And Then

First of all, I have zero interest in scolding anybody for being happy today. For dancing or singing or spraying champagne. For celebrating for the TV cameras, for Twitter, or just for themselves. For cracking jokes. We grieve how we grieve, and make no mistake, this is still grief. It's impossible to get an A in it, and it's grotesque to try. Lecturing others on how to do it right is just a way to draw attention to yourself, to make you the Virtuous Voice of Truth. I've never liked that voice. Ever.

But let me ask you this: Read this and tell me, could we have done this before now?

In an interview at CIA headquarters two weeks ago, a senior intelligence official said the two proud groups of American secret warriors had been “deconflicted and basically integrated” -- finally -- 10 years after 9/11. Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the information was collected and analyzed. In it, he thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan’s knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military’s maps but also develops their pattern recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with “high probability” that bin Laden and his family were living there.

Could we have had the champagne at Ground Zero, could we have had the dancing and the singing, the silence and the reflection, the closure and the open wounds, without the past 10 years of pointless death in Iraq and Afghanistan? There were no military casualties from killing bin Laden, the president said, and it hit me like a fist in the gut. Could we have done this, brought justice however brutal, without killing another American soul?

There are times I go to a Pat Robertson-type place, I really do, and think about the karmic bitchslap we are so utterly due for what we've done. And I pray, almost, an argument, "lots of us tried to stop it." Tried, of course, meaning nothing to the dead. 

So this morning the wars continue, because after all they weren't about bin Laden. If we had done this 10 years ago, would it have been enough? The president talked about how united we were on 9/11; I was working that day and every day thereafter, not too far from where he was, and he is telling us a pretty story, a pretty lie. We were not united. We were fractious and enraged, and quite a few Sikh and Indian men, quite a few innocent Muslim women, can attest to that if we choose to listen to them. In that furious fear-driven anger, would this have been enough?

Look at the pictures. Look at the joy and sorrow. You tell me.

A.

 

Comments

[virgotex]

I was taken aback at the amount of scolding flying around on Twitter. I personally didn't feel like dancing in the street, but who's to say what the appropriate response is? Crowds are not organized, formalized, thought out ahead of time things.

I mean has Marianne Williamson written an etiquette guide for this exact situation?

[Maitri]

Al Zawahari is the real brains of the outfit.

Oh wait, YAAAAY USA USA USA

[scout]

So much for wire tapping all the phones......

[Kevin]

I was taken aback at the amount of scolding flying around on Twitter. I personally didn't feel like dancing in the street, but who's to say what the appropriate response is?

Daily Kos, of course. I checked for the predictable, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger passive-aggressive "Do what you want, but I, personally, just can't celebrate the death of another human being" thread, and found it high on the recommended list. It's still there.

[Maitri]

@Kevin: Fuck a trial, like some of these people want; I would have gladly shot OBL in the face and want to dance to disco over his death and livestream it on the 'tubes. What stops me is what it will mean for our people in the various war zones, and following that, for people who look like me over here. Shorter: I don't want to die because that shithole did.

[noblejoanie]

Sorry, I'm gonna take the contrary view. I believe in a government of laws not men, stooping to their level puts us at their level.

OBL didn't so much deserve his day in court, WE deserved his day in court.

YeeHaw is not a foreign policy---remember that?

[Athenae]

There's nothing wrong with "I think this, which is different from what you think." It's "You all think this and so you suck as people" that I quarrel with. The Kos post Kevin cites above is a perfect example.

Just so we're clear, y'all aren't doing that here, which I'm proud about.

I spent a good amount of time bragging this weekend about how awesome you all are.

A.

[pansypoo]

any excuse to party. shame we couldn't put him in a cage.

[PWL]

OK, I'll be an asshole.

I'm not sorry Bin Laden's gone, but I couldn't listen to all the "U-S-A! U-S-A!" crap.

A large part of the people out there doing the boogaloo over OBL's death are the same ones who were rah-rah boola-boola about starting all these wars we're in now, as if it were all one big football game, and who called anyone who questioned the necessity of them "surrender monkeys."

I can see the reason for celebrating on some people's part-i.e., the 9/11 survivors, but a lot of this is just fratboy mentality and it gives me a headache.

[Uncommoner]

Let's be honest, it doesn't matter that he's dead.

He won the war a long time ago. The moment western nations decided to resort to illegal tactics and war crimes, the war was over.

The War on Terror ended years ago. Good lost. Evil won.

