Greetings and Happy New Year to all of my beloved hippyfans! May this year be better than the last one!

Yes, 2006 sucked the big one, but now it’s relegated to history, which is exactly where that shitty year belongs.

You don’t need me to tell you how crappy 2006 was; every other form of media has done the entire ‘year in review’ thing to death. I won’t go there.

For me, 2006 had a couple of minor highlights, but overall it wasn’t anything special. Mostly, it was just another year.

It was another year full of death, destruction and despair. The weather turned angry, the death toll in Iraq continued to climb and our personal liberties continue to be methodically stripped away. I’m sure none of that will happen in 2007!

2006 ended with three famous people kicking the bucket. Celebrity deaths tend to come in threes anyway, which is a real nightmare for the PR people that coordinate these things, but somehow they manage.

Gerald R. Ford, former president and VP, not elected to either office, granter of a pardon for Richard M. Nixon (who despite his own protestations to the contrary, was a crook), popped his clogs at the age of 93. The papers keep calling him “the accident president”, but let’s face it, he’s a footnote to a footnote and he’ll get his big state funeral and that will be that. His wife, Betty is more significant, with her Betty Ford Centre and good work highlighting the problems of substance abuse. I thought she was dead too, but I saw her on TV the other day. Sorry, Betty.

The next death was the godfather of soul, Mr. James Brown. Brown was about as influential as you can be in music. If you have ever heard a hip-hop or rap record made in the last 20 years, then chances are you, you’ve heard samples from James Brown’s music in the backing tracks. Try Googling “Funky Drummer”, the most sampled drum beat in the history of sampling comes from this track.

I was working the night before Brown died and I caught a news wire that said he had been admitted to hospital with pneumonia, but was expected to be released in time to perform the following Saturday. That was enough for me not to think he was going to die. By the time I got home, it was breaking news that he was dead. Ooooops, I guess I shouldn’t believe everything I read.

Except of course on the northlondonhippy website!

James Brown was a one of kind, wild man and damn he liked to party! He was a true original and will be missed very much.

The third celebrity death is the one I find the most troubling and I’m not really sure why. Something was decidedly unsettling about the execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel this way.

I’m not going to debate whether or not he deserved to be executed. He was an evil dictator, responsible for the deaths of thousands of people on Iraqi soil. He was a criminal and a thug.

I’m more interested in how it was done, in such a pitiful and pathetic manner. I’m more interested in the speed in which the death sentence was carried out, as if it needed to be done as soon as possible.

Now that we’ve all seen both videos, the official execution film shot by the Iraqi government and the camera-phone video, shot by a witness, we know exactly just how half-assed the entire thing was and how it lacked in dignity.

You can argue that Saddam didn’t show any mercy or dignity to any of his victims. I’d agree with that. But we’re supposed to be better than that. We’re supposed to rise above the behaviour of our enemies.

We’re supposed to do a lot of things.

Saddam Hussein was an evil man, a dictator, and a morally reprehensible piece of shit that got his just rewards. Saddam Hussein was also a human being, a father, a son, a former president and leader of a sovereign country, who at a minimum deserved to be treated some minor level of respect and dignity.

A society can be judged how it treats it enemies and in this execution, we weren’t any better than the man we put to death. He may have deserved to die, but he didn’t deserve to be taunted and ridiculed in the last moments of his life. No one does.

Let’s look at it another way: If you feel that a president deserves to be put to death for being responsible for the illegal, unsanctioned killings of thousands of people on Iraqi soil, then Saddam shouldn’t be the only one swinging by the neck, should he?

I’m not joking. Isn’t it time George W. (for warmonger) Bush should be sent to The Hague and be put on trial for crimes against humanity? He won’t face the death penalty there, which is far more mercy than he showed his sworn enemy, who tried to kill his daddy.

No, I don’t want to bring Saddam back; the world is better off without him. But then, that would be true if he remained in prison until his natural death as well. Killing Saddam was blood lust and victor’s privilege. It righted no wrongs.

Two wrongs only make another wrong.

Will 2007 be any better? As a constantly disappointed optimist, I can hope.