Celebration Guns – Stars
Regret – New Order
Calm Americans – Elliott
So: the celebrations about the death of Osama bin Laden. What are we to think of them? There are a couple of strands of thought here. Some people want to criticize them for finding joy in murder. And there is a certain ghoulishness to the whole thing. Others want to say that people should feel free to express themselves in whatever way felt right. That there is no accounting for the sort of visceral reaction that the news might provoke. Others see nothing shameful at all in the celebrations. Some of these lament the immediate politicization, discussions about what it means, etc. They simply wanted to feel the unity of the moment.
My own reaction was somewhat muted. In general I am deeply skeptical and unhappy about the state wielding deadly force. That said, I’m no longer the total pacifist I once was. At least, I don’t think I am. And if there is anyone that a state has justification to kill, bin Laden has to be high on the list.
That said, I certainly did not respond with high-fives or any real sense of joy. There was that fake MLK quote floating around, which has a sentiment that I can certainly get behind. But my thoughts actually turned more to a bit from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:
[T]here is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?
* * *
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.
The thing I like about the Vonnegut quote (and the book as the whole) is that it doesn’t limit itself to simply making a moral judgment on the act itself. Massacre is certainly a bad thing, but that’s a pretty banal point. For Vonnegut, the really complex problem isn’t the fact of massacres as much as it’s the glorification that it receives back home.
Must our enemies be killed? Perhaps. But if so, I tend to think the proper response should be Vonnegut’s quiet “so it goes” as opposed to cheers.
All that said, I don’t feel particularly comfortable criticizing those who responded differently. 9-11 never hit me with the same sort of pre-rational force as it seems to have struck many others. And while I do feel comfortable criticizing a lot of the policy choices that were legitimated or grounded in that primeval set of emotions (the war in Iraq most prominently, but there’s plenty more), I don’t want to necessarily challenge the validity of the momentary feeling itself.
Obviously, it’s difficult to disentangle those things. But in this case the line between valid outpouring of emotion and problematic appropriation of that emotion is found in the “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chants.
To celebrate the death of bin Laden leaves me feeling more than a bit uncomfortable. But I can deal with that. It’s the immediate translation of that celebration into the language of American dominance and hegemonic empire-building that concerns me. I think that passes into the realm of destructive and vaguely disgusting political ideology.
To simplify: I don’t feel the desire for revenge as a sort of affective need, but I can understand those who do. I cannot find any modicum of respect, though, for those who immediately jump to nationalism as the filtering mechanism for this.
There is danger in framing bin Laden as having committed crimes against humanity (in terms of what then becomes possible and/or necessary as a political response). But that formulation at least implies the idea of a principle upon which our search and destroy mission was conducted. To chant “U-S-A! U-S-A!” is to declare that this whole thing has only ever been (and will always be) about nothing but naked aggression and power. It is, in short, to validate every criticism of the US as a hypocritical, tottering, imperial force.
The death of bin Laden does not prove the worth of the United States. If the US is great, it is in spite of our desire for vengeance and our capacity to wield mass death. It is in our capacity for restraint, in the fact that if we must kill we do so with some sense of regret.
All of which is to say: the expression of unfiltered joy at the death of bin Laden by itself doesn’t strike me as a serious problem. It is the celebration of that joy, its reification through self-congratulatory forms, that fills me with dread.
Technically, the chants were for the fact that badass US soldiers got him. I don’t think there’d be the chants if he died from pneumonia. It was much more about a feeling of accomplishment and a sense of security vs. the general feeling vulnerability and powerlessness in face of the falling towers. There might be something problematic about that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also something understandable and justified about it either.
In other words, you might be right that some people are cheering in terms of “naked aggression and power,” but I don’t think that’s really what most people were cheering about. You’re jumping to a much more aggressive conclusion. I think they were cheering for the hope that we can actually have some agency in our own security. For the idea that a United States that fights for freedom can actually accomplish something against an asshole who wants to impose Sharia law or death on everyone. Frankly, it’s really not that different from “yes we can” — a chant that people were also cheering outside the White House at the time.
Also, you characterize the particular (USA) and universal (humanity) as opposites, but isn’t that a good thing? There’s something good about a sense of nationalism that retains the need to justify its actions and pride in its actions in terms of the universal, and at the same time, there’s something good in refusing to forget one’s particularity when acting in the name of the universal (because that’s what opens action in the name of universality up to politicization, and it allows the expression of particularity as itself a valuable component of communal discourse). So, in sum, turn.