The real war, the one we CAN still win, is for the hearts and minds of people who are willing to reject evil whatever its form. My country's fighting a skirmish today, and if I were a praying man I'd be on my knees bargaining for a win.

[PWL]

Ditto, Uncommoner.

Unfortunately, this country lost a lot in this War On Terrorism. Not only a lot of lives and a lot of treasure....but also its honor and its principles. Osama's death doesn't change any of that.

In some ways those are the greatest losses of all. Not sure this country will ever really recover from that...it was led into betraying everything it said it stood for.

Joan Walsh asks "if we can have our country back now." Don't think that's possible. Don't think this country will EVER again be what it was before 9/11.Something seems to have been lost for good...

[Hecate Demetersdatter]

Athenae, I love you.

[Brooklyn Girl]

I'm with PWL and Uncommoner. I'm not sorry the bastard is dead, and the special ops group that pulled this off deserves our gratitude and respect, but "we" didn't "win" anything, and all the mindless rah-rah crap is revolting.

[whet moser]

I didn't celebrate, but I can't help but think some of the joy has to do with the fact that America did something well. Would I have preferred that it be the regulation of the financial industry? Or the rebuilding of New Orleans? Absolutely.

But think how long it's been that the country did something difficult and complex, and did it well. Someone said, can't remember who, that the killing of an enemy is a low bar for that. Maybe so, but the bar is damn low right now.

[BlackSheep0ne]

Y'know, peeps, John McCain spent some time in a Cong prison -- and other US POWs were paraded around in cages in Cambodia and 'Nam. I'm old enough to remember when the POWs came *home* from over there, and I know that most of the folks alive in Southeast Asia today had little or nothing to do with that war. But I remember -- like Daniel Inouye remembers WWII, you dig?

Long time and lots of miles ago. But ... no.
Better Osama bin Laden as fish food than as the bigger-badder blind sheikh, with romanticists trying to spring him.

Far, far, far better as fish food than as some half-mystic heroic fugitive, too -- "USA's most wanted" eluding capture for year after year, building his legend.

Who was that guy who hid out in the woods for years after the bombings at the Atlanta Olympics and the women's clinics? He's in jail, now, right? There's some faction here in the US who idolizes his sorry butt, too.

So I'm not just okay with a bullet thru the eye for bin Laden. Damn straight I, who have like everybody else in this country searing memories of the embassy bombings and the Cole as well as 11-9-01, am happy that worthless cowardly criminal SOB is dead. Do I have regrets? He probably died fast. He definitely had a cleaner death than he inflicted on so many thousands of his victims. So yeah, a few regrets.

But that a generation of kids raised on "threat level" and "terror alerts" and "be afraid" are out throwing a "Thank FSM, Ceiling Cat and all the gods the boogeyman is dead" party?

No, that's not one of my regrets.

Helluva job, Mr. President. Outstanding work, Seal Team Six. Way to go, intel agents. Three cheers for the pilots and the support troops too.

Now, let's get on with the nation's business. Let's put a stop to our enemies, foreign and domestic, in this businesslike fashion henceforward, and let's get our troops home and our folks back to work and stop pretending running three wars doesn't contribute more to the deficit than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps combined, okay?

[PWL]

Sorry, BlackSheepOne, can't go with you there:

Old enough to remember Nam and all that myself. And yeah, OBL was a rotten person, but I guess I just can't get behind celebrating KILLING SOMEONE, no matter how nasty they were.

Yeah, a sigh of relief, maybe. But not boob-flashing, beer-swilling and "TO-GA!TO-GA!TO-GA!" Guess I just can't get behind the notion that a war is just One Big Football Game.

But then, when this all started we weren't given anything like "I have nothing more to offer you than blood, toil tears, and sweat." I could have understood that. Instead, we were told, "Go shopping! Spend money! Take a vacation!"

My parents LIVED through a war--the Germans were dropping bombs, V-1s, and V-2s on my mother's country back there in 1940-45. They had very strong feelings about war, what it is, and what it does to people...So maybe that's why I feel a little different about all this rah-rah boola-boola stuff...

Y'know, we found it revolting when we saw Arabs doing the happy dance after 9/11. How do you think all this "party hard" stuff looks to the rest of the world? Don't you think they might find it a little revolting,too? Do you think two wrongs make a right?

[PWL]

But aside from that, BlackSheepOne, I agree with you that's it time to work on undoing the damage that the last ten years and three wars have wrought on this country...