When I started Rosie Picture I hoped I wouldn't become enslaved to commenting on current events. But with the death of Saddam, I couldn't help myself.

Yes, I do have the talking head syndrome.

I have many feelings about the death of Saddam. It will be for the crowd growing up a moment in time which will stick in their collective memory like the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. stuck for us. They will answer questions about 9/11 and the death of Saddam the way we answered and still answer, and the way our grandparents answered to the memory of the bombing of Pearl Harbor: "I was in fifth grade," or, "we was riding home from school, and my mother bypassed the black neighborhood," or, "I came out of the movie and a man saw my uniform and yelled, ' get back to your barracks, soldier, America's being attacked."'

Even though today Saddam's death seems the most important event in history with rumbling repercussions ripping through the most significant time in written history. Let me assure you; it is not. After some time has passed, the rumbling will only be the memory of thunder, the sky will still be dark. It will still be rainining.

I would hate to be George Bush when historians finish with him. I suspect our modern day Herodotus will note Saddam's execution was the most expensive in history. The way I figure it: thirty feet of rope x 600 billion (very low estimate) = 20 billion a foot, or almost two billion dollars an inch the American people paid for that rope. We could also measure it in lives -- but what's the point?

And George, where were you? Oh, hiding from a thunderstorm in an armored car in Crawford. George, you should have flown back to your other hiding place; you remember, the mountain you hid under while events unfolded on 9/11. Yes, you were in your undisclosed location in some western state. Remember? After you finished reading, "My pet goat?" while New York City was under attack, while the Pentagon burned, while the Senate stood on the steps of the Capital singing "God bless America?"

You know Saddam's body is going to be given to his family. (mistake!) They will take him, dress him like a hero, lay him in a nice hardwood coffin, put his solid gold Uzi in the coffin with him. His family and the Sunni will mourn. Great T.V., but not good for us. The Shi'ite will go crazy. What's wrong with the way Mussolini ended up? And his girlfriend too.

Now, if I had it to do (not that anyone would ever let me have it to do), I would have beheaded Saddam, picked his head up and shown him his body, watched his eyes widen and blink like crazy, watched him gasp for unavailable air, but not for mercy -- even he would know. (I read once during the French Revolution, when people were being beheaded right and left, there was a scientific sort who was to meet his end by the guillotine. He told his friend he would blink once a second for as long as he could after his head was severed from his body, and for his friend to count the blinks -- there were seventeen of them. What a U-tube clip that would be!)

And finally, after Saddam was no more, I would find a beautiful young Shi'ite girl who hated Saddam, maybe he would have killed her father and her mother in front of her, then raped her. I would encourage her to do a dance of joy in the blood of Saddam. Lots of pics of his blood on her dance slippers. Then throw his body to the dogs in the street. But we won't do that. We are too civilized, too politically correct, too nice-- nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't win wars .