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Will
The Real Saddam Please Stand Up?
by Mad Dog
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The expert
concluded that not only did Saddam have three body doubles who appeared
on his behalf, but that the real Saddam hadn’t shown his face in
public from 1988 until this past September. |
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It’s been said that we
each have a look-alike somewhere in the world. Personally I find this
very scary, but then maybe I’m unusual in not liking the idea of
walking down a street in, say, Romania and bumping into myself. Well,
not unless the theme from The Twilight Zone automatically fills
the air at moments like that. It’s bad enough my image in the mirror
looks a lot like me, at least it can’t walk around charging clothes to
my credit card so when I contest the bill they point out that the sizes
are exactly the same as those I wear.
That’s not to say there aren’t
times when a doppelganger would come in handy. If you’re married, you
could send one to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner while you went to
your parent’s house and no one would be the wiser. You could dispatch
your double to do the things you don’t want to do, like go to the
office Christmas party, get that root canal done, and watch the 20-part
PBS documentary about the history of matchbook covers. Well, as long as
your double liked that sort of thing. If you were the leader of a
country like, say, Iraq, you could round up a bunch of look-alikes to
take your place so you wouldn’t have to do all those icky boring
things the public expects of you, such as give speeches, cut the ribbon
at the grand opening of the new Saddam-Mart™ in downtown Baghdad, and
meet U.N. weapons inspectors at the airport with cheap plastic leis.
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Jesse Ventura used
a body double during a photo shoot for a campaign commercial. He said he
did it because he didn’t have time to spend 10 hours at a photo shoot.
Hey, it was a better excuse than “The dog ate my feather boa.” |
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Yet that’s exactly what Saddam Hussein does. No, he doesn’t
meet inspectors at the airport with anything except automatic weapons
and a return ticket to U.N headquarters. What he does do is have
mini-Saddams stand in for him. Recently a German public television
station, ZDF, had a forensic specialist study 450 photographs and video
clips of the Iraqi president taken over the past 14 years. After
realizing that he wasn’t watching Omar Shariff movies and Lara’s
Theme was never going to play in the background, the expert
concluded that not only did Saddam have three body doubles who appeared
on his behalf, but that the real Saddam hadn’t shown his face in
public from 1988 until this past September. That, of course, leads one
to wonder what in the world Saddam’s been doing all this time,
especially since the infrastructure in Iraq is so bad that you know he
doesn’t have good enough Internet access to be spending his free time
searching for fake nude photos of Anna Kournikova.
Saddam’s doubles don’t just rely
on their natural born, uh, beauty. They take poise lessons also. Just
kidding. Actually they undergo cosmetic surgery to make them look more
like the real thing. This isn’t any late breaking newsflash. In the
mid-1990s a man who was a double for Saddam’s son—a mini-mini-me, if
you will—exposed this practice when he defected to the West so he
wouldn’t have to undergo another operation. Well, that and he got
tired of being asked “When are you going to stop playing with that
G.I. Joe and start oppressing the other kids already?” And having Dad
tell him to “Pull my trigger finger.”
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Are we certain that when the Israelis are demolishing Yasser
Arafat’s compound in Ramallah they’re not going after Ringo Starr by
accident? Tell me, have you ever seen a photograph of the two of them
together? |
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Saddam
isn’t the first political leader to use a body double. Here in the
good old U.S. of A., Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura used one during a
photo shoot for a campaign commercial. He said he did it because he
didn’t have time to spend 10 hours at a photo shoot. Hey, it was a
better excuse than “The dog ate my feather boa.” Besides, movie
stars do it all the time, and if you can’t trust that to be Rene
Russo’s butt, what can you trust?
All
this brings up a problem about fomenting a regime change in Iraq: If we
track down Saddam Hussein, how will we know it’s the real one? It
would be like a Whack-a-Mole game where even if we hit the Saddam it
might be an imposter and another one would pop up somewhere else. So
many Saddams, so few Stealth bombers. It would be like an episode of the
Patty Duke show run through a Xerox machine. Where would it end? How
would we know when we have the real prize? And most importantly, each
time we get a Saddam can we upgrade the SpongeBob SquarePants stuffed
toy for a larger one until we finally win the giant grossly overstuffed
Anna Nicole Smith doll?
This definitely makes me wonder
if Saddam is the only one doing this. Might there be spare George Bushes
floating around who spend their off duty time learning the fine art of
malapropisms? Are we certain that when the Israelis are demolishing
Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah they’re not going after Ringo
Starr by accident? Tell me, have you ever seen a photograph of the two
of them together? And really, how do we know that’s really Vladimir
Putin asking to open up a Chechen account at the Moscow Savings and
Loan, and not Frank Gorshin after a botox party, still thinking he’s
The Riddler? With luck we’ll hear the theme from The Twilight Zone.
That would be a good tip off.
©2002 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them to your body double.
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