If you are forced to take up residence in a murky, underventilated “spider hole” after terrorizing a large segment of humanity for decades, suddenly it’s spider hole this, spider hole that — in conversations around the water cooler, at the hairdresser’s, in the corridors of power. But mostly in the press.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him,” Paul Bremer famously told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday, Dec. 14, soon after Saddam Hussein’s capture. He then told us, over and over, where exactly “we got him,” thus reintroducing a term born during WW II and retired since the Vietnam War.
“The area is a small, walled compound with a metal lean-to structure, a mud hut, and during the search a spider hole was detected. The spider hole’s entrance was camouflaged with bricks and dirt. After uncovering the spider hole, a search was conducted and Saddam Hussein was found hiding at the bottom of the hole. The spider hole is about 6 to 8 feet deep and allows enough space for a person to lie down inside of it.”
Got that? Saddam Hussein was in a SPIDER HOLE.
From there we reassimilated the word as instructed. We co-opted it, redefined it, repeated it thousands of times and, finally, ridiculed it. All within one week.
Right off the bat, on Monday, Dec. 15, Joseph Lieberman employed the term for his own purposes: “Howard Dean has climbed into his own spider hole of denial if he believes that the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer.”
Same day, the Washington Post raised important spider hole questions: “In a sense it’s already an election year, and the second question people had to ask Sunday morning — after “What’s a spider hole?” — was “What does this mean for the November election?”
Slate’s Andy Bowers answered that first question right away. “Although the origin of the term spider hole is fuzzy, it may have something to do with an arachnid commonly known as the trap-door spider,” which “makes a burrow and then builds a tight fitting removable lid of silk and earth, which it covers with soil or gravel to disguise the entrance. . . . In Vietnam, where the Viet Cong had an extensive network of tunnels, American GIs learned to dread the specter of enemy snipers popping up out of small spider holes, which were covered with camouflaged lids at ground level.”
The next day, in The New York Times, William Safire begged to differ a bit: “The Vietcong guerrillas dug `Cu Chi tunnels’ often connected to what the GI’s called `spider holes’ — space dug deep enough for the placement of a clay pot large enough to hold a crouching man, covered by a wooden plank and concealed with leaves. When a U.S. patrol passed, the Vietcong would spring out, shooting. But the hole had its dangers; if the pot broke or cracked, the guerrilla could be attacked by poisonous spiders or snakes. Hence, `spider hole.'”
Initially, at least in the early days — make that hours — most of the references were serious ones, in the news.
But by last Monday night the term had already made it to “The Late Show With David Letterman”: “Top 10 Questions Asked by Saddam Hussein When He Was Captured: No. 10. Be honest . . . have you ever seen a nicer spider hole than this?” And again the next night: “Top 10 Secrets Learned From Saddam Hussein’s Papers . . . No. 1. He wrote letters to `Penthouse’ under name `Sexy in Spider Hole.'”
Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” offered “Spider Hole 101,” in which he ridiculed the press’ obsession with demonstrations, computer graphics and re-enactments meant to “boil down the concept of a guy in a hole so that even the layman can understand.” He showed clips of the MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer crawling into, and lying down in, a wooden reconstruction of Hussein’s spider hole while chatting with military expert Ken Allard and dressed in a bright red pantsuit.
And way too soon, it seemed, everyone began to feel comfortable tossing the term around casually, in ways that had little to do with the actual demise of one of the 20th Century’s most loathsome figures.
“Democrats Straddle a Spider Hole” was the headline of an L.A. Times article about the panic Bush’s coup was causing that party.
Australians seem to find the spider hole especially useful as humorous fodder.
The Melbourne Age reported on the existence of a vacuum cleaner, the HVS-3, “that looks like the Pompidou Centre on wheels and can draw out a kilo of dust per square metre of carpet,” and which “at full throttle could’ve sucked Saddam from his spider-hole.”
Probably by the time the National Business Review of New Zealand is cracking wise with a phrase (on Dec. 18: “[Fishing company] Sanford hasn’t emerged from its spider hole to brief the media in years, so it’s no surprise hacks have scarcely mentioned the 233 percent share price rise over the last four years.”), it has run its course.
By Sunday, Dec. 21, if you Googled the term, you’d turn up 414,000 references in 0.08 seconds.
