Bury him good.(Saddam Hussein)

NEW YORK, JANUARY 2

WE haven't yet had, in the West, a crystallization of opinion on the matter of a) what can be shown on TV news, or b) what the public should be allowed to see via other media. Divisions on these questions were very clear following the execution of Saddam Hussein.

There was some confusion traceable to eclectic authority. Saddam was physically imprisoned under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army, but he was tried by an Iraqi court, in a courtroom made possible by U.S. caretakers.

When the time for the end came, the U.S. delivered Saddam to the execution site, which was under overall U.S. control. But he was delivered into the hands of Iraqi judges and executioners. Here the question of authority got confused. The United States, as a general proposition, does not permit moving pictures of death scenes. Sometimes these are taken for the record, but not for public exhibition. Some of the photos taken of the medical proceedings after the shooting of President Kennedy have not yet been released. The delicate question has to do with prurience. Do we wish to make possible the gratification of that sense, quite overt in some people (e.g., the tricoteuses during the French Revolution who went early to make certain to get seats for the morning's decapitations)?

There is, then, a class of people who would keep their eyes open even if they knew that what was coming up on the screen was the neck-breaking of Saddam Hussein. At the opposite end of the scale are those who so deplore the spectacle that they are willing to pass laws criminalizing the exhibition, and here and there have succeeded in doing so.

We run into a conflict in priorities. There are always those who believe that there should be no censorship of any public event. People who hold to that view were supported for a very long time by moralists who believed that public exposure of the wages of sin would diminish the incidence of sin. The anomaly was famously exposed when, in Great Britain, capital-punishment abolitionists drove home the point that hanging ten-year-olds for stealing something worth sixpence had no apparent ...