Count me as one of the ghouls who watched the 2½-minute video of Saddam Hussein’s execution more than once. Why? “Such graphic violence plays to our most base instincts,” a media studies prof told the National Post, which added that the clip ranked among the top 10, between “sex accident” and “Brazilian goddess immerses into the sea.” I don’t agree. I watched it, I’ve come to think, to be reminded about potential dignity in the human species. No kidding.

Viewing a real execution is different from seeing a simulated one, like Sean Penn’s in Dead Man Walking. No matter how chilling that was, you knew it was Sean Penn. You could imagine a camera crew just beyond the set, with Tim Robbins calling the shots. This was more like, as various people said, home videos of hostage beheadings made by kidnappers in Iraq.

The botch of the execution was the fault of those Iraqis again, said the Americans — don’t they just botch everything. We’d have done it differently, said a U.S. general who handed Saddam over minutes before he swung, and also transported Iraqi officials from the Green Zone to the prison, where U.S. soldiers frisked them and removed (they thought) all cellphones.

The New York Times‘s magnificently obtuse columnist, Tom Friedman, whined that “not enough of our Iraqi allies have risen to the occasion,” compared to the decorum with which the U.S. buried former president Gerald Ford. As if the U.S. hadn’t also humiliated Saddam by releasing tape of lice and dental exams when they caught him, and there had never been abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, or the “rendering” of Maher Arar to Syrian torture.

Bush spokesman Tony Snow bemoaned the focus on two rowdy minutes of execution rather than Saddam’s 69 years beforehand. But there’s little chance his past will be forgotten. Real Iraqi resistance to the U.S. only began after he fled during the invasion. It increased after he was captured and is likely to increase again now, as it did after the death of the barbaric Abu Musab al-Zarqawi six months ago. Iraqis seem energized in their fight against occupation by knowing these creatures won’t return.

But still, there was something compelling in those two minutes. What might it be?

There’s not a lot of dignity in a state premeditating the murder of a prisoner at any time, a.k.a. capital punishment. Albert Camus, one writer recalled, compared it to “a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”

Yet, there’s an odd reverse dynamic: You can lend dignity to a life by trying to deprive it of dignity, because by doing so you acknowledge that it may possess dignity — even the life of Saddam Hussein. His bearing at his execution, especially in contrast to the hooded guards who jeered him, seemed to rise to that occasion as noted, among others, by John Burns in The New York Times.

Is this kind of momentary dignity a mockery or illusion? Maybe, but I think you can also place it in a religious or spiritual frame: There is a dignity that inheres in all humans, including the monsters, and that occasionally we are reminded of, despite everything. What are monsters? Distorted human beings but still human; that is the insight of Frankenstein.

The point is not that all people are noble but that they all possess potential nobility — you never know when it might emerge. There is often a pairing of possibilities, found in the psalm, for instance: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? . . . For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels.” Or Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! . . . And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

This line of thinking has an almost medieval quality: How do we know human life is sacred? Because in even the most depraved cases, we glimpse an occasional spark, which flickers . . .

The National Post headlined: “Saddam clip shows we’ll ‘watch anything.’” Hmm. Well, maybe anything that reminds you of human complexity and makes you feel even slightly hopeful, or not utterly hopeless.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.