www.terryhowcott.com

Saddam Hussein has been assassinated.

A few hours ago, as we inch toward New Year's Eve and crossing to 2007, NPR reported that senior officials of "major news organizations" are "confronted with a complicated dilemma." They then filtered in this deep - feigning to be pensive - voice of a news executive asking the American public if they would like to "hear the sound of Hussein's neck snap."

Saddam Hussein's lynching, and the proposition to exhibit his killing and corpse to the world is part of a wider pattern we have witnessed of late. That pattern is the increasing blood- thirsty status of those in power and control here and around the world.

Rarely do we openly discuss when we see dramatic shifts in Euro group behaviors - instead shaking our heads and moving on with our daily lives.

But, when national media (which is one conjoined entity) and the public digress and veer off the road - appearing to show interest rather than outrage with public displays of bodies and body parts of people of color - there is great reason for Black folk to be deeply concerned.

For the first time in over a hundred years, we are seeing the press feeding more and more closeup images of the dead in a manner that is - if you'll excuse me for making up a word - "creaturistic." Recall the stunning exhibition of the faces from the bodies of the sons of Saddam Hussein last year. Adaoma writes reminding me that this country's TV audiences are "groomed for violence." She points to "nighttime TV shows that focus on graphic medical invasions of the body, autopsies and violent murders all that help whet the appetite for such events as the hanging of a world figure."

In the meantime, it appears we are becoming increasingly unwilling to speak our values if that would mean advocating for sparing the lives of those who are hated or despised. We seem strangely unavailable, some seeming even less than "Christian" when it would be quite Godly to demand that even the corpses of the unpopular ought not be used in an exploitive, inhumane, circus-like public viewing that appeals to character defects and racist behaviors unseen in recent memory. Perhaps our silence speaks to a major shift in behavior both of the oppressor and also of the oppressed.

It is ironic that only days ago talking heads from these very same news organizations accused George W. Bush may be "going mad" (which I'm not challenging here), while they now condone these wildly insane behaviors in which they themselves are willing to participate.

Further, this propensity to exhibit the dead is a selective willingness given their miserable failure to display even the coffins of American soldiers or the great loss of Middle Eastern innocent life in the Iraqi War (and others around the world).

The bottom line is, particularly our young people need to know that there is something very wrong with this picture. They need to know that these shifts in behavior of the powerful are dripping with dangerous messages.

The increasing frequency and desire to televise such images, the public's attraction to them as entertainment, and the continuing harboring of the death penalty is an exact replica of how people in our communities were demonized, hung and murdered leaving the perpetrators free to have picnics, champaign toasts and celebrations around the lifeless bodies of our loved ones. They collected body parts as trophies to "prove" certain folk were truly dead, passed trading cards with faces of the their victims and even carved images of Black people hanging from ropes into the handles of their walking canes.

The gap between that history, and the images we are seeing now is closing.

Execution of the death penalty in Iraq is being held up as a model of a march toward "democracy" - which we all know does not a good democracy make.

The impact of seeing Whites enjoying these events is oftentimes skewed or muffled by our pain and anguish of seeing the twisted, blood soaked bodies of our ancestors.

Curtis Mayfield sang the song, "We Who are Darker Than Blue" which inspires my cloaking our loved ones in the photo above in a deep shade of blue so as to diffuse our pain and attention on them, focusing it instead upon this sickness that seems to be rising up before our very eyes.

We should take notice, we should be concerned, we should be alarmed, we should be horrified, we should be furious, we should teach the connection between historical and contemporary events to our youth, and we should be prepared for the next trip on a slippery slope toward a repeat of history that we can not accept.

(Also see at "Ravaged Cultures Spark a Cultural Revival" the Terryhowcott.com position on what was then the pending assassination of Saddam Hussein at "The Absurdity of Assassinating Saddam"

Names, State of Death, Date of Death and Year of Black People Lynched Between 1865 and 1965 in the U.S.

Black People Lynched in The U.S.

NPR's Michel Martin's discussion on lynching at Lynching, from Michel's Perspective via interviews regarding two books on lynching - "On the Courthouse Lawn," and "Like Trees Walking."