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By Justin Peters
Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in the darkest corners of our hearts, and if you don't lock your doors tonight he'll swoop down from the sky on a fiery broomstick and eat your babies. He's not dead after all, despite our hopes to the contrary; in fact, he sounds rather robust. Audio evidence suggests it, technical analysis confirms it -- the man America loves to hate is living large in the Middle East, and he's probably laughing at you right now.
So Emmanuel Goldstein lives. Boy, I didn't see that coming.
The fact that bin Laden hasn't died yet defies all logic. The United States has been after him for more than a year, throwing everything in its considerable arsenal against him. It dropped daisy-cutters on his underground lair; it sent in a crack regiment of troops to hunt him down. It blocked his sources of income and it kept him on the run for more than a year. Still, despite all that, he lives on. At least, that's what they tell us.
I suppose it doesn't matter if the man himself is dead, because his main function in this country has always been as a propaganda figurehead. As such, bin Laden's remarkable resilience has been an incredible boon for the United States. After all, it's to the government's benefit to keep him alive for as long as possible, to be able to trot out this familiar effigy whenever it feels the public's fear is flagging. What a shame it would be if he were actually dead, and the United States had to channel its collective hate toward some lesser known terrorist. It wouldn't have the same effect if all of a sudden the public had to redirect its fury toward someone like Ayman al-Zawahiri -- a man just as much a terrorist as bin Laden, yet an inconspicuous cipher in the public imagination.
That's why bin Laden will never die -- not for a while, at least; not until all the legislative measures designed to support the War on Terrorism are in effect and we've passed the point of no return. It's difficult to unify a people against an abstraction. Thus, if Bush's crusade is going to proceed, Americans need a master terrorist, a common enemy, someone we all know and hate as the tangible representation of the Other.
Osama bin Laden sure fits that bill. He is the embodiment of everything America detests: dirty, swarthy, religious-but-not-Christian, fanatical about something other than making money. Bin Laden is the heart of darkness for the post-modern era. What a shame it would be for the nation to lose such a recognizable propaganda symbol, such a national rallying point.
It's the same with Saddam Hussein. Had we wanted to take him out any time in the past decade, we would have, no doubt. But we didn't and we won't, because the government recognizes the value of a bogeyman -- someone who can be predictably dragged out to scare the public whenever the United States needs public support. "If we don't pass this military spending bill, Saddam will bomb our nation and rape our virgins," they say, as they project a picture of his leering, mustachioed face in the background. "Look at him! Just look! He's evil!"
In horror films the villain is invariably represented by a figure in a mask or with grotesquely contorted facial features. This allows the protagonists to set the villain apart from themselves, to say, "We're facing something that's not like us." I doubt if the Friday the 13th series would have made it this far if Jason Voorhees had traded in his hockey mask for a business suit and his meat cleaver for a briefcase after they chained him to the bottom of that lake.
The iconography of fear in American life is remarkably similar. Amalgamated from thousands of comic books and nightmares, such fear is demonstratively theatrical in nature. Ravenous sharks and killer bees make newspaper headlines for months, while thousands die of cancer unnoticed. Yet the iconography of fear is also an iconography of race. Witness: Jose Padilla sits in jail along with thousands of other swarthy men, denied due process, while California's own John Walker Lindh gets a speedy trial and twenty years.
Keeping this in mind, it's easier to understand how and why bin Laden's invention and perpetuation is so crucial. The media and the government have spent so much time building up this iconography of and around bin Laden that they'd be fools to lose it so easily. Look at how the average American views al-Qaida's leader -- an 'evil genius,' a 'criminal mastermind,' a mixture of Jim Jones, Genghis Khan, and Lex Luthor, wrapped up neatly in a beard and turban for easy digestion. In a nation where frequent flyers exchange nervous glances when they see an Arab boarding an airplane, bin Laden is the übervillain.
But the thing you have to realize is this: there are no heroes, no villains, no supermen, no bogeymen -- just men, some sadder than others. Vilification, lionization -- it's all just so much rhetoric. Any effort to characterize bin Laden as totally, absolutely evil is ruined when we realize that, on the other side of the world, there are people who love him and praise him as good and just. Are they wrong, simply because they don't speak English? Are we wrong, or right, based on our geographical location? Can we be expected to take an objective viewpoint on a matter so close to our hearts?
I would hope so. If we're going to go to war over something, if we're going to fight something, let's fight the problem, not the figurehead. Let's try to get at the root causes of terrorism -- whatever those might be. Bin Laden is a man, not a machine, and he's not the one we need to fear. For once, let's fear something abstract. Fear terror, yes -- how could one not these days? But also fear the war machine that creates heroes and villains in order to justify its own existence. That, in itself, in all of its ramifications, is something darker and scarier than any Osama bin Laden or Lex Luthor that the government might ever invent.
Justin Peters is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jtp22@cornell.edu
Cornell Daily Sun
November 19, 2002
WANTED: Bin Laden Dead or Alive -- But Mostly Alive
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