So Osama bin Laden is dead (or might be dead), which the US is quite ready to claim without proffering the body, though they claim they had it, and even claim they buried him at sea to peaceably accord with the Muslim tradition of burying the dead within 24 hours postmortem, all of this within mere hours of the actual pronouncement of the deed; I'd be dishonest if I didn't say that all of this sounds mightily suspicious and dubious. For a high-profile person of historical importance like bin Laden, this kind of quick and convenient religiously sensitive disposal makes no sense whatsoever. And so Gadhafi’s kid and grandkids are dead (or might not be dead, might not even exist, according to US and NATO, at least not until they proffer the bodies). Legal and philosophical burden of proof stuff and matters vaguely similar to it, how it applies and to whom it applies and to whom it doesn’t and when it does and when it doesn’t—it’s all very confusing. But like on most issues, it seems as if America is making their own rules and sticking hard and fast to them irrespective of the rest of the world. If Osama is dead…then terrorism is over, right? No. The world is now safe from threats? No. "A mortal blow has been dealt to al Qaeda"? Sorry. Sounds nice, but not that either. A front waged against undefined "terrorism" is a measurable war with clear-cut outcomes and goals against America- and freedom-hating infidels orchestrated by on arch-villain madman under whom all inner- and outerworkings function? No. Not at all. What’s certain is this: The death (or rumored death) of Osama bin Laden means absolutely nothing. Closure is a word invented by pop psychology books, and chances are (much like what Edith Wharton said of happiness) if you're seeking closure, you're probably going to have a rough time finding it. A literal translation of Habeas corpus: show me the body. Prove to me that this is something besides a scapegoat for all of Americas' and our executive's frustrations. Everything I've read thus far is all anonymous this and undisclosed that and 99% this but can't confirm that. According to some bin Laden has been dead for a few years now. According to others the man as we've construed him has never even existed (like Jesus, probably) except on American television. Now these might very well be shaky-fingered conspiracy theories in which one would have to be a little bit screw-loosened to believe, but one would have to be equally screwless in the head to believe that the death of Osama bin Laden carries with it any nanoscopic amount of national or international import. Whose to say American forces didn't just now come across the emaciated body of a man who'd died in the desert from privation and heat and decided to say they executed him, to boost morale? Whose to believe any of this without the same burdens of proof the government asks of everybody else, especially other countries. Nevertheless, say this is true, say bin Laden had been, upon executive order, brought down in Pakistan after ten years of wearying searching, destroying, and dying on the behalf of American (but not only American) troops. This is what we call a pyrrhic victory, if it is even that at all—a minor “triumph” offset by an outlandish tonnage of losses, the balance of which is not even proximal to being evened. Is this the rate of success we can expect, then--ten years per one success--let alone one with which we're content? Will it take another ten, twelve years to bring down another figurehead on whom our government chooses to place their crosshairs? Is any of this even worth it? Besides giving a small population of people yet another martyr to shower with praise and adulation, what does this accomplish in the grand or even in the miniscule scheme of things. Forget the macro; what's the micro gain of this? Not much.
