May 8th, 2011.

I’m exhausted and have a great hatred of ants. 

You know, the kinds that you crush one by one but en masse are simply overwhelming?  I should’ve remembered to check the coffeemaker and see if it’s plugged in.  But no, the many-legged masses have followed the lines of power once again, only to find that when they reach the end of their journey, there’s nothing there but masses of their own kind, boiling and writhing.  The metaphor can go further: we can talk about the desire to use chemical weapons, but that weapons of mass destruction are no deterrent to armies have no fear.  We can either endeavour to destroy them utterly, or stop up the windows, unplug our luxuries, wipe our world with vinegar day after day after day and Live in fear…  Or get to Love the taste of ants.  The feel of them on our skin.  The sight of their half-seen movements as they skitter across the tables and floors and across our computer screens.

I’m making it sound much worse than it is, but I’m exhausted and have a great hatred of ants.

When I was but a wee boy, my parents poured money into re-pouring our home’s foundations.  Jacks were enlisted, great metal frameworks surrounding the house.  There was digging for what seemed like the whole summer – a whole summer vacation where waking up at 7am hadn’t ended – and with digging came dirt.  A great pile of dirt, a MOUNTAIN, in the driveway.  My parents’ cars were parked in the street, my father’s Austin Healey and my mother’s AMC Hornet, both displaced by this glorious mountain of dirt.  There is little that can make waking at 7am seem worthwhile to a little boy home from school, but a whole new world waiting to be populated by GI Joes and Star Wars figures, myself and my brother might JUST come close. 

And populate we did… it was a great time had.  Until the first bite.  I felt it somewhere on my ankle.  I pulled up my pants leg and saw an ant looking back.  I don’t remember much of what came next.  I remember SCREAMING as more and more bites came, fast and furious, covering my body… running inside crying.  I remember being rushed into the shower and stripping down and realizing my entire body had been stealthily covered by the herd.  Washing them away by the dozens, hundreds still clinging… I remember it as a horrible writhing cloak.

And so I have a great hatred for ants, and generally I’m in control, but in the last couple of weeks every once in a while there is one that finds its way on to an arm or a leg or a hand or my stomach and I feel a core of panic – and like any human being that feeling of panic and fear swiftly evolves to hatred.  Pretty mindless hatred too.  And so I can’t help thinking….

Osama Bin Laden was killed this week.  In the back of my mind I’m wondering when the various parts of his name were added to Microsoft’s spell check.  In the forefront of my mind I’m remembering Kristen calling me upstairs to watch the news.  The two of us sat and watched as various reporters and pundits and interviewers interviewed one another about the tiny scraps of information that they’d gleaned.  I was impressed at their ability to rehash the same bits of information (please, buy our CDs, our mailing list is on the table next to our postcards, please – take a bit of us home with you….) and to incorporate minutiae as it was released.  I wonder what the setting of this slow trickle was… emails and texts, reporters begging, promising, threatening.  I hate that the government managed to keep the secret of the potential for the strike so effectively for weeks, and the fact of the strike for days and the results of the strike for hours… but for 60 minutes before the OFFICIAL release of information, lips couldn’t wait any longer and a slow but steady stream of various facts and almost-facts just came pouring forth.

Obama walked forward and gave us a statement.  It was a good speech.  I think he managed to couple the fight for gay marriage, the economy and the killing of Osama Bin Laden all into one short burst of rhetoric – but it was GOOD rhetoric.  It was sane and calm and well-presented.  His speech-writers deserve kudos.

The newscasters, on the other hand, could barely control their glee.  I swear I saw them drooling and they should know better.  A day of celebration for all Americans?  Really?  What about justice?  What about accolades and sympathies for those still in harm’s way?  Any of that ring a bell?  No, it’s solely the sound of vengeance tolling.  It’s like the country had to take time out of their Sunday night for a big, collective high five.  Twitter was filled and Facebook was filled and the airwaves were filled with kids talking about how they never thought they’d see this day come, but what a wonderful day it was!  The front of the White House transformed from a couple of tourists taking a couple of photographs to a Live streaming street party of swiftly-growing proportions.  Someone down in downtown DC got REALLY American and managed to get over there to sell everyone some American flags ASAP.  The American anthem was downloaded and the American anthem was sung and CNN managed to capture it all from their comfortable nest through the convenience of zoom lenses and shotgun mics, never having to actually go and interrupt their pundits by interviewing anyone…

And yet the phones of anyone who’d lost anyone at the Twin Towers or at the Pentagon or who was the brother of the mother of the uncle of a firefighter in New York City must’ve been ringing off the HOOK in the hopes of getting a soundbite.

