Revenge is sweet

Osama bin Laden in dead. Great news for everyone, although I do have reservations about the crowds screaming USA, USA. This isn’t the Miracle on Ice. Still, as one who was caught up in the joyous celebrations for both VE Day and VJ Day I can understand the emotion. It’s a victory to be savored. I have no idea how our Special Ops did it (we’ll have to wait for the Bruce Willis movie to see) but it was quite brilliant. Also clever was the burial at sea. No pilgrimages, no burial site, no monuments. He’s gone. George Orwell wrote that he couldn’t really hate Hitler because he saw so much pain in his face. This didn’t win him any friends in England but it was a personal, human reaction. Looking into bin Laden’s history we see that he was using our Stinger missiles to help drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan . He was in our good books then. But when he returned to Saudi Arabia he was disgusted with our deal with the oil rich royal family there. He then became a sort of Arabic Che Guevara and turned from a gentle (the papers description of him) and idealistic young man into a murderer. I hark back to Mary Shelley’s famous novel “Frankenstein”. It has nothing to do with Boris Karloff but is a morbid story warning about the dehumanization of art and the corrupting influence of science. The final lines are chilling and apropos of bin Laden’s ending: The Monster said, “my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds” .He sprung from the cabin window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.