One day when I was about twelve, I was at my friend's house down the street, slamming it in Mike Tyson's Punch Out. My friend's older brother turned on the other television and we saw oil going up in smoke on a desert landscape, and the President, an old man in glasses who looked like the Superintendant of Librarians, telling us that it was now our duty to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. "We're at war, boys," said my friend's brother. We didn't question this -- not the President's pronouncement nor the older kid's -- it all made perfect sense. We were pre-teens, in a white-bread Republican cul-de-sac, but we were at war. Now. Just because.
Bin Laden's death seems to have kicked up a lot of controversy over justice -- what it is, whether it's been served. The reactions I've seen online and the discussions I've engaged in seem curiously... uncertain. Where's our good old-fashioned American machismo now? We killed, like, the MAIN TOWELHEAD, boys and girls. Shouldn't there have been some kind of impromptu all-night kegger? But, no -- everyone seems to be looking for assurance that this was the right thing to do. Strangely, at the same time, while we try to convince ourselves that our honor has been satisfied, we all seem to be quite properly sure, in a Starched and Dry-Cleaned sort of way, that the man was pure, 99.44%, granulated, concentrated evil, and spent the last ten years doing absolutely nothing whatsoever but steepling his fingers in a Mr. Burns-ish way and smiling demonically while bathing in the glow of his unwashed, red-eyed disciples. One the one hand, this is just our natural American predisposition to ADD: we all know, or would if we could be bothered to remember, that Bin Laden was a grandfather and a devoted family man who happened to have -- like much of the rest of the world -- outspoken negative beliefs about America -- but we cannot be bothered to remember such trivia. HE WAS EVIL INCARNATE, OBVIOUSLY, AND HIS DEMISE HERALDS... uh... A NEW AGE OF... uh... WELL, HE WAS EVIL! But the caveat: WAS THIS JUSTICE? Ah, that we can't quite know for sure, because that would require a critical mass of righteousness that we cannot muster. We have the biggest guns and the loudest trumpets, but what we don't have is an unswerving belief in the Almighty and the paradise yet to come as just due for our patient righteousness. We do sound bites. We do faith that's subsidized, stamped in triplicate and confirmed by whoever we're tight with. But none of us in America really have the slightest notion of what it is to believe, to feel the truth that possesses one to storm an airplane and fly it into a densely populated tower, knowing that one's divine reward is at hand. And maybe that's what's really behind this oddly muted, divided reaction to Bin Laden's death: the sneaking awareness that, however we may placate ourselves into distraction this time (the Beast destroyed!! The government's hiding the body!!), somewhere back there in the reptilian part of the brain that merely eats, procreates and survives... somewhere, maybe we're afraid that we just don't measure up.
"Ding, dong, the witch is dead. But wasn't there a second evil witch enraged by the death of the first?" --From online public opinion poll: "Will Bin Laden's death represent a turning point in the war on terrorism?"
