Death Fest: USA! USA!

Praise be to the God of Death!

We killed the motherfucker! Yeah man. We’re the best killers in the world.

New Yorkers recently showed their true mental roots as they poured into the streets pumping their fists in rah-rah high school mentality, as if the war on terror were a football game between rival schools. It was USA vs. OBL (Osama bin Laden) but it might as well have been Ridgewood High vs. Beaumont High. Numerous interviewees claimed that normally they would not celebrate death, but in this case they felt it was appropriate.  Is it?  If such behavior occurred anywhere else in the world, New Yorkers would have been snickering in their martinis at the brutishness. Indeed, in other more sophisticated cities such childish celebrations of death are not to be seen. The only other people that act like this are our supposed “enemies.”  What could this mean?

What I want to look at is what these people are actually celebrating.  It is not justice, it is not victory.  It is a death fest, the fact that we KILLED the motherfucker, we blew his face off, we shot him dead in the head (in the eye no less). The airwaves are full of the praise of DEATH. He (bin Laden) is Dead, which here in the Easter season is sort of like saying He is Risen, and indeed he may be in future generations.  Everybody is in on the death fest.  Giuliani is joyful.   The Governor is ecstatic. Christine Quinn cries “America, America is Great.”   Mayor Bloomberg too has  joined the death fest, cranking up the pathos meter by bemoaning all the lives that could not contribute to the world (what he means of course is the New York economy). No one is concerned about the 100,000+ dead Iraqis or the dead Afghanis, or the dead Libyans, or all the other dead who cannot contribute to the banquet of life. We killed the motherfucker, yahoo!

The Dead Arise with Flags in Their Eyes!

This bullshit about the dead not being able to contribute is, of course, just that, bullshit. The argument is only valid when it is your own people you are talking about. Sure little Jimmy who joined the army might have invented a cancer program, or little Suzy the office girl in the towers might have given birth to the next savior of mankind. But what about the massive slaughter that is taking place every day and in which we participate by our own complicity or indifference. Think of the Mahatma Ghandis that cannot come to fruition because we slaughtered them on the streets of Baghdad. Think of the starvation we have joyously imposed on huge populations because they did not agree with our politics, thus depriving the world of thousands of little Einstein’s. Think of the Afghani Jesuses we have killed. Think of the Rwandan children that could have grown up to save the human race via a new philosophy of  “peace.”

Justifying death by thinking of “what could have been” is a sarcastic joke. But it’s one that too many people are willing to buy into as long as the last line of the argument, i.e. the punchline, reads: “we are better than you.”  We are better than you is the cry that echoes through the centuries of human history. We all know an American life is worth more than any other life and a New Yorker life is worth the most of all. For most New Yorkers, the rest of the country doesn’t exist; they are, so to speak sooo less better. New Yorkers are the greatest most excellent people in the entire universe. Go watch them pumping their fists in the streets. USA! USA!

No politician nor person in the streets can speak of the recent events, without speaking of the greatness of death, especially in this special case. Newspapers and media outlets are ablaze with special coverage of the death of Osama Bin Laden. Brian Lehrer has a special call-in on death. Old pundits like Tom Brokaw and some other politician speak exceptionally deliciously of death and you can even hear the blood and saliva squeezing through their teeth as they relish the thought of shooting bin Laden in the face. Of blasting out his eye or his brain.  Indeed, if we hadn’t killed him we could have put him in stocks in the public square and stoned him, which might have been more cathartic.  But we made him dead instead. We shot his ass off. We killed him dead. Dead! Dead! Dead! Too bad they threw him in the ocean because we could fuck up his body and make his death more dead. We could stab his dead body or piss on it.

Wish I could have pulled the trigger!

More death gives us more revenge—oops, that’s a bad word.  But then maybe it is a revenge fest and not a death fest of which I speak. Everybody says that it is justice. But where is the justice? I think they are using the word justice as a substitute for revenge. (Its no coincidence that bin Laden was shot in the eye—an eye for an eye is a form of justice.) The purposeful confusion of justice and revenge is all over this celebration like a stain. It came up on a BBC interview this morning, an interview that turned into a word brawl between a British guy and an American guy (I can’t remember their names). The American guy claimed that killing Osama was justice. No trial needed. The Brit was claiming that Revenge and Justice are not actually related, and that Justice required some kind of process. To which the American said, “Well yes they are related in a way.”   This argument turned into an argument over the death penalty (America being the only developed country that has it). Lise Ducet could barely keep these men from coming to blows over the radio.

We all know that the importance of death is relative—if it’s the death of someone in your family, it is very important. The 911 victims are still going on about it. If it is the death of a hundred thousand Iraqis, or several hundred thousand Japanese (as in Hiroshima), well death is just part of the price they pay for “living in our way,” which is like getting in the way but with deadly consequences.

The dirty secret of course is that human life has no value at all, and all this hand wringing and fighting is over some chemicals in a bag that in another couple thousand years no one will even remember because there will be no one.  (I hear the song “In the Year 2525 ” in my head and find it optimistic in the extreme.)

Another word that seems to come up all the time in relation to the Death of bin Laden is “closure.  Suddenly everybody has closure over 911 and closure over the two wars and closure over the ongoing cultural conflicts that are tearing the world apart. This word closure makes Roman laugh. The world is not a novel or a Sunday school lesson. There is no “closure.” Each event will cause another event.  You can’t stop the onrush of the universe, which incidentally does not care about you at all. One man’s death causes another man’s rage, and more death causes more death. The death fest never ends. The wars won’t end—despite what they want you to believe, they were never about capturing bin Laden anyway. The security checks at the airport won’t end. The Imperialism won’t end. Nobody is coming back from the dead. All the sorrow and crying isn’t going to stop.  Therefore, I maintain that the current death fest is in fact a failure fest. It took ten years to kill one man—that seems like a failure to me.  We failed to make the world over into our image. The wars have failed. Our economy failed. Our morality failed. We failed and continue to fail and death seems to be a way of thinking we are winning. Someone or something is DEAD. We win.

So let’s do it as it should be done, let’s have a tickertape parade for death. Now that we have killed this man let’s kill some other people so that we can keep the celebration of death going. I think we have some atomic bombs lying around—lets drop them.  Let’s really have a mission accomplished.  Let’s let the celebration of death reign supreme.

Truth is that the only thing that should end is the worshiping of death.

So Hiroshima mon amour to you, cowboy.

Osama Bin Laden was a terrorist and is now a Dead Man.

I am Roman Stoad, Everyman and No Man. I am no New Yorker. In fact, I am better than no one.

Vote for me, vote for Life.