Saddam Hussein was executed. Hung. Before it happened, I spoke big, confident words, saying that it was his due.

The video shown on the news, though, terrified me. I need not see the camera phone footage of his death itself. Seeing the noose tightened around his neck was enough. Here was a human man, afraid, about to be strangled, and I almost regretted my belief. But this was weakness. We are not as strong as our fathers. I remembered my Dante:

Truly I wept, leaning upon a peak
Of the hard crag, so that my Escort said
To me: Art thou, too, of the other fools?

Here pity lives when it is wholly dead;
Who is a greater reprobate than he
Who feels compassion at the doom divine?

We spare the lives of murderers out of compassion; it is mercy, not justice, to keep them alive. We do so in the hope that they may come to regret their sins, sincerely repent in this life and thereby share joyfully in the next one. The arguments to suspend Hussein’s sentence were all of a pragmatic nature; justice and mercy came into the debate not at all. Practicality is a poor substitute for morality. It is doubtful whether we need give clemency towards those who never ask for it. As for Hussein’s soul, it is outside human power to save. In the spirit of charity, may God have mercy on the condemned. But let His will be done, and not our weakness.

It’s hard to do a Beatles cover well. Partly this is because of the band’s iconic (and exceedingly familiar) presence; but perhaps it’s also partly because they themselves performed and recorded so many amazing cover versions. The Beatles were, before anything else, unparalleled synthesists of Rock and Roll history. They knew precisely how differences in tempo, aggression, or vulnerability could change and renew old, familiar songs; and because of this knowledge they rarely, if ever, made mistakes with their own material.

Fiona Apple’s (new to me) version of Across the Universe is, then, one of those rare exceptions—the great Beatles cover. It might be even more: superior to the recordings on both the original and stripped versions of Let It Be. Lennon wrote Across the Universe during the disintegration of his first marriage; but the song’s feeling was buried, to a certain extent, under the novelty of the Beatles’ short-lived infatuation with Transcendental Meditation—hence the “Jai Guru Deva Om” mantra chorus line. By slowing the song down, altering the instrumentation, and simply enunciating differently that chorus, Apple brings out the emotional resonance of the original composition. And this is bolstered by the compelling accompanying music video, with its thorough destruction of an idealized past:

The removal of her headphones two thirds through the song, without any change of demeanor, is tacit evidence that she recognizes the riot ocurring around around her, but chooses to ignore it. Headphones are one of the quintessential modern symbols of disconnection—ubiquitous Walkmen and iPods block out the presence of the wider world. But Apple is not isolating herself by wearing her pair; she is asserting the primacy and eternality of her interior world over the thoughtless and ephemeral actions taking place around her. Again, the sudden removal of her own headphones reinforces this, as does the song’s refrain. Apple (who alone among the video’s characters is dressed in modern clothes) reaches back visually across time and space—yes, across the universe—to find something pure and beautiful, and to pull it, not precisely to the present, but into her (and our) everpresent. It is just as she did musically, with her selection and recording of the song. This continual renewal—and renewability—of an object of beauty is the source of meaningful, lasting art. It is also, incidentally, the mark of a great cover. That the object being renewed may have also once been thoroughly destroyed—that doesn’t matter at all.

I thought I’d missed the boat as far as commenting on the recent cartoon riots, here at Angst Dei, but this weekend’s events in Nigeria have shown the intoonfada to have an unfortunately long set of legs.

It was hard to take these demonstrations seriously, at first; their very appellation, “cartoon riots,” makes referring to them with a straight face difficult. Nothing kills a joke faster than having to explain it; but the escalating violence and increasing body count demands a deadly serious explication of the origin of the comics and the original controversy—Time does this well in its most recent issue.

This cartoon gets better with every riot.

The most absurd thing is that the reaction of these Muslim mobs—the scores of dead—have turned what could, and should, have been dismissed as a petulant, reactionary, parodical line-drawing—Mohammed with a bomb as his turban—into an increasingly trenchant, incisive, and perceptive piece of agitprop. At least it feels that way.

The riots, the burnings, the deaths, have thrown into sharp relief once again the massive cultural divide between our free nations and the illiberal states infected with Islamicist ideology. The Danish government is absolutely correct in its assertion that it will not, and cannot, apologize for items printed in a privately owned newspaper. But this position is impossible to convey to human beings who have no concept of freedom of the press.

