Epitaph for Uday
I loathe Uday Hussein like people must have hated Hitler in the years immediately after the war. I don't know why I revile him so much. There are plenty of cruel people out there to abhor, dead or alive, starting with his father and brother.
But something about Uday is so viscerally disgusting that I can't let go just yet. He was a cipher representing our basest instincts. But I think my revulsion is a reaction to his face. It's lurid but juvenile, like the face of a child who molests even younger children.
What a weird reprise of the family narrative of The Godfather. Two sons: one older, flamboyant, and favored; the other a quiet, initially unpromising replica of the patriarch. Uday had all the cupidity of Sonny Corleone (although telescoped beyond the human into an extra-chromosomal realm), but neither his true virility or anything approaching his primitive sense of honor.
Instead, he was smothered by the anxiety of his father's influence, corrupted by absolute power and privilege, and broken by a nearly successful Causeway-style assassination. In the end, he was a crippled satyr with a pig-tail squiggle for a dick that he forced on 12 year-old girls to shore up his bottomless ego.
Only in the Islamic version of a Miltonian hell could this man meet a fate suited to him.