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IDLE WORSHIP
A fine line between idol and icon
BY CHIP BENSON

Saddam Hussein had planned for a legacy of idol worship. His statues and portraits followed a familiar script played out by hundreds of other actor-tyrants. Take your pick of kings, emperors, or pharaohs. He could have been Stalin in 1948, or Louis XIV in 1648. Look at the similarities between Saddam and Julius Caesar in B.C. 48, or Pharoah Ramses in 1256 B.C. Saddam Hussein just missed out on becoming an idol and joining the list of tyrannical rulers whose symbols become travel destinations for future generations, because, really, what are today’s museums if not houses of the unholy — temples for idol worship.

All it takes is for a couple of hundred years to go by and statues become idols. All the totalitarian terror fades away like a bad dream, and suddenly New York’s Metropolitan Museum is opening its new season with a Saddam Hussein exhibit. "Ohhh, look at the sculpting on the mustache," tickets go on sale May 22, 2203. The foundation of today’s global tourism, and its economic and cultural ramifications, rest on visiting monuments built by the monsters of the past. The Egyptian pyramids, the Roman Forum, the Palace of Versailles — beautiful all, but illusory.

Don’t think that museum curators aren’t shaking in their boots. The president of the Met assures me that he could never mount an exhibit of Saddam Hussein, but when I press him about the propriety of the Egyptian temple in the museum’s new wing, he suddenly has a meeting to attend. You get the picture. Maybe ransacking the Iraqi National museum in Baghdad was a good thing. These people needed to blow off some 21st-century steam and rightly smash the symbols of their stone-age oppression.

If would-be idols and tyrants around the world have learned anything from Saddam Hussein, it’s, "You can’t build statues of yourself while you’re still living!" It raises eyebrows, and gets people’s attention — the wrong kind of people. As the "Uncle Saddam" statues came tumbling down with help from American tanks, and his playboy mansions were looted, all that seemed to remain of Hussein was his televised image. Okay, maybe the footage was Saddam double No. 3, but it looked like the real guy. Even his actual remains may never be found. So he’s an icon for failed tyranny. Instead of Iraqi Idol status, Saddam is relegated to iconic status, preserved forever not as statue, but as celluloid. The ironic icon. He woulda-coulda-shoulda been a contender, an idol, but instead his talents seem better suited for American Idol than the American battlefield.

It’s a fine line between idol and icon.


Issue Date: May 30 - June 5, 2003
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