By Jack Brummet, Unexplained Phenomena Editor
My friend, Jason Larsen, wonders if the very public and emotional celebration of Osama bin Laden's death shows our barbaric side? My knee-jerk reaction was--come on, don't be a weenie, Jason. But in fact, as a student of Roman history, yeah, it spooks me to the core. Especially because I am one of the ones who, if not enjoying this, are feeling at least relieved, and even more guiltily, very glad it happened on BHO's watch. My feelings about that are mixed--I've been a skeptic about President Obama's stances on war and gay marriage, and a couple of other issues. I never thought we should escalate the war the way we have. But I always thought we should crank up the CIA, Special Forces, and The Spooks in general in our efforts to eviscerate Al Qaeda (including cutting off the snake's head). I don't know if the massive troops deployments helped in this or not, but clearly the intelligence and counter terrorism operations and maybe even Black Ops, did lead us to this moment. Let's just not get carried away and have a jump the shark/Team America celebration about this.
I wonder what my Buddhist friends (whose hearts I trust) think of this joyous celebration? It is a little unseemly yes, even barbaric--ala Rome--but like I just wrote to Jason, I think I would have been one of the street dancers on April 28, 1945, when Hitler decommissioned himself. Yeah I do feel sorry for his four or five wives and 24 children. I don't feel all that much joy, but a lot of relief. Is it misplaced relief? Or false relief? Probably. But it's something. A big something.
One of my Facebook friends wonders if the birther wingnuts will claim this is all cooked up. Or that we kept his corpse in a freezer to pop out at just the right moment (which numerous "news" sites and bloggers have already postulated). Trust me, The Company will have a iron-clad chain of evidence detailing the facts and meetings that led up to this, along with DNA, photos and video as it happened--none of which they will release unless their backs are up against the wall...or Julian Assange/Wikileaks gets their hands on it.
---o0o---
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was a soldier and one of the best known poets of World War I. He won medals for bravery on the Western Front, and wrote poetry about the horrors in the trenches, and the patriotic hypocrisy of those who wages what he believed was a pointless war. After he wrote this letter, echoing what the singer Phiil Ochs wrote fifty years later "(I ain't marchin' anymore") in 1917, the British army, which considered the letter treasonous, rather than fight his protest, or try him, or give him a platform, declared him to have shell-shock (what we call Post Traumatic Stresst Disorder today) and tossed him out of the army.
