After nearly 10 long years, Osama bin Laden is finally dead -- or so we've been told, anyway. He's apparently being buried at sea, so I guess we'll just have to take the word of our government (the same government that once told us Iraq was swimming in WMDs) that he's gone. The skeptic/cynic in me has a hard time believing anything that anyone in a position of authority says these days, but I'm sure that enough of Osama's body is being kept to provide DNA samples as definitive proof against those who might suggest that he's still alive, hanging out in an undisclosed location in Pakistan somewhere with Elvis, Jim Morrison and Biggie. (Side note: leaving out Osama, wouldn't that be just about the best jam session ever?)
DNA samples, of course, aren't enough to prove that we killed him when the government is telling us we did, as opposed to, say, killing him months earlier, or 9 1/2 years ago, or whenever; nor are they enough to prove that we didn't, say, find his body in a grave somewhere and claim credit for a job that was done by someone else (or by his kidneys). Bin Laden has been quite a useful boogeyman for the neoconservatives and other friends of perpetual war against Eastasia (or was it Eurasia? I forget), so it wouldn't be at all surprising to find that he's been actually been dead for quite some time now, as some have suggested. Taking such speculation too far, however, risks leading us into the same murky, crocodile-infested intellectual waters into which the birthers, truthers, and other assorted crackpots have blissfully dived head-first. Better, then, to simply acknowledge that Osama bin Laden is no more. He has ceased to be. He's expired and gone to meet his maker. He's a stiff; bereft of life, he rests in peace. He's pushing up daisies, his metabolic processes are now history, he's off the twig, he's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Osama bin Laden is an ex-parrot.
And I suppose it was inevitable that people would cheer his death, and that those in positions of authority would pull a muscle or two patting themselves on the back for the fact that he's been eliminated. And that's all fine and good, even if I do find all the glee over his demise a bit unseemly and disturbing. But amid all this triumphalism, what I'd like to hear from someone, anyone, is: what does this change? Are we going to be pulling out of Afghanistan any sooner, or finally wrapping things up in Iraq? Will we be cutting back any on our bloated, wasteful military budget? Will we now be able to take shampoo with us when we get on an airplane; will we no longer be subjected to virtual strip searches? Will we finally close Gitmo, and stop torturing detainees; will we stop sending them to other countries to be tortured?
I'm sure that Osama bin Laden's death will provide some semblance of closure to some of those who lost loved ones on 9/11, and so for that, if nothing else, it's good that he's gone. And to a lesser extent, it will provide an opportunity for closure to all of us, for we were all changed by what happened on that dark day. But if, in the end, after all the confetti has been swept up from the streets and the American flags have been folded up and put away -- if after all that we obtain no more than a vague sense of closure from this, and continue on with the sorry business of bankrupting this country and chipping away bit by bit at the things that once made it great, then why should we really care that bin Laden is gone? What difference will his death have made if we still freak out every time we see some dark-skinned person on an airplane wearing Muslim garb? If we continue spending nearly $700 billion a year (and growing) on our military -- almost as much as the rest of the world combined -- while we slowly dismantle Social Security, and Medicare, and Medicaid, and leave millions of people uninsured, why should it matter that Osama bin Laden is dead? If he's dead, but the seeds of destruction that he planted in our fertile soil continue to grow undisturbed, and we continue to water them with our money, with our fear, with our blood and the blood of countless others, does it really matter that his name is no longer at the top of the al-Qaeda org chart? Are we really so taken in by cheap, meaningless symbolism that we would turn a blind eye to the lasting and significant damage that we have done, and continue to do, to this country and comfort ourselves instead with the false satisfaction of reveling in Osama bin Laden's death?
What does bin Laden's death change? Someone tell me, because what I'm seeing now hasn't been enough to convince me that I should really care all that much that he's gone. Tell me how this is going to make me proud to be an American again. Tell me how this is going to unfuck everything that we've fucked up over the last ten years. I'm all ears.