Saddam Hussein Sued for Mental Anguish

pon his return to Iraq's interim "sovereign" government, former dictator and one-time Iraqi big man Saddam Hussein was hit with a multimillion dollar lawsuit for damages, including punitive, and citing "mental anguish." The group, describing itself as "Now-Free Iraqis Completely Happy with American Help," had the dictator served in his new prison cell in Baghdad.

Lawyer for the plaintiffs Abazzi al-Shidir made the case to American newspapers.

"Finally, the Iraqi people are hitting back at the one who caused them so much grief and misery. If Saddam Hussein hadn't been hiding weapons of mass destruction—and we're all pretty sure they're around here somewhere—the U.S. never would have had to liberate us. Not to mention all the years of terrorism he committed upon his own people—which is us—and the mental anguish he inflicted. He'll be found guilty of war crimes, no doubt. But we want him to suffer financially as well. And with our new legal system, he will."

Al-Shidir could not comment on the demographics of those who filed the class-action suit, but assured the media they came from all walks of Iraqi life and represented the majority of the country. If the suit rewards the plaintiffs, al-Shidir confirmed they would use the money to rebuild Iraq's economy and restore order to the nation, and would likely draw up a contract for American companies to bid upon.

It was hard news for Saddam Hussein, who spent much of last week enduring the public handover to the new government of his former country. Hussein denounced all threats to bring him to justice in public trial.

"Ah, fuck you all, you hopeless puppets," grumbled Hussein, as a translator struggled to properly interpret the swear words. "You and the camels you road in on. You all didn't say shit when I was running the show. I piss on your justice. Ally McBeal had a less fictional courtroom. Whatever you do, don't charge me with possessing weapons of mass destruction—I would hate to see everyone strain themselves hauling in that much imaginary evidence. And in conclusion, suck me."

A garish gesture was made to the public, who all applauded, thinking it was something else.

The return of Saddam Hussein was sometimes overshadowed by the "surprise" handing over of the hot potato country from U.S. coalition forces, who are still there as resident muscle, to the interim government led by temporary Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who took over following the death of the most recent in a series of unsuccessful Prime Ministers, who were either killed in terror attacks, horrific missile-related accidents, suicides, or killed by their own dissatisfied people.

"Finally, Iraq is free," declared Allawi, raising his hands in the air and shaking them like a WWE wrestler.

Allawi then instituted martial law, for the protection of the city, and demanded the assets of suspected terrorists be frozen while they were investigated. The people were rushed off the streets by armed police since the curfew was quickly approaching, while the citizens said something in Iraqi, probably about how nice it was Saddam Hussein was finally out of power.

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Last installment we ended with the great video game crash of 1982, which treated the world to visions of programmers heading west across the dust bowl in Calistoga wagons, embarrassing holes worn through their one-dollar pants. Entire landfills had to be created to accommodate the vast influx of unplayed games and unused gaming consoles manufactured in the early 80's. The town of E.T., Maine, was founded around a massive landfill that Atari created to hide the shame of the millions of unsold E.T. game cartridges produced before the company realized that not even stamping the name of a hit movie on the cartridge could save one of the shittiest games ever produced.

From this smoking hole in the ground Nintendo would emerge with the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Hujitsu Homanama had formed the company to sell his sexy playing cards in 1889, naming it "Nintendo," a Japanese word meaning "eat the children." Over time the company would evolve into other areas of gaming, scoring hits in the early 80's with arcade hits Donkey Kong and Stick Dick in Hole for Blow. But total world domination would have to wait until 1985, when the company's first home console grabbed the world by its balls and mopped the floor with it, like some kind of weird ball-handled mop.

The driving force behind the success of the NES was its megahit pack-in game, Super Mario Bros. Offering gamers a glimpse of what happened to those bickering, deranged Italians after they finally climbed out of the sewer at the end of the original Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. delighted children the world over with its colorful, drug-induced imagery and perhaps the most cruelly addictive theme song of any video game ever. Years later, respected American composer George Crumb would be shamed in the international community when he realized he had inadvertently written the Super Mario Bros. theme into one of the movements of his grand fifth symphony. Regardless, anyone who had grown up with a NES controller fused to their mitts and that maddening little song in their ear was quick to forgive.

