Laden, with Meaning?

The lead photo on the front page of this morning’s Sunday New York Times shows a diminished-looking Osama bin Laden—draped in an old blanket and with a wool cap on his head—sitting in a dingy room, pointing a remote control device at a television set. Beside the TV and snaking down to a power strip on the floor is a jumble of cords that looks more like a fire hazard than the anatomy of a fierce propaganda operation.

Much already has been made of this image, released by the US government in what analysts are saying is an attempt to add insult to injury, in effect, by showing the world and its jihadists that the late al-Qaeda mastermind was far from the mythical figure he’d been built up to be. It’s a visual twist on “the emperor has no clothes”—the emperor has to dress in unflattering layers because he can’t afford to turn the heat up. (And by the way, even Mike Nesmith of the Monkees rocked a wool cap much better than you, ya grizzled old coot.)

On all-news WTOP radio this morning, the guy who leads the “talkback line” discussions solicited listener reactions to the photo. His own take was that it reminded him of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the mighty Wiz was revealed to be just a bland guy behind a curtain using gadgetry to look tough. I didn’t listen long enough to hear any of the talkback responses, but I expect that a lot of “Guess you weren’t so tough after all, asshole!” gloating ensued. As I played those imagined sound bytes in my head I recalled the TV images in the immediate aftermath of the successful US strike on bin Laden: Jubilant Americans gathering in front of the White House and at other prominent spots across the country to celebrate, nay, revel in the fusillade of lead that ripped through the hated Saudi’s brain. “USA! USA! USA!” vast crowds of people shouted. (Unless I heard it wrong and it actually was “NRA! NRA! NRA!” which on such testosterone-choked occasions essentially means the same thing.)

There is so much that’s sad, self-serving, hypocritical and just plain wrong in all of this that I hardly know where to start addressing it.

Well, let’s take it chronologically. The raid on bin Laden’s heavily fortified compound in Abbottobad, Pakistan (no relation to Lynn or her Jewish family, by the way), was carried out on May 2. The initial reports were that bin Laden was armed and had used one of his wives as a human shield before being blown away by Navy SEALs. Of course, it later turned out that neither detail was true, but the errors served the initial purpose of painting bin Laden as a coward and suggesting that the good guys had been quicker on the draw—an image America loves so much that it’s the theme of thousands of old Westerns.

Next were those scenes of celebration, as hundreds of people in each location—many of them too young to have taken arms against al-Qaeda in the years right after the events of 9/11 in 2001—whooped and hollered and held aloft signs adorned with that iconic American symbol of the early 21st century—crosshairs. My personal favorite was the accounts of the chest-thumping at Philadelphia’s Citizen’s Bank Park, as Neanderthal Phillies fans (apologies to potential Lassitude readers Greg and Betsy) took time out from a baseball game against the Mets to strike up the “USA!” chant after hearing or reading the news on their phones. (Philadelphia sports fans being what they are, I expect more than a few of them also screamed, “Osama, you suck!” and perhaps shouted some vulgar things, as well, about his mother, his religion and that “towel” on his head.)

Then, finally, sobriety set in over the past week with the realizations that 1) al-Qaeda didn’t die with bin Laden, 2) the “shootout” had been the killing of an unarmed man, and 3) the “lavish” estate within which presumably harems of babes had been feeding bin Laden grapes poolside while his disciples shivered in caves in Afghanistan actually is pretty primitive and crappy looking (“cushy” only in the sense that it presumably has dependable electricity and indoor plumbing.) So, on cue, the US government released photos from the stormed compound designed to humiliate bin Laden, and in the process pump up our flagging nationalistic mojo. Of that photo in this morning’s Times, the reporter of the accompanying story wrote that bin Laden had been watching himself on TV “like an aging actor imagining a comeback.” Other confiscated videos reportedly show the old ham “flubbing his lines.” And Osama had been sufficiently mindful of his image, the story noted, to have dyed his white beard black for videos that later were broadcast to the world.

There’s your chronology. Now let’s take a closer look at all this.

I first heard the news that bin Laden had been killed by US forces when I was getting ready for bed that night. I found the radio report interesting, surprising and gratifying, in that order. No “USA!” chant welled in my throat. It simply struck me as very belated good news. A manhunt that had begun nearly a decade earlier finally had concluded. The brains (and start-up funder) of an operation that had killed thousands of Americans, and many people in other countries, had been silenced. This was, no doubt, a good thing.

But there was no feeling of “the monster has been slain.” Because just as I’ve always loathed as self-serving and simplistic the Bush-era terms “terrorists” and “war on terror”—which reduce the enemy to bloodthirsty killers without a shred of legitimate grievance and exalt the United States as utterly untainted defender of democracy and freedom—so, too, have I always distrusted the government-produced and media-amplified portrait of bin Laden as the personification of evil.

To this day, nearly 10 years after the downing of the Twin Towers, most Americans have little tolerance for anyone who so much as suggests that America itself bears an iota of culpability for the sociopolitical climate that gives rise to jihadists. Which seems willfully blind at a time in history when the Egyptian people have risen up to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, one of the many, many autocrats and dictators worldwide the US has propped up monetarily, diplomatically and militarily over the decades, the will of their people be damned. Sure, in each case our government has had its reasons—often arguing (accurately or not) that the despot we back not only is better for US security than the alternatives, but that the alternatives would be worse for that country’s population, as well. Regardless, there are legitimate reasons that many people in many countries see the United States in a way that we seem incapable of seeing ourselves—as the bad guys.

