On Sunday evening, as word of Osama Bin Laden’s demise ricocheted across the world’s media, I was riding a bus home from Manhattan, where I had spent the weekend visiting my mother and a few friends from high school. My phone had gone dead during the trip, and so I missed the wave of speculation which had captivated so much of the country that evening. Instead, I got the news in a single heaping serving as I arrived back at my apartment, exhausted from the weekend.
“You didn’t miss it,” my girlfriend told me as I walked in the door.
“Miss what?”
“The president’s speech.”
“About what?”
A pause.
“Was your phone dead? They killed Osama Bin Laden.”
“Holy shit…yeah, my phone was dead.”
If the cable pundits are right, I will probably remember that awkward and confused moment of revelation for the rest of my life. Osama’s death is supposed to be one of those indelible events–like VJ Day or the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 itself–that my generation will talk about around the nursing home cafeteria table. I’m sure that’s true, and I will almost certainly tell my disinterested grandchildren about how I learned about the demise of the world’s #1 terrorist a good hour after everyone else. But I can’t help but wonder how we, or the history books, will recount the emotions from that day. Because for all the outward celebration, I think most of us experienced something far from simple joy.
Much has been made of the way young Americans flooded the streets that night to celebrate. Some seem to think it was unseemly to throw a pep rally in celebration of a man’s death–even this man. And as someone who lives in DC and hopped in a friend’s car to the White House a little after midnight, I can confirm that the scene was indeed a confused, garish, jingoistic, frat party-like mess. It was clear that police had adopted a hands off policy for the night, and the college students and twenty-somethings dominating the crowd seized the chance to commit whatever amusing illegal act they could think of. I saw guys drinking from open handles of Smirnoff and smelled pot smoke wafting by. More than a few bros climbed up the 30-foot lamposts on Pennsylvania Ave. and waved American flags from the top. Others settled for the trees of Lafayette Park or the equestrian of General Lafayette himself (I tried to climb up a few times and failed). People chanted U-S-A and sang the Star Spangled Banner. They held up hand drawn signs that read “Osama Bin Later, tea partier “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and Obama campaign posters. One lonely girl stood around with an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of cardboard on which she had written “No More War.” She was mostly ignored. Another guy sat on his friend’s shoulders and unfurled a flag bearing an assault rifle and the words “Just Try and Take It.” He got a crowd.
I watched the party unfold with some detachment–in it, but not necessarily of it. In a way, it was similar to what I experienced on the day the towers collapsed. I was in class in a school building on the Upper East Side that morning. But when I stood in the middle of Madison Ave. and stared at the enormous, volcano-like cloud of smoke and debris that had risen from downtown, I didn’t feel fear so much as a kind of blankness, a sense that my emotions had simply short-circuited. I knew I was watching something complicated and horrible, and over the coming days, as I watched the towers burn and collapse over and over on TV and listened to the sounds of fighter jets overhead, that ineffable feeling lingered. To me, Osama’s death was almost the perfect reverse–wonderful and complicated, a satisfying ending to a story that, no matter how you measured it, would never be a happy one.
For all my ambivalence, the party still seemed fitting. That it was was grotesque, cruelly joyous, and politically confused made it a perfect reflection of the years of frustration and strain that had led to it. What else could possibly do justice to a ten-year man hunt through the mountains of a godforsaken failed state in central Asia? We have spent more than a trillion dollars in part to track down a sickly, bearded demagogue who, as it turned out, had been living under our noses, camped out in the Palm Springs of Pakistan. That our country succeeded was the most and least serious accomplishment one could imagine, a symbolic victory that changed nothing and everything. For those of us who grew up immersed in this last terrible, paranoid decade, it was only our second sigh of relief (the first, for most of us anyway, was Obama’s election). The moment called for a spectacle, and if half the crowd communicated in sports chants (what could be less dignified?), then that’s because that’s the language we’ve learned to express victory. Half those in the streets, I think, were there just watch, if nothing else than out of respect for the moment, to give it the proper, screwed up due.
Will we all remember the strangeness of the moment while we’re old and still yammering about this? Probably not. Memory isn’t kind to complexity–it smooths and simplifies. But if the crowd’s reaction wasn’t tidy and dignified, it’s because the feelings behind it probably weren’t either. I think everyone was permitted to go a little nuts. We’d earned it.