Nobody honestly thinks this man's death does anything to compensate for 9/11 and the nearly 3,000 lives wrongfully taken from this planet thereon. That's not true, I guess, because the counterterrorism head seems to believe that al Qaeda is a thing of the past now and considers America a categorically safer place, and the fact that this is our counterterrorism chief is just a little bit upsetting to me; those sentiments are mere wishful thinking and American fear- and ego-stroking with "narrative agenda" written in blood all over them. We're talking about a guy, bin Laden, whose role over the past ten years has been so scarcely limited he might as well have not existed at all. And now, after what is and has always been an overblown and overhyped threat from al Qaeda to begin with after 9/11, after the death of that organization's feeble old symbolic face has finally died, America wants to act as if a major blow has been delivered and al Qaeda has been crippled; and while that's a nice and cleanly composed story book morality tale with a happy ending, it doesn't have much to do with the actual way reality has played out. I understand the potentially viewed insensitivity of what I'm saying to those who've lost loved ones in these acts, and I of course feel for you, I truly do, and I empathize with all your anguish, anger, and suffering, but I stress the point of an earlier sentence: this does nothing to mitigate any of that, at least nothing beyond temporary respite, the deferment of said anguish. Killing one man cannot make anything better; it cannot make up for ten years of mistakes and cluster-fucked ham-fisted clumsiness; and it cannot clean up the confusing messiness of the 9/11 acts in the first place. They happened and the death of their "orchestrator" cannot make them any more understandable or easier. It doesn’t vindicate the wars nor does it make up for all the lives lost therein. It inflicts not a lick of damage to the vast and interconnected system of al Qaeda and its diffuse and little understood affiliates; what it does put an end to is most Americans' symbolic understanding of that organization, and bin Laden is just that: a crudely drawn symbol and a practically irrelevant figure to them in recent years, a boogeyman for all of America's despair, fears, and anger. al Qaeda means "the base" in Arabic and that's exactly what their goal has been from the start: to be the base, which isn't the same thing as a central source of power, but a kind of loose gathering point of uncountable divisions and branches, subsidiaries and take-offs with marginally different ideological goals, all self-sustaining and all able to rely on others if need be, so many of them that it would impossible to track them all. What the jubilant and eerie celebration of this does is point to how futile and interminable these wars are and how desperate and yearning-for-anything of a nation we have become and how just plain old ignorant (or worse, in denial) to the state of things most of us are. Call it “justice” if you want; the dead aren’t coming back nor are they even watching. If there is such a thing as an afterlife and the dead are in fact capable of observing us, I hope to hell they've turned their back on our sad little dramas for something more interesting years ago; were I to be dead, I would much prefer to watch the gradual burning out of a distant star or the birth of a galaxy than the unforgivable cruelty and wastefulness of the human race. This is nothing more than a sadly trumpeted sensation to make up for what has been a decade of fruitless engagements, staggering losses of life, and rampant hopelessness in search of an end to a war (and a series of wars) without end, without directive, without, in general, a point. To combat terrorism is a vague and meaningless mission, in addition to which it is dangerous and reckless. For every Osama bin Laden you kill there are probably 300 more you don’t know about. The world (and America) is not even a scintilla safer than it was before, and to think that either of the two are demonstrates a fundamentally cracked and childish understanding of the world in which America is still a do-no-wrong spandex-clad superhero and purported “evil” can still be stamped off in one swift blow by felling a comic-book type of head-honcho evildoer. The lives that have been lost are lost and no amount of violence can rectify or make up for this. To celebrate this minor footnote on the grim, sanguine spreadsheet of these wars as a kind of comprehensive military triumph over evil, a symbol of American indomitability, and to pretend that because the American military managed (or may have managed) to kill one person who has been wandering around caves, luxuriating in compounds, and herding goats for the past ten years will in any way ensure a greater blanket of safety on the world is either shamelessly and pueriley naïve and simplistic or willfully ignorant and an example of seeing the world through perpetually red, white, and blue blinders, but it’s most likely all of the above, not to mention a pinch jingoistic. If anything, this is an example of America's singleminded compulsivity and perilously cathectic behavior disorder, in that we will pursue the first thought-best thought plan, no matter how terrible it is or how much damage (human and financial) it causes us, because that's what Americans do--get the goddamn job done at all costs; and it's there, that "at all costs" where you lose me and where you lose, as it turns out, lots of living, breathing lives, and where, in my opinion, the ends here are simply unjustified vis-a-vis the means, and not even close to being worthwhile. 