The important lesson to draw from these events is one many of us in the West have been loathe to learn. Our beliefs here in the United States, as enshrined in our great Constitution, have always had a universalist dimension to them; now, more than ever, we must realize that dimension explicitly. We have shied away from proselytization in the past, but we cannot do so any longer. In the era of instantaneous and common global communication, there are no local beliefs. When cartoons published in Denmark precipitate deaths in Nigeria we can no longer affect the fiction of cultural relativism; Nor can we pretend to isolation. Immanuel Kant’s maxim—that we should act the way we’d want the whole world to act—isn’t just a moral imperative anymore. It’s become a simple fact of life.

The wealth and nature of comments on my short dialectical series of posts—Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis— compels me to make a few clarifications:

One. None of these posts should have been read outside their context; the three entries are inextricably linked, and the most noisome comments that have been directed towards me in relation to them have, it seems, been a result of doing so.

Two. Thesis and Antithesis are not, strictly speaking, my ideas. They are rephrasings, and small expansions, of comments left by two readers of this site. I thought each contained a kernel of truth, which leads me to

Three. My ideas on the matter, such as they are, are summed up in the accurately labeled Synthesis. For the record, the “race” seems to me only worth running only if you are primarily competing against yourself.

There’s no surer sign of mental decay than that desire you’ve been having lately, to feel unique. You just haven’t thought things through. Let me explain.

It’s easy, these days, you know, to feel like you belong. Our unprecedented access to information, the ease with which we can connect to others, the multiplicity of viewpoints which we can experience—it’s never been simpler to find someone who shares your interests and desires, or your fears and your enemies. Someone that understands you, that really connects with your soul, you may have gone a lifetime without knowing before, but now, they’re just a click away.

But you know, the modern world, in providing us with these thousand wonderful developments—in doing so it has produced a cornucopia of methods by which to discover the next logical step. Mass produced mediums broadcast the inescapable conclusion; a million blogs whisper into the ether the unavoidable realization, the one that’s been weighing on your mind:

You’re not very special.

No, really, you’re not.

But let’s face facts. You were never very special. Your cog is just one part in the six billion strong human machine. Maybe before modern times, it was easy to ignore this—because you never came in contact with those other six billion. And maybe before these last few years of your life, the idea was easy to ignore for the same reason. But now you’re an infojunkie, plugged in, wired up, and you know all about Them. All of Them. The seething, unwashed Them that comprise the world and in their tremendous aggregatation, make you feel, just a little more strongly, totally and completely generic. Even in this you aren’t alone, and you know it.

We both know that when a country tries extra hard to assert its identity, it’s because it doesn’t really have one. Oh, you can give me that saw, about the fact that no one has the precise combination of CDs you have, no one’s read all the books you have, no one’s had the same experiences you’ve had—but we both know that’s a crock. Someone else, out there, has listened to, or read, or done the same things you have; and they probably did it better. And that unique perceptual filter idea? It’s like there’s a big bag of jelly beans we all share; you might eat them in a different order, but they’re the same damn beans. Establishing identity like this is precisely like winning the special olympics. Geez, I’m proud of you.

I’m sure it won’t comfort you to find out that what you’re going through is pretty common. You remember Kurt sang about it. It’s all a matter of your expectations. See, you went through a lot of your life—probably most of it—with the idea, constantly reinforced, that you had something other people didn’t. Maybe you were the smartest, or the most talented, or the strongest at your high school; and people—your parents, your teachers, your friends, your girlfriend—they told you just that.

But now you’re in the real world. The world where’s there’s 21,500 high schools in the USA, and every single one of them has a senior class vote two people as “most unique.” And they do this Every Year.

Are you ready for the cliche? You were a big fish in a little pond. A pond smaller than you even imagined, back then. And now you’re finding out that you matter even less than you thought you would.

So what’s the answer? Geez, I should hit you. Maybe that would make you snap out of this. The answer, as you already know, is simple, as simple or simpler than the idea that’s got you down:

Originality is not a moral virtue.

Oh, it’s something people tend to like, that’s for sure. Novelty always wins crowds. But if I remember right, you never wanted to be popular. You just wanted to do the right thing. Very conformist of you—conforming to an idea, that is. And if that idea takes you someplace others go too, well, alright, and if it doesn’t—there’s your uniqueness. Just wanting to feel special, that doesn’t make it happen. Ask Canada. This is the mental—and moral—decay I mentioned at the beginning. Get over yourself, and get thinking again. Big pond, little pond, it shouldn’t matter. Swim where you should. Swim like there’s no pond at all.

