It’s been one of those weeks. Taking the penultimate week of the semester off to do research at the royal wedding seemed like a good idea at the time. I was giddy with research possibilities as well as an overly optimistic view that it wouldn’t be that bad when I returned. But as my plane landed in JFK, reality began to set in and the romance of research on a seemingly trivial topic was replaced with a deep sadness about the weighty matters that awaited me in the U.S.
In the airport people gathered around TV’s. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on and was too exhausted to pay much attention. Then word of Osama bin Laden’s execution by a U.S. Navy SEAL in Pakistan came my way. The next day in class a student asked whether I’d seen the Facebook pages about bin Laden’s death and the royal wedding? Turns out there are a lot of them. Most of them celebrated both the royal wedding and bin Laden’s death.
“A royal wedding and bin Laden dead” and “Osama bin Laden’s death biggest thing since the royal wedding.” Some poked fun at the royal wedding as unimportant and ridiculous. ”Thank god bin Laden is dead. I was getting sick of the Royal Wedding” or “Bin Laden dead is way better than the royal wedding. We should get the day off.”
All of them seem to celebrate Osama’s death even if they don’t all see the royal wedding as worth raising a glass to. A few days later uberliberal Rachel Maddow appeared on the The Daily Show to say that everyone feels good about bin Laden’s death, no matter how they feel about the wars.
Even if you’re not one of those people who’s out there singing in the streets about this, we are all having an emotionally cathartic reaction to it.
I wasn’t feeling catharsis. I was feeling shocked that even a left-wing maven was telling us nice little fairytales in which bin Laden’s death is the happy ending. There is a romance of death that has been playing out in the U.S. media and even on the streets as people gathered to express their relief. It struck me as sickeningly similar to what I’d seen at the royal wedding: an ideology of romance glossing over power and its discontents. Except instead of fetishizing the wedding dress we made a totem of the corpse.
It should be quite obvious by now that the Americans who gathered at Ground Zero Sunday night to sing “We are the champions of the world” had an overly romantic a view of this particular execution. That story is as real as any story with a happy ending where the good guys ride off into the sunset and all is right with the world. Did all these Americans celebrating imagine bin Laden’s death as the ending? Of the wars? Of hatred toward America? Did they not imagine the messiness to come, far messier than a royal divorce?
Yesterday al Qaeda said they will seek to avenge bin Laden’s death. Protestors gathered in a variety of cities throughout the Middle East as well as London to chant “Down with the USA.” I cannot imagine that this is the happy ending the overly romantic American public was hoping for.
Even if such protests are dismissed as extremist, many journalists outside the U.S. are not exactly seeing this as a “and they lived happily everafter” moment.
As Peter Hitchens put it in the Daily Mail:
“What a lot of rubbish we have been told about Osama Bin Laden. I’m not sorry he’s dead. He boasted that he was a mass murderer and he can hardly have been shocked that the USA hunted him down and killed him. But in the end, the operation looks tawdry and futile. The Americans admitted as much when they lied that he had defended himself when he hadn’t. I’m sure they wish he had, in fact, put up a fight.For reasons it’s hard to explain, but which most decent people instinctively know, killing an unarmed man in his bedroom just doesn’t look good, however wicked he is.”
But that’s what happens when we start seeing things through an ideology as powerful and promising as romance. We believe we can perform sacred acts—like a wedding or an execution—and wake up the next day and everything will be different. There will be no betrayal or death or even messiness in narrative form. The story of love and of war will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. No circling back, getting lost in a tangent, or finding that what you thought was the main story was in fact the tangent and it was all really about something else.
In other words, romance is an ideology that promises us happy endings if only we perform the right rituals with the right magic. Sadly, the terribly romantic tale of a SEAL killing bin Laden cannot help the US ride off into the sunset anymore than a perfect wedding can ensure a lifetime of happiness.
