mousemusings...multimedia, music, progressive politics, video, web design and general rants
Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
~Kurt Vonnegut
Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Extra! Extra!

When I was a little boy in Albany, N.Y., I delivered newspapers. Whenever there was a big story, like the day Charles Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped, the newspapers rushed into print with an extra edition to tell everyone about it.

There was no television then.

Newspaper boys went out in the street with bundles of papers, yelling,

"Extra, extra, extra!" I felt sorry for newspaper editors this morning. The papers were on the street before they knew Saddam Hussein had been captured.

Not a word about it in the paper.

Like most Americans, I first heard the news when I turned on the radio this morning. I went to my television set and sure enough, there was Dan Rather, a fireman in the television news business, yelling "Extra, extra, extra!"

I had a hundred thoughts about Saddam Hussein while I was eating breakfast.

What was his mother like?

I hope we don't kill him.

I hope we don't let him kill himself.

He's a great source of information and such an egotistical bastard that he'll enjoy telling us everything.

If you made a list of the 10 most evil men of all time - there has never been a woman so evil - Saddam Hussein would be on the list.

My history isn't good enough to name all the old ones like Genghis Khan, Nero, Caligula, Attila the Hun, but we all know the modern bad guys: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Qaddafi, Khomeini, Marcos.

We congratulate ourselves all the time on our democracy here in America and for not having had a dictator. I don't know whether we've been lucky or smart. It could happen.

The people who follow an evil leader don't have to be evil themselves. They can be dumb, uninformed, disinterested in the world, or just too absorbed with their personal problems to care about their government. It's been amazing, really, that this great democracy of ours has lasted so long.

A dictator doesn't usually just come in and take over. He moves in little by little. That's why every country, even so free and democratic a one as ours, with a nice guy as president, has to watch out.

It's why some Americans - me for example - are nervous about something like the recently enacted Patriot Act. We're even nervous about saying we're nervous, for fear of sounding un-American.


Anyway, we've all been looking for the perfect Christmas present, and now we've got it: The capture of Saddam Hussein. It's the best gift we could possibly get, and we thank the men who gave it to us.

Written By Andy Rooney © MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
posted by Cyndy | link | | |
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