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.
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