Obama 1, Osama 0
By:
May 2, 2011
Over at The Atlantic our friend (and HiLo contributor) Alexis Madrigal perfectly expresses my own inchoate reaction to public reactions in US cities after the killing of Osama bin Laden was announced, last night.
The area directly in front of the White House was a mob scene. Women sat on shoulders waving flags. Everyone held their cameras aloft and tried to capture the magic. A man next to me said, “It’s like a Who concert or something.” But there was no band, no focal point to the celebration. No one had anything to wait for, and yet, it seemed that everyone was waiting for something. Where were you supposed to look? What were you supposed to do? Who was running this thing?
Maybe for that reason, the roving television cameras seemed best at structuring the crowd’s attention for short periods. Whenever they flipped on, a crowd would swarm in front of them like fans of the Duke Blue Devils basketball team, the Cameron Crazies. But instead of yelling about the hardwood, these kids were chanting U-S-A, U-S-A and celebrating the death of the most notorious enemy of America. It was as if all those drunken Georgetown games had been training for this moment in front of the world’s roving cameras. Yes, America and all its youths are happy that Osama Bin Laden is dead! We are so happy that when a television camera’s electronic eye interrogates us about our feelings, we can do nothing else aside from scream and pump our fists and scream some more! I even saw some people even giving the “We’re number one!” sign of holding up the index finger. We’re number one? Because we killed Osama Bin Laden?
The college kids seemed best at this kind of aimless celebrating. Or at least they were drunk enough to lead. They climbed trees and snapped flags through the air. They shouted. They carried each other on their backs and took smiling pictures in front of the White House. Luckily, Facebook will tag the date on those photos lest the subjects be left wondering, “Was that the day we beat UNC or the day we killed Osama?”
The college kids also started most of the chants. The most disturbing to me was probably, “Nah nah nah, nah nah nah, hey hey hey goodbye.” If you’re a basketball fan, you’ll recognize that chant as what you do when a guy fouls out. Baseball fans might hear it was what you rain on an opposing pitcher when he’s forced from the game. Neither of these chant-analogies seem at all appropriate for the killing of America’s greatest foe. The same goes for the Georgetown fight song, which broke out several times, and received actual boos from some passing American University students, who contemplated being able “to take” the Georgetown kids.
Everyone seemed to be confusing the occasion with other times that they’d been in large crowds of like-minded individuals. On a half-dozen occasions, different Washington Capitals hockey fans started the “C-A-P-S, Caps, Caps, Caps” chant. On the other end of the spectrum, a random activist brought a large Algerian flag into the center of the American flag area. When asked why he had an Algerian flag, he said, “Because Algerians have fought with Americans in the war on terror,” but I figured that maybe it was the only flag that he had, and flags were a most sought-after accessory.
Great reporting, Alexis. Yikes.