Should baseball crowds at a game between the Philadelphia
Phillies and the New York Mets have chanted “USA! USA!” on hearing
about Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs last
Sunday night? Should college students at the White House gates have
done the same thing?
Critics are right to note that the chant was ill-suited
for marking the death of any man, even one who had it coming. That
said, if going to hell in a hand basket were a new phenomenon,
Germany would never have lent the word “Schadenfreude” to the
English language. The recrimination now voiced by sensitive souls
is not necessarily the beacon of righteous indignation that it
wants to be.
While the “USA chant” is usually heard at international
sporting events and no commando operation entailing risks like
these will ever be mistaken for a game, the line between
competition and combat is not as bright as people who’ve never
enjoyed a Rocky movie, darkened the door of a dojo, or
watched a mixed-martial-arts fight might think. Color commentary in
the National Football League is rife with combat metaphors, yet all
concerned realize that “trench warfare” between offensive and
defensive lines would be orders of magnitude more lethal if guns
were involved. No one expects football people to beg pardon from
professional warriors for co-opting the imagery of
battle.
To the apparent disappointment of self-consciously
progressive friends, I’m no good at filling the Claude Raines role
in Casablanca, so I could not even feign shock at the
celebration of Bin Laden’s demise. What too many are quick to lose
sight of, however, is that the people chanting USA were not doing
that to glorify murder: our country’s initials can as easily
acclaim the professionalism of Special Forces operators, or signify
approval of a gutsy presidential decision. Last Sunday night, they
did both of those things.
In other words, it is uncharitable to interpret gladness
at Bin Laden’s death as a sure sign of moral degeneracy. Quiet
satisfaction would have been a more decorous response to the news
of his passing, but ours is not a culture given to quiet
satisfaction. Instead, we send children to public schools where
administrators keep a wary eye out for tee shirt slogans or designs
that someone somewhere might regard as divisive. Some of us have
forgotten that when a weight is lifted from our shoulders, the
impulse to celebrate with passerby of goodwill is wonderfully
human.
The fog of war is nothing to the dark of willful
blindness. We were told by apologists for Islam that bin Laden was
not “a true Muslim.” Despite that assertion, the U.S. Navy gave him
at least the semblance of an Islamic burial. Whatever ceremony
attended that burial was supposed to placate Muslims. Like most
such gestures (and as George
Neumayr noted in this space), it backfired. “Militants” who
think they’ve suffered an exquisite insult now quibble impotently
about whether Bin Laden’s burial was Islamic enough. Let
‘em quibble. That’s an argument it’s nice to be able to
have.
What we know for sure is that by his own confused lights,
Bin Ladin was a leader in an allegedly noble cause, out to kill as
many Americans as possible. His bid for leadership in the Arab
world had failed, but the armchair quarterbacks now trying to
induce a twinge of guilt in America’s military-industrial complex
by calling the late al Qaeda chief a “fringe” character have yet to
explain how a fringe character could enjoy the name recognition and
influence Bin Laden had, or why special forces were needed to go
after him. No less an observer than German Chancellor Angela Merkel
declared on live TV that she was “delighted” by Bin Laden’s death.
Meanwhile, pundit Christopher Hitchens reminded
everyone less versed in geopolitics of the obvious:
“In what people irritatingly call ‘iconic’ terms, Bin
Laden certainly had no rival,” Hitchens wrote. “The strange,
scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance
was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see
whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of
revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim
world.”
Part of what I think Hitchens means is that there’s no
reason for anyone to feel morally superior to the people who
greeted Bin Laden’s death with repeated shouts of “USA!” As blogger
Tom Maguire points out, crowds would have been shouting the
same thing if President Obama had announced just the capture of Bin
Laden. When that is understood, several corollary assertions fall
into place: “Maybe we aren’t tastelessly celebrating [Bin Laden’s]
death. Maybe we are just celebrating the end of his era and the
triumph of the good guys over the bad guys (sorry for the cryptic
reference, libs — Team USA is the good guys.) In which case, the
handwringing is utterly misdirected,” Maguire wrote.
Let me put it this way: Notwithstanding the truism that
“no man is an island,” one can welcome the efficient dispatch of a
terrorist without hating that terrorist, for much the same reason
that one can welcome the removal of a cancerous tumor without
hating cancer.
Another item complicating reaction to Bin Laden’s death is
that eager beaver progressives have dammed the river of American
culture with so many protected classes that few expressions of
patriotic pride can still be used in polite company. What’s an
assembly to do when welcome news breaks while hardware stores that
sell American flags are closed and country singers are home with
their families? Some people sang the Star-Spangled Banner, but our
anthem is famously tough to sing well. Ray Charles could always be
counted on for a goosebump-inducing rendition of “America,” but
he’s no longer with us. And absent a cover version by the cast of
Glee that will never be made, the Battle Hymn of the
Republic isn’t likely to reclaim its lost mojo.
Even a Buddhist meditation teacher who
worries about the perils of misdirected jubilation and
collective failure to realize that there is “no such thing as us
and them” might be persuaded to see shouts of “USA!” in a more
forgiving light. The Buddhist I am thinking of said she would
rededicate herself to the idea of brotherhood, even brotherhood
with people who want her dead. Fortunately, the connotation of that
USA chant helps us both, because it’s a chant that signifies
brotherhood without applying religious litmus tests that anyone
holding a disfavored creed might otherwise flunk.
Christian faith tells me that Osama Bin Laden was a child
of God. Reason and observation tell me that he made discord and
murder his life’s work, doing his best to ignore both his own
dignity and the dignity of others, especially if they were not
Muslims. Given those realities, it really doesn’t matter why
President Obama approved the lethal strike, whether Bin Laden was
armed when found, or if a military dog accompanied the SEAL team.
The salient fact is that Bin Laden died in a war that he himself
had started, killed by brave men with a precision rare in the
annals of military operations.
To welcome Bin Laden’s passing or feel pride in the
martial prowess of fellow citizens may be indelicate, but it is not
wrong. That feelings of relief or admiration sound coarse when
filtered through a three-letter chant says more about the limits of
our public vocabulary that about the morality of people doing the
chanting, at least some of whom I hope and suspect are now
praying for Bin Laden’s soul.
