Osama bin Laden: Anticlimax

--It's a Wrap:
National Command Authority viewing the 
Osama bin Laden execution 

make em laugh make em cry
make em dance in the aisles
make em pay make em stay
make em feel ok
we've got to get on with the film show
Hollywood waits at the end of the rainbow 
--Not Now John, Pink Floyd 

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile
Let me do a few tricks
Some old and then some new tricks
I'm very versatile
--Let Me Entertain You, Gypsy 

You brought me fame and fortune
And everything that goes with it
I thank you all 
--We are the Champions, Queen
___________________

Say, did ya hear about that tornado in Texas? They say we've had a tornado a day since May 2nd. Kinda blows your little mind, no? Oh, and black men who run from the police, some of them have been killed, too.

And an impeccable journalist (a vanishing breed) named Seymour Hersch has just revealed an explosive news story to little attention: that the Osama bin Laden kill-raid was a well-scripted affair in collusion with the Pakistanis for a couple of years before the scenario actually went into live action action on May 2011. The body parts of the target of the assassination, Mr. Bin Laden, were strewn in the mountains of Afghanistan (in contrast to the official story of a burial at sea.) 

The non-event was in the can before the film started rolling.

The Big News is: President Obama's approval of this assassination is an impeachable offense, but the media cabal will not allow that to happen, in the same way it (and we) have allowed Mr. Obama to order previous assassinations (four of whom were U.S. citizens.)

The point is, we are distracted by the predictable, the intractable and the insoluble, while a real and present threat to our democracy is issued from the White House to little fanfare. We are slaves to our self-imposed notions of political correctness, missing the forest for the trees.


When the Abu Ghraib scandal was revealed by the same Mr. Hersch, The New Yorker magazine was only too happy to oblige. It brought proper shame and howls of execration upon the administration of President George W. Bush. The press was game to follow the meticulously researched trail of grotesqueries revealed by Hersch's reportage, but not so now. Why?

Mr. Bush was a natural flak magnet, a Privileged White Man (PWM) who began the dreadful bungle of the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) in a spectacular fashion, with the support of many. However, as the realities of the failure began to unravel themselves, the easy derision -- often from his one-time supporters -- came easily.

Though Obama has continued what Bush began and taken the legal violations to new heights, there is not much outcry. Obama is a "serious man". He embodies what we like to imagine as our triumph of will: The election of our first black president.Our underlying collective guilt and bigotry allow us to do naught but allow for the hagiography of Obama.

But The London Review of books did run Hersch's piece, and it is just as damning, just as vulgar as anything committed in the Bush administration if not more so by virtue of its scripted nature. Where much of Abu Ghraib was a ghoulish cock-up perpetrated partly by misfits operating under incapable supervision, partly by a hubristic system gone rogue, reveling in its sadistic power, the killing of OBL was accomplished by a master plan long in the making, staged to look like a heroic mission.

However, heroism is not a term to be applied to either Mr. Bush's or Mr. Obama's escapades in the conduct of the Phony War on Terror. We do not need Mr. Yoo anymore; Obama brings his own lawyerly skills to the execution of his administration's dastardly deeds.

One and a half years later, Hollywood's script of the Army's scripted action -- the film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) -- was released, winning an Academy Award for Kathryn Bigelow (a FEMALE director!) capturing the "essence" of war. She had cut her teeth on "the Hurt Locker" in the same way the Army cut its on the Jessica Lynch fable. Our own Leni Reifenstahl, helping to further the war effort; a good lap dog.

The White House fabulists began the simulacrum with their early construction of a "daring" multi-force assault story-board for the rescue of Jessica Lynch, the plucky blond West Virginian who went down shooting in 2003, except it was not true. Twelve years have passed since that foundational tale, and it was bookended with the daring OBL raid and the fake-modest book by one of the perpetrators (Mark Bissonnette), "No Easy Day."

No, you will not hear the calls for President Obama's impeachment over his complicity in and approval of this shocking action because, well, you choose the reason.

We will offer a few:

--The nation needs its heroes.

--The trade-off for the blacks who have been killed in recent months and have been forefronted by the media is to not try our first black president. (Forget that they and he are not fungible quantities. For the sake of a Tweet they are.)

--If President Bush was not tried for impeachment, we can't try Obama.

--Living as we do in philosopher Baudrillard's hyperreal, to reveal the fact behind the portrayal of the spectacle would be a tertiary
"event" for us, and therefore, much diluted in its potency. The real is less appealing, and we are collectively less heroic, more demonized, in its revelation.

The OBL raid was DOA as a news item; an anticlimax. The ailing older man had been superannuated by new leadership presenting new challenges. The only thing left was to rub out the lingering non-threat (OBL) and to imbue the supposed capture-kill mission with an air of western bravado, another daring raid, a la Jessica Lynch. An Eastern Western, fit for the agog Facebooking masses.

Like propagandist Reifenstahl's homage to the Third Reich (Triumph of Will), Bigelow's No Easy Day  depicts Americans as well-intentioned and successful. Like director Clint Eastwood's American Sniper earlier this year, these movies show events populated by men and missions acting for the greater glory of the State. There is little room for ambiguity. Things are necessary, and the gruesome and ambiguous nature of the reality is sucked up by the "get ir done", can-do of American moxie.

It seems the supposed liberals think it better to let Hersch's expose die with every other failure by denying it press, by focusing on the things we know how to talk about, giving our sympathy to things familiar and tried. Pity, given the dangerous nature of the news Hersch has presented

A nation which pretends to democracy while hiding its violations dies the death of a thousand small cuts.