Dear [Names Withheld],
This weekend it was released that US Armed forces, under direct orders from President Obama, launched a strike on a compound in Pakistan to kill Usama bin Laden. The report from the White House, and from the President himself, is that the mission was successful and Usama bin Laden is dead.
You have heard this, and now, you doubt it. That is: like a bad paraphrase of a famous figure in the Christian Bible, unless you see the bullet hole in his head and can put your hand in his cranium, you will doubt the reports. Some of you are convinced he died in 2002, and others believe he was dead even before 9/11 – replaced by another man with less gray hair and a larger nose.
Now, from my desk, I say to you: that’s a very complicated religion you have there. I have a better one to offer you, but it doesn’t come with photographic evidence, so I doubt you will take it up. Suffice it to say that if you believe in the resurrected Christ and you repent of your sins – your pride, your avarice, your entitlement and self-promotion above the governments God has ordained for this world at this time – you can be saved from your paranoia and your crypto-anarchist tendencies.
That’s not why I’m actually writing. I’m writing about the photos.
Look here: in your view, until you personally see the photos, President Obama is a liar. That is: he’s not innocent until proven guilty, he’s guilty until he can produce witnesses to exonerate himself – and that’s easy work, you say, since everyone involved works for him. Just the photos, since the body is in a watery Sheol to prevent its exhumation per Sharia law, and we can call it even.
As you have read on twitter, I’m agin’ it, and I wanted to tell you why.
Back when Jesus was telling people that he would have to die at the hands of the Romans and the Jews, they did something called “crucifixion”. It was a practice so vile that even the Romans hated to write about it – and they wrote about everything. Yet they continued the practice for one purpose only: to make the point that Rome was not to be dallied with, and that those who were so stupid to do so would not just be killed, but would be put on display as a monument to their own stupidity for the sake of warning off others.
And that, it seems to me, is the executive logic behind releasing the Usama death photos: proving that we did it, and that you do not mess with Texas. Or Honolulu, as the case may be. From your desk, the reason is also to prove (to you personally, since you are the most important person we’re talking about) that the Government didn’t lie to you about violating the sovereign space of an ally for the sake of destroying a man who was (allegedly, in your view) leading an effort of mayhem and terror against the United States in particular and Western Civilization in general.
But there’s the thing: Western Civilization.
You know: as I’m typing this, I am in an airport waiting to board to go home from a business trip. Thank God, but I did not have to be virtually strip-searched at either point of entry, and somehow someone named “Turk” doesn’t raise any questions to the TSA about whether he is hiding a weapon where the sun don’t shine so I also was not given the enhanced pat-down. But in 3 weeks I’m taking my family to SoCal, and we will likely be subject to that treatment at at least one point of entry to the national airport system – me, my wife, and my two kids under the age of 12. I get all of Phil’s tweets about how vile it is that our government is treating innocent citizens like criminals for the alleged sake of containing air terror – but I can hate the game without inventing a whole MMORPG of planning and intention which causes me to abandon the principles of Western Civilization.
If what is actually at stake here is our culture and our values, then let’s distinguish war from not-war (and “not-war” is not necessarily “peace”; for example, “not-war” could be “legitimate civil debate” – it could be “pragmatic misalignment”) and approach what is not-war with the right set of categories which preserve the ways and means of Western Civilization.
So to that end, are we at the point where we are revisiting the logic of crucifixion as a deterrent to violence against our citizens? If the answer is “no,” and we can see the western logic of disposing of Usama’s body in the ocean, then maybe we should follow our western logic to its conclusion – and let crazy people who have no body to produce pretend that absence is the same as invincibility and immortality, and let them promote Usama to the Imam in the well for all we care: the fact that the live in a delusion should not cause us to allow them to dictate the way we will run our non-war civilization.
And I don’t want to be the one to point this out to you, but I’m sure you can remember the death of Nick Berg in 2004. His beheading was videotaped by those who were conducting Jihad against, well, us at that time, and their point was exactly: this is what you get when you mess with Jihadists. In fact, this is what you get when you are kidnapped by Jihadists, and when they are running things as well. That is: this is the civilization they want you to embrace.
Now, given that they did do this to Mr. Berg, if we therefore say, “We’ll see your kidnapped and helpless victim and raise you your number one guy in his house on a Sunday night, [gamer expletive omitted]. And here are our pictures,” what are we really doing? Are we saying that because we are stronger, we are right? Is that how we want to reason with the Chinese right now?
So my point is that if we’re going to allegedly be defending civilization from lunatics with Scimitars and dreams of nuclear holocaust drawing an invisible priest of God out of the well to usher in the end times, we have to be something other than the exact same guys but with automatic weapons in place of big swords and Lady Gaga or Donald Trump in place of the invisible holy man and Atlantic City or L.A. in place of the well. We have to actually have a civilization worth saving from those maniacs because it is different from what they want.
Do you want something different than what Usama wanted? Are you sure? Because if the only difference is that in your plan Jason Stratham plays you in the movie, and in his plan Jason Stratham plays him in the movie, you both like the same movie – you both want the same thing. You’re just fighting over who gets the credit.
So when the photos do come out – it’s politically inevitable and the only way our president can prolong this into a boost in popularity both here and abroad – ask yourself if that’s what we want to be known for. That’s the visual we want for this stage of western civilization: we rock because we can blow your head off.
I am certain that Caesar would be very proud.
