Going first person here. I’m totally in favor of symbolic victories, and so, without even apophastically questioning bin Laden’s recent operational importance, I happily watched stately anchor after failed actor awkwardly iterate his or her three or four sentence synopsis of Sunday evening’s importance as The White House inexplicably appeared to have procrastinated in its completion of the easiest ten minute Presidential (getting-well-past)-primetime address to the nation ever. That said, all this celebration of a bullet to the head as “Payback” only betrays the hopelessly impoverished collective imagination of any country that “does not torture.”
For while reliable reports suggest that bin Laden the man stared into the abyss with somewhat less bravado than Saddam Hussein the Stalinist or Ceausescu the Vampire, it is difficult to imagine bin Laden the fanatical caricature dying in any less than Gandhian tranquility. Thus, imagining that for some people some things are worse than death, I had my own fantasies for bin Laden the idiot. Having defeated Communism and bankrupted Capitalism, just three months ago this idiot might have gone into his seventy-two virgins confident of ultimate historical vindication. Then democratic, peaceful, coed assembly defeated a Western-backed dictator in Tunisia. Then in Egypt. Then it made efforts in less hopeful police states. Recalling the eleven years of civil war and slave trading that separate “Life, Liberty, and the Purfuit of Happineff” from “We the People” and extrapolating similar revolutionary fits and martyrs to our North African expectations, a bullet even three months from Sunday may have left the idiot feeling similarly vindicated. How divine the foresight of Obama to shoot bin Laden in a head at its nadir of relevance, thus obviating my imaginative fantasy to treat the manacled terrorist to a full tin of halal lamb-over-rice in Zuccotti Park less than thirty minutes before a swim in the nearby Park 51 Islamic Community Center’s coed deep end!
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