To all post-imperial Europeans, and across-the-ponders who find America’s public rejoicing over an intentional killing a bit “unsavory”, first know that I’m more than a little…. uneasy about people hooting in the streets in flag suits, too. Nothing good has ever come of the “USA!” chant, and folks waving flags are like some of the scariest motherfuckers on earth. But in America, there’s always some idiot ready to come to the game with the team’s colors painted on his torso, or with the bible verse sign, and there will always be overexcited flag wavers.
A product of Quaker schools and scientists, I am constitutionally unable to feel anything other than queasiness over one human intentionally taking the life of another. Most (principled) people feel that we ought to respect human life above all else – above even our own existences and our own safety – and that in turn, we should only ever feel grief over someone’s death, regardless of our righteousness and no matter how much our hand had been forced by our enemy. But. Guys. When our President – who since taking office has been the object of unrelenting, racially depraved attacks on his character, his courage, his intelligence, his Americanism – takes out the guy who ruined our country….the guy who eluded our previous, terrible president, and who is the embodiment of the national terrorist nightmare….are you seriously saying only a disengaged response is appropriate?
I get that to some folks, killing bin Laden makes the devastation the US has caused over the past decade in response to 9/11 even more futile, and the torrent of jingoism and triumphalism grotesque. But, it’s not like it’s the first time Americans have celebrated a bloody military coup. We were given the catharsis that had eluded America for a decade. And for once, Americans are able to collectively agree that something is “good”. The same marauding Americans didn’t rejoice over Saddam Hussein’s killing, and they weren’t rioting over some cretin burning a bible, or celebrating the deaths of innocent women and children as a result of a coward’s suicide bomb. We are not emulating our enemies — we are emulating human beings. And while I’m not saying that a fundamental piece of this country’s psyche didn’t need activation by bin Laden to become assholes, when we watched 3000 people we knew burn to death, leap to their deaths or get crushed to smithereens – in the towers and in the Pentagon and in the sky – something in America’s psyche changed. And that is part of Bin Laden’s lamentable victory. One thing 9/11 taught all of us is to never assume there are no more layers of innocent to peel; the planes; the jumpers; the office memos littering the streets and the homemade missing-persons fliers that papered the city; the smoldering wreckage of flight 93 on a PA freeway; my sister, wandering ground zero. the place that was once her home, lost in a post traumatic nightmare, taped off from the rest of the world; the daily Portraits of Grief” that we read with grim responsibility, and from which my family learned that Stephen had died in the south tower…It levels you to your weakest link, and everything you thought you had was left at the border. And don’t think for a second that America’s emerging misanthropy came without a price. That free floating rage with a hex on it’s tail, wishing ill on others, has got to be as annihilating as any feeling I have ever had.
Americans weren’t cheering “just” because Bin Laden killed those 3000 people, it’s because he won. He damaged us. He ruined our whole country.
Now that the US is occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, bombing Pakistan and Libya, threatening Iran, bin Laden succeeded in his specific goal of transforming the struggle between the United States and the Muslim world into the impression of a war against Islam and came damn close to instigating a global conflagration on an unfathomable scale. Worse, Bin Laden’s provocation strategy roused America into using its enormous powers against itself. He coaxed America into a paroxysm of terror, pitting us against each other like Lord of the Flies and drove a terror stake so commanding through the hearts of Americans that they acquiesced everything to the Bush administration, for its hideous agenda. bin Laden is the reason Americans voted Bush in for a second term, during which time he decimated the nation of its principles and unity, it’s economic standing, its its commitment to global climate change and scientific advancement, things we will never be able to reverse, that time we will never give us back again. bin Laden helped drag us to exactly where we are now, running on untethered greed and graft, foaming at the bit with unabashed anti intellectualism and racism, veritable lunatics holding public office, destroying lives and future lives. Terrorism, even al Qaeda’s spectacular, lo-tech, high-concept brand of it, simply can not be the prevailing dominant influence on a great power’s role in the world.
About bin Laden, our previous American President said “I don’t ever think about him anymore”, all while ordering the slaughter of thousands in retaliation for what that guy he never thinks about anymore supposedly did. So, cringing, judgmental non Americans, I put unto: You try living in a country under the rule of this man for 8 years and tell me you wouldn’t go tramping around, pissing on cars and doing fuck all when your black president did what that this illiterate hillbilly failed to do because he wasn’t “thinking about him”.
And you try disengaging from the reality of the confirmation of what we maintained all along: that the occupation of Afghanistan was not necessary or justified in order to stop bin Laden. It was an intelligence operation that brought him down, one that the US did not have to invade or occupy Pakistan in order to carry it out. All those deaths, all that money… it never had to happen at all.
And even though we know will never “get our country back” to where it was before bin Laden – before the Patriot Act, before FISA, before rendition and torture and Guantánamo; before we turned our backs on the constitution and began giving up the freedom and belief in due process that makes us Americans – there is hope that by removing the parodic villain of the Bush administration, we can now put the specter of 9-11 behind us as an official filter through which all our policy decisions have to pass.
And my fellow Americans/goomy gusses, you couldn’t let 48 hours go by before bemoaning all the country’s probems that killing bin Laden didn’t solve? As if killing Osama bin Laden is only a good thing if it also solved our budget woes, stopped spiraling poverty rates, union busting and Wall Street bankers from logging record profits while tens of millions of Americans continue to lose their homes? Come on, people. You’ve been through a lot, give yourselves a break for 5 minutes.
Maybe the cynics will prove to be right and bin Laden’s death won’t change a thing. Maybe the United States won’t start refocusing on it’s other core interests – restoring its economic strength, it’s commitment to the earth and science, and reinvigorating its relationships with emerging powers around the world. Maybe we will blow this opportunity to turn the page on the past decade’s perverted foreign policy narrative. And maybe the Afghan war will stagger blindly on and Taliban prisoners will continue to escape in industrial quantities. Militant Islam will surely march on even if the Arab spring delivers peace and pluralism to the Middle East, China will go on rising, and Al-Qaida, Inc.? Well, successful franchises don’t shut down when their wacky spokesmen die. Bin Laden’s fiery and relentless videos have sustained the fervor for growing franchises of his ilk – albeit less “charismatic” – to carry that torch. But on Sunday, it took 40 minutes to close the book on the decade of swaggering incompetence that has come to define our country and for that I cheer, if not inanely wave a flag.
And, now we’ll probably never know if 9/11 would have ultimately been a spectacular one-off coup. But what we do know how is that it was all a dead end (except of course for the defense contracting industry where jobs were created and millionaires were made). Like so many revolutionary romantics steeped in cleansing dreams of bloodshed, Bin Laden was a hero for losers, too.
So although I was not among those cheering in NY, I am an American and reserve my right to. Does that reflect a character altered by Osama bin Laden? Perhaps, or maybe it’s effing human nature to celebrate the death of a murderous sociopath who ruined our country. And I’m warning you in advance, that this particular pacifist will cheer and wave flags when those other two criminals – Bush and Cheney – meet their makers, too.