Everything Julia Gillard had planned for this week has quietly been taken back to the policy shed for later release. Since all that was planned was to take several hundred more hits over the carbon tax and to make an education announcement involving Peter Garrett, it's probably not a bad thing. The death of Osama bin Laden will rightly dominate the news for at least the rest of the week, and it will give the Government a nice little breather before the Budget next Tuesday, which by all accounts, will be another mishandled shit-storm.
The significance of bin Laden's death for the United States and the western world cannot be underestimated, and certainly there are many who believe that this one event has secured Barack Obama's re-election. Certainly the punchy-ness of the 'Obama got Osama' slogan already scrawled on hundreds of hastily created signs suggests that this is the case. However, it is worth noting how the reaction to the news, late on a Sunday night (US time) was evidence as to how the US has changed in the last 10 years. Changed in a way many find disturbing.
On the evening of September the 11th 2001 I was watching Rove Live. Why I was doing this, I don't know. It's certainly rather embarrassing to admit that now, but watching it I was. Across the bottom of the screen came a news ticker with a line about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Centre towers. This was an unusual direction for Rove I thought, I couldn't see how his audience of bland 18-35 year-olds could cope with this form of world shattering 'gotcha' humour. However, it kept scrolling, and the host seemed completely oblivious; well more completely than he usually was. I began to think about the depth of Rove's new found edginess. How far can he take this? What's the punch line? Certainly "Say hi to your mum for me" would not be an appropriate 'out' for this piece of sophisticated humour. I eventually came to my senses and switched channels and was promptly frozen in front of my television until 3 o'clock in the morning.
I watched what you watched, there's no need to recount it, but there was one image in particular that I remember which for me confirmed that if there was not a war in the Middle East by September 12, there would be one very soon. Late into the night, both of the Towers long collapsed, bin Laden officially blamed, and CNN were talking to Tom Clancy. That's right, Tom Clancy. They cut the interview short to show pictures from Gaza, where in the streets were people. Young people, and they were celebrating. It was not unbridled joy, but it was celebration. It was a show of the 'we like that this happened' variety. Of course, this made a lot of people angry.
Nine years, seven months and 20 days later I saw the same sort of celebration. Young people in the streets of Washington showing not unbridled joy, but saying 'we like that this happened', and it's going to make a lot of people angry.
The similarity of the two images is troubling. Extremism can breed extremism, and the celebration of death, even of one man, is extreme in my view. However, if you have grown up with one individual cited as the bogeyman to end all bogeymen, in a climate of fear and threat, how would you react to the news that he is dead? The answer is troubling, but not surprising.
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