Watching the celebrations redolent of the kind of mind-numbing fist-pumping of fans after a superbowl victory, I'm actually a little stomach-sick at how myopic and callowly credulous we can be. The best and most composed way to celebrate or, let's try a better word, acknowledge the death (or rumored death) of Osama bin Laden would be to ignore it and ignore him, to go about your lives with your heads up and your eyes open, to continue being brave in a dangerous and violent world, to find some way to be kind to someone whom might need it, to dive in to the world and life you have right here and eke out as much significance as you can with the people you love because it all moves pretty rapidly and one doesn't have enough time to get caught up with pettiness and useless allocations of time, like the death of one insignificant Afghani guy with a beard who may or may not have been entirely responsible some massively and heinously atrocious acts, and to remember that there are still many thousands of men and women overextended, overtaxed, and being treated, in general, like armamentary apparatuses rather than human beings overseas pursuing an increasingly fragmented, dissolute, and disillusioned war against a nebulous conceptual enemy by which this country is being torn open and bankrupt and against which there is no genuine way of safeguarding and protecting ourselves, not in any meaningful way at least. Regardless of how you feel about bin Laden and 9/11 and the horrors thrust upon the country and the country's consciousness at that moment, there's something sick and depraved about excitedly and joyously celebrating the death of bin Laden, a ghastliness and a depravity that brings us right back around full circle to why we're here, because of a uniform celebration of death and destruction, mayhem and ruination, the same celebrated death and destruction that bin Laden and his janissaries felt when they toppled the towers and felt, for themselves, a sense of closure, an upper-hand, a comeuppance. Human life is human life is human life is human life is human life is human life; you want to be proud that he's gone, fine, go ahead. But to celebrate it, to want to see POV footage, as I've heard expressed, of the man being gunned down, the desire to see his shed blood, the extended desire to kill his family--i.e. to want to turn bid Laden's death into entertainment, which is what Americans want to do to everything--it's all a byproduct of the same sociopathic, inhumane, and detached viewpoint that brought us here in the first place--an unwillingness to approach even remotely understanding one another; an absolute self-assuredness and confidence in the purity, religiosity, nobility and almost saintliness of one's actions; a total dearth of doubt; and a kind of tumescent sense of pride in oneself and implosive self-centeredness--so to celebrate, to be mirthful and ecstatic at this death, is to be complicit in everything involved; be glad that a small chapter is finished and move on. 
Hate is a corrosive thing; energy is precious; and so you've got to be careful about to what or to where you devote it, and to hate bin Laden, to relish in his death (of which, in the end, I'm still a little unconvinced), not to mention to try and seek some kind of resolution from it, is nothing but a waste of time and personal resources and won't last you in the long run. I repeat: this means nothing other than a forced and false meaning affixed onto a linkage of wars devoid of any such thing. But it's fine. We'll buy signs and banners congratulating ourselves on bin Laden's death, we allow ourselves to be commercialized by the whole event, we'll join facebook groups commemorating and celebrating the death of bin Laden, we'll make jokes, we'll advocate for holidays in which we get a day off because of the rumored and as-yet unproven death of bin Laden, we will, in essence, trivialize not just the death of bin Laden, the deaths of those in 9/11, and the deaths of all those who have died until now and who will continue to die along the circuitous courseways of this pathetically empty-hearted and -headed war, but death itself, and when you trivialize death itself you also, as a result, trivialize and cheapen life, you make life all that much more meaningless than it already is right out the tabula rasa-gates. But it's fine. It's America. I get it. We're sad and desperate and incultured. Flags will wave briefly, car horns will honk wildly in feigned joyousness, and people will drink themselves into a stupor they will tell themselves is about American pride and not their own problems with their own dissatisfying lives, but in the days that follow the originally scheduled programming will return to America like the vomitous pall that it is with all the self-satisfying reliability of prime time television, and those sterilized, overly saccharine pop star voices auditioning to be big hits and national anthem-crooning baseball park stars and starlets will continue telling you the same fallacious nationalistic bromides you've been told for too many years for there to be any hope of reversibility: you are special; you are righteous; you are so fucking great.
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