Burying bin Laden
His body has been consigned to the sea but how will we deal with his legacy?
For years now, the corporeal Osama has been like one of those aging celebrities on reality TV and game shows popping up to reprise his latest and greatest hit on 9/11. His irrelevance has been monumental.
What needs attention now is the hole he left in the American psyche that has been growing and festering for almost a decade now–gaslighting us into self-destruction, a term to describe intimidation and psychological abuse through false information that clouds the victim’s perception.
“All we have to do,” bin Laden crowed in 2004, “is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note…”
He was talking about Iraq and Afghanistan but could have updated it with Libya, Yemen and most of the Middle East by now. If he were poetically inclined, Osama might have even eulogized himself for much of the hatred, division and distrust that cloud internal American politics today.
MORE.
One Response to “Burying bin Laden”
Obama 2012 and Congressional Dems will exploit it for now, gloating about how tough ‘n’ hawkish they are.
(The only thing that could be taken seriously from Dems in DC would be if Obama reversed the silly chair-rearrangement he recently had announced, and make Hillary Clinton the new Secretary of Defense if ever she wanted to leave the top job at State. Defense plus State is a novel pair of federal posts as an alternative to the VP, Senator [which Clinton already has been by exploiting New York voters], or Governor for the Presidency, as Colin Powell exemplified earlier.)