeley’s People Park when she heard the news that George Wallace had been shot:
I suspect I wouldn’t remember if it hadn’t been for what happened a few minutes later. Someone just to my right, a blond, shirtless someone, began to applaud. And then a few others joined him. Not many, but enough to make me wonder what kind of peace movement applauded someone — anyone, even George Wallace — getting shot.
All I can say is that when you’re nineteen, maybe it’s good to learn that not everyone on your side is necessarily nice. But it seemed to me that the violence of the decade we’d all just lived through had twisted some people into depressing shapes. The applause seemed to say something very bad about the times and what they had made us.
I commented:
I also remember the strange twisted mindset that set itself off when I heard the news that Ronald Reagan had been shot. I cursed his assassin: “Reagan doesn’t deserve to be a martyr,” I said to the friends who were walking with me.
Twenty three years later it seems a milder sentiment than what you describe. Yet, I find myself strangely ashamed, strangely proud of what I said at that moment.
The event that precipitated this exchange was the news that Saddam Hussein’s two sons had been killed. Nurse Ratched spoke in contrasts when she reported her feelings about the broadcast that broke the news:
Last night, I watched part of the History Channel program about Uday and Qusay, “Sons of Saddam.” The program’s slant was very clearly pro-invasion, but I can’t say the world will miss Husseins sons, two sadistic psychopaths.
I would rather have seen them captured alive and brought to the International Criminal Court where we could see the evidence against them presented, sifting out the propaganda weevils, retaining the fine truthes as the flour for baking a conviction.
I say about the boys what I said about Reagan: they probably don’t deserve martyrdom. The dance of the assassins belittles not the victim but the dancers. For anyone to cheer about it these deaths or any like them betrays a disturbing willingness to dispense with justice. If the loathliest criminal cannot be assured a fair trial instead of a summary execution, then the highest-minded man or woman of conscience is also threatened, as is the most apathetic and law-abiding of citizens.
