By Jon Letman
May 5, 2011 LIHUE -- Since the announcement of Osama bin Laden's death late Sunday night, the country has been swept up in a frenzy of 9/11 flashbacks. Americans have reacted to bin Laden's killing with emotions ranging from shock and relief to satisfaction, skepticism and incredulity, but the most prominently emotion displayed, and the one that has received the most attention, is pure, unabashed joy.
Not the joy of watching a child take her first step or the joy of creating something new and beautiful, but the dark, blood-stained joy of exacting revenge on a mass murderer. Americans were dealt bruising physical wounds and a deep psychological blow on September 11, 2001 and, for the last decade, have been on a constant drip of reminders of the attacks whose intensity ebbs and flows with time. But the elusiveness of 9/11's supreme perpetrator, has remained like a broken thorn under our skin, palpable but without relief.
Most would say the spontaneous eruption of jubilation and glowing satisfaction, like the feeling of finally scratching a deep, nagging itch after enduring the pain for so long is only natural. But the celebratory flash mobs of fist-pumping youth draped in red, white and blue as they chanted "U-S-A! U-S-A!" and wild orgy of hyper-Americanness claimed to be patriotism rubbed more than a few Americans the wrong way. A Reuters photographer who was at the White House when Obama made the announcement described the scene outside later as deafening "like a sports stadium...like a carnival."
Two days after bin Laden's death a Reuters video story titled "Bin Laden death boost for Obama" showed the president remain stony-faced and somber even as members of Congress rose to their feet and burst into applause when the president made a reference to bin Laden's killing.
Clearly the president is not one of the "America - Fuck Yeah!" flag-wavers. This week he announced that the White House will not be releasing pictures of the dead al Qaeda leader because, as he put it, "we don't need to spike the football." Yet at the same time he has used bin Laden's killing to suggest this is a moment of "national unity" around which all Americans can and should rally together.
"There is a pride in what this nation stands for and what we can achieve that runs far deeper than party, far deeper than politics," the president told members of Congress.
But the suggestion that bin Laden's killing should be a sources of national unity is a cynical, cheap exploitation of American's weakness for displays of brute force, violence, killing, and militarism, presumably in order to gain some political capital at a time when Mr. Obama's presidency has been mired in the ugly stuff of reality: stubbornly high unemployment, rising gasoline prices, an economy that is wobbly at best and attacks from both the political right ("Where were you really born, Mr. Socialist?") and the left ("This isn't the change I was hoping for").
It is a sad reflection on both the state of the nation and the moral elasticity of the president that what Obama calls "national unity," if something we can all feel good about together is, in fact, a covert military incursion conducted behind the backs of a supposed ally (Pakistan) as a commando-style night raid and revenge killing -- a targeted assassination. Is this what draws Americans together: a blood-stained bedroom floor, the burnt wreckage of a helicopter littering bin Laden's walled courtyard, freshly killed men growing stiff in pools of blood, impounded orphans, a widow and a villain shot in the face and hastily dumped in the sea?
If this is the true north to which the needle of our moral compass points, then we may as well throw away our compass -- we are clearly lost. It is unimaginably bleak commentary on our nation when, after more than a decade of increasing nastiness, divisive politics and a fraying social fabric, that in the year 2011, Americans seem to be most united only after a killing spree in Tuscon underscores our own tolerance for self-inflicted domestic gun violence or our president announces, albeit with more maturity than the last one, but all the same callous confidence in ourselves to mete out our own cowboy version of justice, united we stand.
Ironically, only 48 hours before Obama announced the death of bin Laden, the people of Great Britain had found cause for unity in celebration of life in the marriage of a young prince and his bride. Cutting across Britain's highly stratified class system, people in the UK looked, for at least a day anyway, supremely united. Two days later, under the banner of revenge killing, Americans are told to unite.
Along with this call for "national unity" in the long shadow of bin Laden's corpse, there is a clamor to somehow saddle at least a full decade's of war making, invasions, occupations, drone attacks, secret imprisonment, extraordinary rendition, torture, domestic and international surveillance, draconian and ineffective "security" measures, economically and socially harmful budget cuts and an unchallenged and ever-expanding misuse of Executive Powers to broaden existing wars while embarking on new ones, all to this vague thing we are told is all about "national security," "freedom," and "the defense of Democracy."
It's as though the killing of bin Laden is supposed to be the Lucky Triple Seven jackpot that makes us all jump and hoot for joy after more than a decade of playing a losing game.
Unfortunately, the machines are rigged and the house always wins. Bin Laden's death, no matter how happy or how ambivalent you may feel about it, is not the end of the game. Instead of being told that this is an event around which we should all "unite," the President should be reminding us this is no game at all -- it's about war and death and about acknowledging our own role in perpetuating the cycle of violence.
Bin Laden executed a number of unimaginably wicked schemes which resulted in the cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent people. He is not someone that merits defending or grief, but he is also not alone in employing wicked tactics to strike out as his enemy, innocents be damned, as he used any weapon at his disposal to inflict death and suffering. Hijacked airplanes, suicide belts, and roadside IEDs (improvised explosive devices) produce the same results as Tomahawk missiles, white phosphorous incendiary weapons and predator drones: dead people.
The terror attacks executed by Osama bin Laden and subsequent ongoing wars which have ostensibly killed and maimed far more than bin Laden could have ever hoped for have created a self-perpetuating culture of death and killing. Bin Laden may have been America's "Enemy #1" and our highest profile target, but his death will not mark the end of any of the wars we have chosen to pursue in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond. Killing one man, no matter how evil he may have been, is hardly reason for celebration and should not be the foundation on which we, as Americans, stand united.
If anything, the news of the death of Osama bin Laden should give us pause to reflect, seriously and soberly about the misery we ourselves have caused, and continue to cause, not only to people in other nations, but to our own fellow citizens right here at home.