And the hits kept coming for Nintendo, thanks in part to the system's forward-looking peripherals. The NES light gun and Duck Hunt made the fun of unprovoked attacks on animals possible without the horrors of spending time outdoors. And thanks to the Robotic Operating Buddy peripheral and the game Gyromite, millions of kids developed critical thinking skills trying to figure out why in the hell Nintendo had put out a complicated robot controller that only worked with one lousy game.

Nintendo even branched out into 3-D games with the inimitable Rad Racer in 1987, a driving simulation title that perfectly captured the powerful nausea someone would experience trying to drive a race car while wearing red and blue glasses.

Though certainly a milestone in the racing game genre, Rad Racer was hardly the first, or the radest. Most rader. The first arcade racing game was actually 1979's Chicken Run, a bizarre title unrelated to the later claymation movie. The game revolved around how many chickens a player could run over with a Datsun in three minutes, based on one of the game creator's DUI convictions from college. Though undeniably fun, Chicken Run would soon be pushed to the back pages of history by 1982's legendary Pole Position. Pole Position remains to this day the most accurate driving simulation ever created, marveling gamers with its realistic physics, and is still the program that the Army uses to train its formula-one drivers.

Pole Position was followed by Sega's Outrun in 1986. In Outrun, the gamer took on the role of a red convertible piloted by a couple of Californian genetic freaks capable of surviving repeated rollover wrecks that would have decapitated a Samoan. A hit cartoon of the game had to be pulled from the air in 1987 because parents' groups thought it was giving young children the message that rollover fatalities are fun.

And thus we're backwardly introduced to Nintendo's only real competition, if you could call it that, in the era of 8-bit home gaming, an American company called Sega. Sega was started by a Korean War veteran named David Rosen as a front company called Service Games, which Rosen used to sell chintzy Japanese pinball machines to American families as a magnetic homeopathic therapy for kids with cancer. Rosen claimed the machines would cure a variety of fatal illnesses, as well as play a fun little song if your wellness score topped 100,000. Later he shortened the name to Sega because he was a very lazy and uncreative man.

Sega scored early hits with the frog abuse fantasy Frogger and the Dr. Seuss-inspired Zaxxon, which grew enough hair on Sega's balls that they thought competing with Nintendo sounded like a good idea. Thusly in 1986 came the release of the Sega Master System, which was actually Sega's fifth console, but the first that didn't have the added functionality and electrocution risk of a built-in juicer.

The only problem was that Sega forgot to make a Super Mario Bros. for its own system, opting instead to put out a whole line of crap. Later, the Turbo Grafx 16, Neo-Geo, Atari's Jaguar and 3DO would all attempt to compete with the NES and lose, because they all sucked a giant dong. The Sega Master system was relegated to "little bitch" role, having to settle for finding a home in households that somehow couldn't find a NES or weren't sure how to buy one.

Sega would later turn the tables on Nintendo with their 16-bit Genesis console, which outsold the Super Nintendo due to confusion about what a hedgehog was, and the surprisingly large number of dumb kids who didn't want to have to choose between "soup or Nintendo." Nintendo would have the last laugh, however, with the release of the Game Boy in 1989, an extremely crappy portable gaming system and technological leap backward which would go on to become the best-selling gaming machine ever. Since the Game Boy was cobbled together inexpensively from components of Russian consumer electronics leftover from the early 1950's, Nintendo's profit margins were enormous and executives spent the entire decade of the 1990's laughing.

Later, even more shit would happen. Stay tuned.

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If reader email and misguided public graffiti is to be taken as any indication, all the hullabaloo and carryings-on in Haiti lately have left most Americans feeling like they just walked in during the middle of a bad action movie with no idea why these strange people are shooting each other. Is it good? Is it bad? If they make it into a movie will they be able to put Tom Sizemore in blackface? Slow down with the questions, anxious readers, I'm only half-listening.

The history of Haiti is a fascinating story with plenty of R-rated action and a weak love interest subplot to please the ladies in the audience, the story of a country that Earl Dittman of Wireless magazine called "Heaven on earth. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll laugh at all the people crying." Though if you only like stories where the good guys win in the end, you might want to read about Germany instead. I won't hold it against you.

Haiti started out as a big tropical ball of fun whose main exports were beach volleyball and smiling people. Things stayed pretty much the same until 1492, when Christopher Columbus cruised up in his boat and hopped out to take a piss. Columbus had this weird thing about not pissing in the ocean, because he figured eventually it's all part of the water cycle and he didn't like drinking piss. So needless to say, all of Columbus' voyages took forever because he was constantly stopping off at every island along the way that looked like it might be an okay place to take a leak.

