May 2, 2011

• Because I'll just create noise and strife rather than anything useful if I post this on Facebook…

   

  I don't know what I love more about this day: the number of comments about Osama through the Islamic religion or the fact that aparently the best response to the death of a man who terrorized the Middle East and ruined American families is just chants of "USA!" (my all-time favorite was a site asking to submit one word in reaction to his death and a fairly prominent one was just the word American).

   

  I mean, I never thought I, of all people, would be one to play judge during a moment such as this. Normally I'd tell the person that they're bothering themselves too much with other people's thoughts or I'd play devil's advocate and say, "Well, why shouldn't we be glad?" And, while I'm not exactly sure what I was, I know I'll never forget when I saw. Just going to boxturtlebulletin.com like usual and the opening article reads, Justice Has Been Done. And I was just shocked. For all those familiar reasons. For justice, because the specter of my childhood actually turned out to be there after all the newscasts and reactions and 10 years of living with it so that I was reminded just how ingrained he was in my memories, peers, psyche, and culture and now he could finally be extinguished, and (I admit) because I knew this was perfect political fodder. Forever the PR individual, this was what Obama needed for 2012.

  For all these reasons, I was taken aback. I haven't slept since (and I only got 4 hours of sleep the night before). And yet, I keep feeling disgust when I see reactions. I mean, I know people are stupid. If you fall for anything within propaganda (which is PR and advertisement, as far as I'm concerned), you're stupid. The backbone is manipulation. Clearly my expectation was that people would eat this up, see it as "a reason to believe in America again" (fuck, was I ever this much of a cynic?).

  And yet all I can see are the same problems that came up, starting with Reagan, during the Bush years. "USA! USA!" I suppose it's suitable enough to run around in a U. S. flag because of this; or at least, normally, you might be able to convince me that I shouldn't think negatively of it. But all I can hear when I see it is, "America is the best country in the world." That ridiculous, egocentric, and mind-numbingly stupid tag line of American politics.

  I want to just sigh, give a bittersweet rejoicement (if I must party, celebrate resentingly), because life was spilt. If I thought I was a cynic before, I thought I was more of a cynic than to make a comment such as, "Is life so cheap now?" I'm glad he's gone. To quote someone else, "Glad Obama got the bastard." But I am not happy. Happy is unmuddled, too pure. It rings of celebration as if the Bears just won the Superbowl. "Yeah, we got 'im." Death (and news about a man who murdered people) should not be celebrated like a sports event; the reaction is so fundamentally detached from the notion of sadness that I can't help but think that the majority of those people only saw the man as a symbol, not a life, not a taker of lives, not an opressor, but an opponent to which our team was losing. Because, all along, it was just about us, right? It was America's personal agenda to settle because it's the strongest country in the world. Because we have a manifest destiny that entitles us to anything we fucking want.

  I want to be happy. Today is a good day.

  But it makes me a little sick inside to call myself an American.

  • 7:57 am
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