Photo by Paul Keller[/add_caption_link]

look, if you are going to write a column about what it means now that osama bin laden is dead, really you have to weigh your options first. you can write it tongue-in-cheek, saying some shit about how you spent that night studying samples of your own handwriting from 9/11 to the present moment, looking for those “minute changes in consciousness” which tolstoy says mean war or something, and so you couldn’t go to the impromptu rager at your college, two thousand millennials strong, beer, effigies, chanting, beer, you were busy, nothing personal. you could say that thing about how every ten or twenty years something happens which everybody remembers- JFK dies, RFK dies, john lennon dies, soviet union falls, 9/11, death of bin laden- then a gentle transition into malcolm gladwell with a little humanistic touch to it, maybe some dr. king or some shit, and bob’s your uncle. or you can talk about its importance as narrative, like this guy

except embellish the “movies as map to our unconscious desires” thing- why is it so important that katherine bigelow is making this into a movie? why do we care the shape of each act? why was the idea about the ball getting kicked over the fence so goddamned good that it’s probably gonna end up in the movie?

and further, why are there so many aliens in the movies this year? green lantern, mars needs moms, the beaver. anyways.

what you’re going to eventually run up against, in your column on osama bin laden’s death and what it means, is a gap between what can and can’t be satisfactorily communicated. what it felt like to be a human at 9:05 that morning is pretty goddamn hard to talk about. if bin laden’s death brought any closure to that feeling, and what that closure would feel like, i know i don’t have the right words for it. probably i haven’t been alive long enough for that.

it has been suggested that the reason news stations kept looping footage of the planes hitting the towers was the overlord xenu’s desire to keep us frightened and complacent, the better to harvest our thetans. i don’t believe that. i think that happened because we couldn’t look away without asking ourselves, “what the fuck was that?” and so a positive feedback cycle started. the networks asked both themselves and their audience what it meant by showing it all those times; we asked it back by tuning in all those hours. maybe one of us would find an answer. who remembers what anybody on cnn said that day, other than the people who were on cnn that day, and even of them, who? who had adequate words for what happened? if you were around the same kind of people i was on that day, your friends found a world map and started pointing fingers. maybe it was japan or germany, thirsty for vengeance. no, scratch that, they’re cool. maybe the british were attacking again. or the mafia. nobody in my sixth grade class had answers.

nor was i the only person in a pubic school at a lack for words that day. was it ten minutes george bush sat reading the pet goat? seven? thank god i can’t remember exactly. i have decided this is healthy. part of the world we now live in etc.

remember the ad lib that made his first term: “i can hear you, the world can hear you,” etc., on 9/14, atop the rubble, through a loudspeaker, in a windbreaker. the triumph/final unity of that day expressed at last- not in the words themselves, more in the cheering firefighters surrounding/embracing him. three days that took. but the cell phone calls from flight 93 already had distilled its extract: “let’s roll.” those were the sentences that stuck. they united us not only with each other but with our shock (in their sparseness), our grief, and our way forward.

notice that they are both ad-libs. here is my suggestion: the sparseness of both phrases is indicative of the kind of attack to which they are a reaction. they hit our language, too– or, american english was part of the collateral damage, the shattered mirrors of windows of the adjacent buildings. something like the gettysburg address would not have worked. do you remember a single sentence of bush’s national address that evening? i sure as hell don’t. we needed a different kind of language.

you hear people talk about how the attacks brought us together. rarely is that unity mentioned in the same sentence as the underlying anxiety which made us seek it out. nobody wanted to be alone with the fear of it happening again. that’s probably why “let’s roll” caught on so well. “let’s” gave us community (“we” knew who “we” were); “roll” gave us direction (the ambiguity of which was later tragically exploited– i mean tragic in the greek sense of the word).

in the immediate psycho-symbolic trauma of that morning– the very first, most subjective moment when you found out, the moment which everybody remembers, the story of which moment everybody tells each other when the topic of “where were you on 9/11″ comes up– we had to improvise some way of coping with the fantastically absurd/horrific/words-don’t-exist-yet-to-describe-it headspace the hijackers foisted upon us. ad-libs stuck because they were said by people with whom we could easily identify– the passengers on flight 93, george bush– people with whom we shared a common shock, horror, and a sense of responsibility. further, people who were like us (or in bush’s case, people we were told were like us).

enough can’t be said of the “sit down and drink a beer with him” factor in our culture. i neither understand it nor have to because i love that about us. it is pleasant to be able to safely assume the following of any given person on a bus with you: he just wants somebody to drink a cold beer with, and also a cold beer. i imagine it comes from a basic human need for intimacy, but the beer in the equation– like an iguana in a werner herzog movie, it’s just utterly puzzling why nic cage stares at it for so long. like it knows something.

so our language went the way of the straight-shooter. OK. we chose that path. on the one hand the united states is still, as a nation, solvent. that’s one pro which is hard to understate. one of the cons is that “the bad guys are over there, let’s roll/ our message isn’t reaching everybody, let’s turn the bullhorn up”, the ideas at the core of both those phrases, are also the core of the bush doctrine. so they’re therapy up to the point when they turn into reminders of more trauma we didn’t need from the same ol’boy we wanted a cold brew with.

some would argue that, for that reason alone, that moment of national panic never really passed (maybe until obama), and the language has therefore lost the challenge 9/11 posed. as in, when all the greek tragedy stuff of the bush years went down, that language still got him reelected in 04, when we weren’t as afraid to go to sleep in a dark room by ourselves as much anymore. remember “flip flopper?” you don’t even have to go that far back. “death panels.” “kill the bill.” “maverick.” “that one.” clearly we have some kind of attachment to language like this if it so reliably get a message across. but are we just scared?

fuck no. i don’t believe that. oversimplifications and buzzwords don’t catch on, at a deep brain level like “let’s roll” did, unless we need them to. the fact that obama doesn’t oversimplify as much– that i find promising. the time for obama to get a saying like, “we got him,” into cultural circulation after the death of bin laden by now has passed. those, i believe, are relics of the twentieth century, a simpler time when ideology still held water next to complexity when it came to forces which made the world turn.

as the species, by and large, isn’t wise to that shift having taken place, of course politicians will make those ideological manipulations to get in power to fuck around with the world’s unfathomable complexity. but hey, sharks gotta swim. unless we become vulcans overnight, we’re probably going to be vulnerable to that kind of manipulation until the end of time. the fact that we elected somebody as rational as obama speaks well of… something. either us or him. the fact that he ran as a liberal but turned out to be a dyed in the wool centrist? my complaints are limited by their existence.

still, am i so optimistic i’d think that a lack of potent sound bytes meant we’re used to understanding more complex stuff, by now? that the sound byte’s time is over? or at least that we think it’ll take us more than one beer to get at what’s eating us?

that the president thinks so? of that, yes. i am hopeful. but when bin laden died, i didn’t see many people talking about what it meant. nobody asked many questions where i’m from, they just drank the beer.

but really, i don’t know what i am, hopeful or not. nostalgic, i guess, for a james joyce-sized talent capable of doing anything, anything, with language, even in this modern hell. if i am hopeful it’s for somebody i can drink a beer with who will treat this as something more complicated than the jason bourne movie it could be so easily made into. when i think about this in ten years, i want to remember most clearly any other words than “USA! USA!”, and if i have to remember only them, i want them to come from anybody other than young, educated people. after “we got him,” i hope this is not too much to hope for.