You pick your own race, and that’s the one you run. Only you can finish it; only you know how to even start. But it’s very apparent, even to strangers, whether you have or not. Figure out your goals. Figure out your dreams. Figure out your ideas and beliefs and start running.

The race is an illusion. If you’re running it, you’re running in circles. If you’re competing, you’re competing on a hamster wheel. Your legs move and move and move, and the whole time you’re spinning in a circle. The question, the competition, is over who can move, the fastest, to precisely nowhere. Drop out of the race.

You run. You never stop. You compete. You compete until you die. If you stumble, you redouble your pace. If you trip, you pick yourself up. If you have both legs chopped off by razor wire—you just don’t care. You crawl yourself to the finish line or you die bleeding. Either or. You have only two acceptable choices.

Take a good, hard look at your life, and figure out what runs only on luck—because luck runs out. Luck runs out inevitably, inexorably. You can’t trust it. Luck runs out and when it does you better have something solid to fall back on. You may have a good run; you might roll those 7s for thirty years; but if what you’re doing is simply, solely gambling, never forget that eventually the house will win.

Remember. Repeat. Luck runs out. Like it did for one of my friends last night.

Studio executives are blaming the poor Tomb Raider movie opening on the recent video game release.

Socrates once pointed out that there were two ways of arriving at a faraway place. The first method, and the one that would occur to most people, is to know the route—to have traveled it before or to have a sure guide. The second method is, quite simply, to guess. The important thing to remember is that, in the end, neither method gets you to your destination any more than the other. If you are there, you are there.

Angelina Jolie receives payment in advance for her role in Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Now we would all recognize that the first method is the better one because of the probability that the guesser will get lost along the way. Knowledge is power, as the familiar phrase goes. Socrates’ lesson was meant to show, however, that knowledge is not the only course to power. It is not necessary and very many successful people are so not because of any understanding on their part but because of blind luck.

Hollywood, you could say, has taken this lesson to heart. No thinking person can cease to be amazed at the episodes of utter cluelessness that they regularly produce; their total inability to comprehend the business which they nominally control. I do not grow angry at them, as so many others do, for creating sub-par, sappy, or formulaic films. I get exasperated, though, that these executives lack even the bare competency of understanding that would be a minimum requirement in—not just any other industry—but in any other mode of life.

This is an industry which has glorified the art of mapless travelling. Of arriving at a destination without ever finding the path that leads there. This kind of adventuring has a joyful serendipity to it that explains why Hollywood has so many successes; but it also explains why the industry creates so many lousy, lifeless sequels and boring cash-in clones. When no one has a map, most people play follow the leader. In our village, where the rain can’t be predicted, we naturally turn to the most confident shaman.

That is, until a new shaman comes by who seems to have a better line. The first time I really took notice of this egregious tendency towards groupthink was when the original Star Wars movies were re-released in theatres. The news media were full of stories talking about the “gamble” George Lucas was taking with the Special Edition. Would audiences really go see twenty year old movies? The answer was obviously yes, but the Hollywood talking heads couldn’t realize that until after all three re-releases were ridiculously successful.

Of course by bucking standard perceptions—and succeeding—George Lucas was given a free hand in Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, resulting in all the problems that have made these recent episodes inferior to the earlier ones. Lucas has, perhaps, sure knowledge, but needs someone else to drive for him.

Now I haven’t seen the new Tomb Raider movie yet; so I can’t speak about how good it is. But I can confidently tell you why no one in our group of friends has seen it so far. The first film, despite having earned one hundred fourty-one million dollars, was utterly abysmal: bad acting, bad direction, bad dialogue, bad plot, even bad special effects at the end; the creators managed to do the impossible and squander the Illuminati. I am an ardent Angelina Jolie fan, but even I can’t defend it.

Paradoxically, this was the argument I tried to use to scrounge up companions for the sequel. The first one was so bad, the second had to be better.

It’s not surprising that I failed. It shouldn’t be surprising to the executives blaming Eidos for the low turnout this weekend. To the Hollywood executives intent on churning out sequels, here’s a tip from the gaming world that you said was your core audience for Tomb Raider. We do this when we explore a new dungeon. Next time you head out into the unknown, bring a sketchpad with you. Try to make a map.