If people want to celebrate the USA for being the sort of place where we’re generous and well-off and happy and whatever, there’s surely something positive about that. But that doesn’t mean all celebration of nationality is good.
And particularly for a hegemonic superpower, celebration of nationalism should be a lot more restrained.
“U-S-A!” doesn’t mean “I have some agency in my own security.” It means “I live in a country with the military capacity to destroy you and everyone you care about. And you better remember it.”
It’s not like Iwo Jima or something. Killing bin Laden is basically meaningless for actual security. It’s purely symbolic. If it’s symbolic of justice there are problems with that, but problems I’m more than willing to take on. If it’s symbolic of revenge, there are even more problems, but not horrific ones. When it becomes symbolic of the inevitability of American (military) victory over those who challenge us, I get very worried.
First, Osama orchestrated the death of thousands of people. Real human people. Not symbols. Not abstractions. Real people. People who lived and worked and laughed only a few blocks away from where I’m sitting right now. And he was continuing to try to do that. It’s pretty disgusting to say his death is “purely symbolic.” Say what you will about the exaggeration of terrorism, but don’t whitewash a murderer to make your intellectual point.
Second, chanting “USA” when Osama is killed isn’t about saying “I can destroy you and everyone you care about” where “you” means anyone at all. The “you” is a murderer. Someone who believes that it’s right and mandated by heaven to intentionally destroy human beings to terrorize a population.
Third, your internal link links to itself. Extrapolating celebration of Osama’s death to mean celebration of the death of ANY challenger naturalizes the assumption that there’s only two types of people/states: those who are with us, and those who are against us. I think it’s nonsense to assume that everyone chanting “USA” when Osama was killed thinks that we’re sending a message to China or France. They’re making a very reasonable celebration of the ability of the United States to defend its citizens and the world against someone who believes in intentionally murdering innocent people to achieve radical fundamentalist objectives, including cutting women’s clitorises. It’s about believing in the ability of a nation that prizes freedom and democracy to secure itself against the terrorism that is enabled by that same freedom — especially for those of us chanting USA with a black President who refuses to use torture.
But it’s even more nonsensical to give those people for whom there’s only one meaning to US nationalism any credibility by ceding the substantive space of national pride. Sure, nationalism is dangerous. But it’s also productive. Either way, characterizing nationalism as an either/or is the same kind of reductionism you are lamenting.
And maybe you’re right that for 99% of people, chanting USA is some demonic act. But I won’t begrudge those people whose uncles and daughters and brothers jumped out a window of the WTC from feeling like finally — finally — there’s some justice.
If there’s one thing we should be bothered by, it’s the willingness to reduce an array of human emotions into a singular intellectual narrative. We should struggle instead to appropriate, complicate, disrupt those narratives… not by naturalizing them to criticize them as strawperson arguments, but by exposing their ambiguity and human frailty.
I’m just not willing to accept the idea of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” being a stand in for “feeling like there’s some justice.”
I get that it’s a raw thing for people, and I’m not trying to reduce things to a singular intellectual narrative. I’m saying that there is a powerful meaning that goes into chants like that, which makes me feel the need to criticize those who engaged in them. Not because they are illegitimate people or have no right to express their emotions. But since we should be nuanced and recognize human frailty, we have to be capable of self-reflexive thought about what it means when we do things.
As for “purely symbolic” maybe my word choice was not apt. And supposedly there’s stuff that suggests he was more involved in operational planning than I thought. But my point was that killing him didn’t accomplish all that much for US security because A) the whole stupid war on terror is pretty useless for our security, and cheering the victories helps to whitewash the terrible terrible things that come along with them and B) in 2011, bin Laden did not appear to pose much of a threat anymore. You say he killed real people, which is obviously true, and I don’t really get why you’re accusing me of ignoring that.
It’s the same argument that people use for the death penalty. “He killed all these people, they deserve justice.” If justice means the state killing people, simply for the sake of revenge, I’m not interested in that justice. And a country that embraces that idea needs to take a serious look in the mirror.
And again, I don’t mean to say that people have invalid emotional reactions if they personally think death for bin Laden IS justice. I’m saying that translating that personal sense of celebration into a valorization of the nation-state is really troubling.
I guess the long and short of it is that the the U-S-A is a murderer, too. And has murdered a whole lot of people in the course of fighting a ‘war on terror’ in the name of some higher principle. Whether or not you believe those efforts have been justified, I’m tremendously uneasy about turning ‘justified’ into ‘we rule, you drool.’
