From Ralph

04/09/03

A Statue Falls

Just watched Saddam's Statue come down along with 90% of the world. Kind of Death of Municipal Art really. The most moving thing was the sheer ecstasy of the people- well, the men anyway. The women in black stayed in the background and let the men do the frenzied work. Eerie stuff, but definitely historic..

The worst moment, following the scaling of the monument by the real Iraqi people, which was genuinely poetic, was a US Marine climbing a Cherry Picker rig with a steel rope, which he fixed around the neck of Saddam, then, horror of horrors, he covered the head in an American flag like a hood. Not a smart move. He was made to take it down and put up the Iraqi flag, and all was well. This has to be an Iraqi victory, if victory is what it is, in spite of all outside help. Incredible euphoria in the air. There were any number of images in those minutes that we are going to see on Time magazine and the rest. The toppling will be rerun as nothing we have seen since the assassination pictures of President Kennedy in 1963. For one horrible moment, as the figure fell, I thought that perhaps that is where Saddam had hidden his weapons of mass destruction, or the detonator mechanism to set off his final wild card. The moment passed, but I cannot help thinking that such a man has left some awful legacy yet to be revealed.