Happy New Year 1400 AD.

"They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town..."
-Bob Dylan


There's video clips all over the Internet of a gnarled old man with a shaggy beard and a noose around his neck. Pixellated images. Occasional belches of video noise and digital artifacting tell us that this was someone's cell phone, probably, pointed above the crowd in an arc. Held aloft by a shaky hand. Everything about the form is soothingly postmodern -- after all, postmodernity is where we live. Hell, this distorted footage could have been taken at the Super Bowl. A hip hop show. A comedy club on the Sunset Strip. Paris Hilton's limo.

Yeah, the form. Familiar as a porno by now, easy on the soul. The content? That's something else.

All events are not equal, even if the way we consume them is shockingly the same. We eat this stuff up, on YouTube, via e-mail, all over the Net. We get it downloaded straight onto our cell phones through V Cast. We stare over a co-worker's shoulder at TMZ in a cubicle at work. Content.

There's lost footage from Dave Chappelle's show. There's Britney getting out of a long black limousine with no panties on. There's the beheading of some Western journalist with a kitchen knife by some men in black hoods with Arabic writing all over the wall as they hack and saw relentlessly at this skinny white neck, blood spurting everywhere. There's clips of Japanese baseball pitchers throwing 98 MPH. There's a once beloved comedian having a psychotic racist meltdown. There's some awesome band from MySpace.

There's Saddam on the gallows.

I'm not here to shed a tear for Saddam Hussein. Just maybe a couple for the rest of us. All it cost us to see this brutal asshole of a dictator die in terror was 3,000 American lives and counting; at least 10 times that many Iraqi lives and counting; a few decades' worth of international diplomacy and institution-building; and not a small chunk of what we once called our souls.

This holiday week, while Christians celebrated the anniversary of the birth of the Prince of Peace, I walked my very sentient, precocious 4-year-old daughter past the newsstands of Brooklyn and tried to keep her distracted with stories about Santa Claus, as the front page of every major daily offered grainy blown up, blown out images of a fucked up old bearded man about to swing by a rope around his neck. Someone in Baghdad has a really nice cell phone. Someone who can't get potable water or more than a few hours of electricity a day, and for whom a trip down the street is a life-threatening gambit, held that cell phone high over his head in the square and pointed it right at the gallows. A tiny chip inside this little hand-held machine set to work, processing signals with unbelievable precision and speed, and captured a series of brief moving pictures of a public execution.

See how we are. See how far we've come. We have all the technology of the 21st century, combined stunningly with all the savagery and barbarism of the dawn of the 15th. Gawk at that -- hell, take a picture, it'll last 14 minutes longer.