1. Is there no scenario at all then for ever cheering USA for exercise of military power to kill someone? What if there’s evidence that X person was about to set off a race bomb to kill all black people, and the USA devotes tons of resources and then sends in Navy Seals to kill X, and there’s evidence that unless the USA killed X, that bomb would’ve gone off? What if it was Hitler?
Your last arg (USA is murderer, therefore can’t celebrate USA killing someone bad even if that particular instance isn’t murder) would require you to say no, because presumably you can never cheer for a murderer. But if you say yes, then you have to acknowledge that cheering the exercise of military power to kill someone isn’t a universal “we rule, you drool.” It’s a specific issue of what you’re cheering. That’s the problem I have with your complaint. You’re lumping any cheering of killing Osama with Navy Seals into the same thing as cheering killing Osama with a UAV or killing Osama with a daisy cutter or killing some random Chinese soldiers or killing a political dissident in Iraq. I just think your inability to distinguish Osama AT ALL from any myriad of instances of people the US should not have killed makes your argument just as whitewashing as what you’re criticizing.
I just don’t think you’ve really responded to my arg. I’m saying that cheering the killing by Navy Seals (with minimal collateral damage and a specific choice NOT to use big bombs or UAVs) of a dude who was downright awful is not the same thing as cheering naked US killing of anyone who stands in the way of the US. It just seems ridiculous to me that you’re unable to accept that there can be a distinction between people cheering the specific killing of Osama from [insert USA killed someone and Charles finds it morally awful].
2. Retributive justice — you really think there’s no value at all to it ever? Or is your distinction based entirely on life/death (i.e., state-executed revenge is ok up to killing someone). Or is your distinction based on whether the justification for revenge is state-based vs. whether the enforcement of revenge is state-based (I think you maybe conflating the two — people are primarily cheering USA for the latter, not the former, though obviously people also are cheering for the former).
3. I don’t think you’ve really responded to my alternative. Nationalism is inevitable. We should use it for awesome. There really is something positive about coopting the narrative that says “nationalism means kill anyone with unlimited force who disagrees with us” into “let’s celebrate restrained, targeted violence that is limited to what’s absolutely necessary, that takes into account tough decisions, that says that justice transcends nation-state borders but must still account and respect those issues, and that still shows respect for the bodies and religion of those we kill — what makes us American is that we can still show respect for difference and respect for freedom and rule of law while protecting our citizens from murderers. We’re far from perfect, but when we do our job well, we’ll be damn proud of it.”
Exodus. Pharaoh’s armies are drowning in the Red Sea. One of God’s angels raises his hands in triumph and calls for a celebration of this amazing thing that God has done. God turns to the angel with a tear rolling down His cheek and says: “Will you please be quiet. My children are drowning down there.”*
Bin Laden had to die. I’m not sure that means we should celebrate the fact that a human soul had become so irredeemably corrupt that the only reasonable response was to destroy it.
We don’t celebrate when we put down our rabid dogs. We don’t tailgate executions (actually, some of us do; I’ve seen it; I don’t think it’s a tasteful choice). We do what needs to be done and get on with our lives.
Also: “USA! USA! USA!” is the same cheer we use for World Cup matches and the Olympics. Something somewhere is being trivialized, I think.
*I can’t remember if I first heard that parable in the movie “Munich” or in an Episcopalian sermon, but I’ve heard it in both places.
I’ll end with this:
1. Osama was not Old Yeller. Osama was neither cute nor fluffy at any point in time. He went to a secular college and was born with an silver spoon. He has quite a bit more responsible for the awfulness of his deeds than a dog does for contracting a disease. There is always some agency. Bad guys aren’t just victims, even if we should also understand the structure that produces them.
2. No one has answered my basic argument. Killing Osama the particular way the USA did (humans with minimum casualties instead of UAVs — a huge choice hyped up in the media) and under the particular circumstances they did (refusing sovereignty of nation-state while still respecting its importance; rejecting torture as means for intelligence, etc.) is NOT equivalent to killing just anyone in any manner and under any circumstances. My problem is with the false equivalence your guys’ fear relies on: it only makes sense that this cheering has bad consequences when you assume one good action is equivalent to a lot of bad actions.
I’ll go on cheering USA for the way we killed Osama. And I’ll be the first to criticize such cheers if they’re for killing good people or killing bad people in bad ways. The problem isn’t with the cheering. It’s in the refusal to distinguish specific scenarios, in the refusal to take pride in a USA that makes careful decisions.