But what might have been an inconsequential pit stop in the annals of history turned into much more than that when Columbus looked around and realized he was pissing on a tropical paradise. Lush and beautiful, 13th century Haiti (then known as "here") was something of a Garden of Eden, populated by natives Columbus described as "the best people in the world. Just really fucking nice." Loving, agreeable and above all trusting, the native Taino ("We live here") people didn't even mind that Columbus was pissing on their beach.

Columbus was so impressed with the natives and the beautiful island that he returned in 1493 and killed nearly everyone there. Those who managed to hide under rocks through the Spanish invasion and genocide heaved a collective sigh of relief when the French took over in 1697, a tactical mistake since the sighers were found out, tortured, and killed under the equal tyranny of French rule. By then it mattered little, however, since the population at that time was made up mainly of slaves imported from western Africa to work on the island's plantations.

A slave rebellion in the 1790's eventually lead to Haitian independence, which survived through multiple coups, assassinations and general bastardry until 1915, when the US decided to put the Haitians out of their misery by occupying the country and keeping the profits for themselves. Despite the fact that the US pretended to leave in 1934, not much changed in the next sixty years, with one US-supported insane bastard after another controlling the country and killing everyone who looked like they thought the system sucked.

Numerous attempts at free elections occurred during the 1980's, each falling just short of success due to the fact that anyone attempting to vote was shot dead by the army. Haiti made People Magazine's prestigious "100 Most Hellish Places" list for the first time in 1982, coming in just behind North Korea and "that pollutiony town from The Lorax."

Despite the US spin that "everything was cool" in Haiti and the production of placating educational films with titles like Rockin' in the Nineteen Haitis, rebellion continued as Haitians stubbornly insisted on crawling out from under the crushing boot heel of Western occupation. By 1990, Haiti had decided they would no longer model their elections on the example of the US South circa 1954, and finally succeeded in electing a president who wasn't killed during Election Day. Parish priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was the surprise winner, despite his support for the poor and lack of US permission to be president.

The US acted quickly in response to Aristide's election, revealing that the 1972 Carly Simon hit "You're So Vain" was actually a biting critique of the self-absorbed Catholic priest. Unfortunately for the US efforts aimed at discrediting Aristide, nobody in Haiti could understand the song because it was in English, and a French-language version of the song was scrapped because it sounded really fruity.

Failing at ousting the elected Haitian ruler through song, the US resorted to its old tricks, backing a military coup to have Aristide removed from power in 1991. Despite seven months of freedom and representative government, Haitians had to wonder if it was all worth it when everyone who'd voted for Aristide was killed after the president's fall in 1991. The coup regime was so nasty, in fact, that it inspired an international embargo so strict it allowed only US companies to do business with Haiti thereafter, resulting in record profits for US interests.

US businesses had long been attracted to Haiti because of ridiculously low wages, thanks to Haiti's brilliant ploy of not paying workers anything, instead just sending thugs to collect money from anyone who didn't work in the whoopie cushion or dog bowl factories. Haiti became basically one big magic company, cranking out baseballs, rubber snakes, and those little plastic donkey toys that collapse when you press the button on the bottom, all virtually for free. Those annoying "I exploited impoverished workers in Haiti and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" shirts became very popular among the elite and were seen on golf courses across America all through the 80's and 90's.

Eventually the coup regime got too insane, declaring Tuesdays as "shoot everybody" day, and the US decided to install Aristide back in power, as long as he didn't have a problem with continuing US military occupation of Haiti or unending economic exploitation. Aristide was happy just to see the sun again, as he'd spent the last three years in a lead box dangling over the ocean.

So what in the hell is going on now? Why are all these guys running around with machine guns and funny hats? Apparently Aristide pulled the boner move of increasing Haiti's minimum wage, building schools and investing in the Haitian infrastructure and agriculture. Such hubris had pissed off the Bush administration for years, leading this month to another US-supported coup and the covered-up kidnapping of Aristide himself.

So now that the insane coup regime is back in power, where does Haiti go from here? Yikes, don't ask me. Just don't go to Haiti on a Tuesday and you should be fine.

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