What I’m trying to say is that my reactions to bin Laden’s death were complicated enough that I was in no mood for celebration. Conversely, I was repulsed by the jingoistic displays of delight in a man’s—any man’s—death, however “evil” that individual might have been deemed. When I witnessed those celebratory scenes on TV, in the newspaper and on the Internet, they symbolized to me what’s worst about America: its violent, gun-crazy, vengeance-driven culture. I’m absolutely apoplectic about our toothless gun laws and the national mood that makes any meaningful reforms impossible. Don’t get me started! We may finally have a black president, but don’t expect to see a Second Amendment-doubting president anytime in the next couple of centuries. (Or an atheist, for that matter. Whereas I’d gladly throw my support behind a qualified candidate who makes no pretense of religious belief but who wholeheartedly believes private ownership of guns should have draconian limits.)

I have, however, found gratifying some reactions to the death celebrations. The Washington Post’s online religion section, “On Faith,” one day last week asked the question, “Is it moral to celebrate a person’s death, even if he is guilty of heinous crimes?” Many readers, including members of the clergy, firmly responded, “No.” I’ve seen similar questions asked, and the same answers received, on public radio and on local TV newscasts in the past few days. Then there was the 20-something blogger whose essay was published in the print edition of yesterday’s Washington Post. Alexandra Petri wrote amusingly and insightfully, under the headline “Osama’s Dead—Party On!”, that young revelers fist-pumping the announcement of bin Laden’s death may have seen the scary old Muslim fundamentalist as “our Voldemort.” For her generation—Americans who had been 12 or 14 on 9/11—Osama bin Laden had been “the face behind the random terror of the universe, the dragon we could slay and beat.” It seems to me there's some truth in that. It makes those young partiers seem less vengeful and more naively goofy. Which helps.

I also was reassured by the reaction of my office friend Meghan, who’s in her 20s and told me without solicitation that she found celebrations of bin Laden’s death “creepy”—like something you’d see on the streets of countries where decades of oppression have provoked bloodlust, not in a country where generations of prosperity have produced a youth culture happily ensconced in its Blackberries and iPhones.

Anyway, where was I? Here’s something else that’s been bothering me this past week. Or rather, that always has bothered me, but that this past week’s events have highlighted: The American government, mainstream media and public’s characterization—both reflexive and calculated—of our enemies as weaklings and cowards, and the concurrent view of America as always strong and noble. With Osama, it started when he coordinated the killing of thousands of people at the World Trade Center—the “cowardly” slaying of innocents. Then he ran and hid all those years, also cowardly. Finally, after we finally got him we found videos in which he looked kind of, well, weak and pathetic. What a loser!

Only, in truth, the guy was a genius who brought America to its knees that awful September day, then eluded capture for nearly 10 years, despite having what we now know wasn’t exactly a state-of-the-art command center. And you can hate, as I do, bin Laden’s view that an intolerant, backward, misogynistic distortion of Islam constitutes heaven on Earth, yet still concede that the ambition and execution of his vision was big, bold and daring. Whatever you might think of him personally, the guy did a lot with a little. Of course, many causes backed by fanatical True Believers tend to show outsized results (right down to that overachieving Army of One who went by the professional moniker Unabomber). But it takes strength—of mind, will and, yes, character—to take a ragtag bunch of discontented radicals and mold them into a force that sends the Western world into a panic.

And I’ve got to ask: What kind of a coward goes out of his way to bring the wrath of the most powerful nation on Earth down upon his own head—even if that head ends up topped by a silly looking knit cap? Not just in the case of bin Laden, but in many other instances around the world, it seems to me that much of the time we spend demonizing and belittling our putative enemies might be better spent trying to understand their totality, the history that has created them, and America’s overt and covert role in that history. I’m not saying that bin Laden was a good man. I mean, he thought everyone who didn’t completely share his beliefs was an infidel who should be executed—that, to me, goes several steps beyond tightly wound. The guy was nasty and scary. But—failed attempts to portray him as a luxury-loving wife-sacrificer aside—bin Laden unquestionably had a warped personal integrity.

Even those who’d be dancing on bid Laden’s grave right now, were he not buried at sea, will concede that the War on Terror—or, as I rather un-lyrically call it, the Battle Against Islamic Extremists Who Crave a World So Devoid of Laughter and Fun That You and I, Too, Would Beg for Suicide Missions—is far from over, and that it won’t definitively conclude in the foreseeable future, if ever. (Maybe al-Qaeda ultimately will disappear only after the melting polar ice caps flood its desert training compounds.) But perhaps there’s some takeaway from Osama bin Laden’s death that’s more useful than the realization that many Philadelphia Phillies fans are fat, hairy goombahs. (Which in fact we already knew.)

This is a good time to think about who bin Laden really was, how we (America and the West) contributed to his creation, and if there are heretofore untapped or under-tapped ways we might better understand and engage potential bin Ladens in the future.

Am I glad Osama bin Laden finally was caught? Definitely, although I’m not completely convinced he needed to be killed. Mostly, though, I would like his death to hold some deeper, longer-lasting meaning than simply, once again, proving the fantastic awesomeness of the USA, USA, USA.