As is my wont, I brought my laptop down with me and watched through my Youtube subscriptions. And the word of the day is, Osama bin Laden got aced.
A whole lot of thoughts bolted through my head in a single instant. On the one hand, my heroes-versus-villains sensibilities were tickled. I was talking this weekend with a co-worker about "villains du jour"; back during the big one it was the Nazis and fascism, and from Korea to the nineties it was communism, and in the modern day it's terrorism. "Us" (or, if I were to be simultaneously more accurate and more cynical, "U.S.") is always the good guys, the American heroes who we're told always strike with righteousness and purity of purpose. "Them" is always the foreign evildoers whose sensibilities, purposes, and methods are alien and wicked. And thankfully, we have a face to put onto this concept that we've opted to wage war against -- once it was Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Saddam, what have you, and now it's Osama. Particularly, it's a face with two eyes, betwixt which we can peg a bullet. So, y'know, the heroes got the evil mastermind. That's good, right?
So why does it make my skin crawl to take joy in the slaying of another human being?
Sure, once I asked myself that question, I also posited to myself whether one can really be referred to as "human" when one is responsible for atrocities of this type and scale. But really, it's not who it is or how they died or how much they deserve it, it's the fact that my heart was so quick to skip when I heard the news. I can't have been the only one. People across the country are probably raising their glasses, throwing parties, and thanking the god of their choice that someone is on ice right now. We put a face onto a concept and then we turned that face into roadkill.
Only problem is, "terror" is still this amorphous monster looming in the dark corners of our nightmares right now, and once we're done reveling over the death of one man, it will be there to accompany us into a grimmer, grislier future. It will be there when we find a new head to put on it, and it will be there when we cut that head off and put it on a spike and pretend we've been victorious. It will be there as the cycle of violence continues unabated, guiding our prejudices and convincing us that there's no problem too great or small to not be solved by flinging the bodies of dead soldiers at it.
The good guys haven't won. The monsters are still under our beds and in our closets. We just got the one that looks most like a man.
By the time my musings were over, my eggs were raw on one side and browning on the other, and my coffee was far too strong, and my playlist went to a how-to video on making a pregnant belly movie prop for cheap. So I finished cooking, ate and drank, and just stared out the window trying to convince myself that it's a really pretty day outside and attempting not to think about what humans are doing to each other and how happy blood makes them.
Human nature scares me right now, so for the moment I elect to enjoy burned eggs and to watch the birds.
2 comments:
I think you mean "...and now it's Osama." You know, with an S.
The thing that has been troubling me more and more is that National and Global is now merely featured as the "flavor of the week"... Like whats going on in Japan, what with the 6.9 magnitude aftershocks and the reactors freaking out. Nope. Its Wedding week. Nope. Hey! Y'all can raise your approval rating of me cause Osama is dead now-- 10 years later!! Not that I'm not psyched about the death of a raving bloodthirsty lunatic and fearmonger, I am, but as you say, just cause we whipped out the "Face of Terror" we still have the body very much alive. And unfortunately Terrorism is not like zombies, when you can just kill the brain and the body will die. The cold hard truth is more like a lizard and its tail, it grows back right? but, horray for us and killing the guy. BUT the question that I'm wondering is a) why wasnt this done immediately after 9/11 or at least why did we wait/take almost 10 years to find and kill this guy? and b) what does mr. bush think about it and does anyone care about him anymore or have we just found a new Political figurehead to Love and Hate? And why this Birth Certificate issue, if what we really want to question but cannot for the media wouldnt touch that w a 10 foot pole is true intentions with his all to oft anerving foreign policy? Questions, I know, just still. Strange times.
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