Too cynical?  Maybe I’m making it sound worse than it is, but I’m exhausted and have a great hatred…

Osama Bin Laden is dead.  Buried at sea.  Bush was at war, and I would’ve expected this then.  Obama’s insisted that this is more of a civil action, and I would’ve expected some civility.  I’m sure there are compelling reasons that there doesn’t seem to have been an attempt to take him alive.  No prison cell to defend, no trial to rally behind.  But even show trials have their place in Life, and though Osama  certainly had no honour, no warrior’s creed, no more courage than is required to sit on the sidelines convincing young men to die on your behalf while using religion as something to hide behind – I do believe we should be better than that.  Cooler heads should prevail.

But no-one cares.  Justice was “served”?  No – vengeance was carried out – and there are those who say it was too swift.  American justice has slowly been subsumed by the desire for vengeance and pomp and circumstance rather than ACTUAL justice.  We don’t want to teach the dog not to shit on the carpet, we want to flay the dog open in the hopes that OTHER dogs will get it.  I think we should think about the lesson we’re teaching: hey bad guys!  Don’t cross America or after a decade of bankrupting ourselves we might stumble across you if you’re Living in a large military complex!  And then we’ll GETCHA!

We want to see the body.  Again, nothing but a vengeance thing.  I understand the argument goes something like we want to see the dead face of this last decade’s bogeyman to PROVE that he’s dead, but 5 minutes with a LIVE photo and Photoshop could provide just as much proof (and indeed, a number of forged photos are circulating even as I type).  Any way that it’s dealt with the believers will believe and the doubters will doubt.  Even a head on a pike would have had dubious value, but I imagine there’d have been cheers at the announcement.

In Star Trek the Eugenics Wars happened under our very noses.  Dovetailed into news stories explained by everyday events (and in reality just a clever bit of retroconned storytelling explaining how the Eugenics Wars, referenced in the 60s television show, could’ve happened in the 90s without our noticing) and unrecognized in its day, it wasn’t until decades later that a series of seemingly unrelated events were strung together and referred to as a “war”.  I wonder sometimes if in history books yet to be written, if the turn of our millimium won’t be recognized as a WAR – the Christian / Muslim war (despite our protestations)?  The Obama Osama Upset? The Bush Blitz? – and I wouldn’t be surprised if it wouldn’t fall into the column of wars that in more politically correct text books will be spoken more about in terms of their social implications and societal complications than in terms of actual military conflict, because much like the Vietnam War, in LESS PC terms I think that we could be seen as having lost it.

Over the course of the week the story has changed, the narrative has changed, the claims have changed, but I think I’m inclined to believe that Osama was killed by the Seals, in Pakistan, unarmed.  I believe a goodly sum of resources can probably now be re-purposed and that victims of 9/11 will find that their closure doesn’t really give them THAT much closure.  I believe that though the week we killed Osama Bin Laden seemed pretty significant, I believe that this week – the week AFTER we killed Osama Bin Laden – will be very similar to the week BEFORE we killed Osama Bin Laden and that very, very little has changed.

I really appreciated this article – Glenn Greenwald’s writing on the “Osama Exception” to our moral beliefs – and through reading it ran across a quote from the Nuremberg Trials that I GREATLY appreciated:  [speaking of how Nazi leaders were going to be tried in a court] “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”  I am disappointed that that triumph was an exception, rather than a show of our advancement.

I’m exhausted and have a great hatred… this past week at least three more soldiers were killed overseas and $5,040,000,000 was spent.  I wouldn’t gripe TOO much about that… except that it’s all borrowed.  We’re a generation of credit card users – and this war is NO exception.  But our credit limit too, can become exhausted.  Ohhhhh the hatred.

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