So we have finally made one thing absolutely clear: you do not fuck with the United States of America for more than about ten years. I’m not going to believe anything until I see the long-form death certificate,* but it would appear that the one person in the world it was unequivocally okay to hate has been shot in the face via our tax dollars. Nice job, President who did not consistently evoke cowboy imagery in explaining his intention to kill that guy. Clearly, Osama Bin Laden was one of the better people you could make dead. Yet ambivalence remains. The picture above—in which someone who was 13 years old on the original September 11th wilds out like the New England Wasps just won the Super Bowl—captures the problem nicely. Insofar as there are Enemies of America, Bin Laden was America’s enemy. All he did was sit in a cave and plot to murder us, whereas we sat in offices and did same while also inventing the automobile and curing polio and producing some really well-lit pornography. You cannot have a society with people like him running around. Popping his dome therefore must have been good for society, but how do we acknowledge that? One does not high five in response to death unless one is playing Call of Duty. One does not take to the streets and jump around draped in flags unless one is, um, a fan of Osama Bin Laden. Killing OBL was something we all wanted to do, to the point where we once evaluated our politicians based on their expressed degree of interest in doing it, but it’s not the kind of thing you can really get jazzed about having done. I submit that America is the place where we pay our government to kill people, but not the place where we publicly rejoice over it. Whether that is good or bad is another question. Anybody else have a big problem with America? Any other cave-dwelling sociopaths have a totalizing critique of modernity? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

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