Pray for Osama who persecutes you

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved with Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne, 1624.

When President Barack Obama laid that wreath on Ground Zero, I lit a votive, in my own mad lapsed Catholic way, and thought of these powerful words and of the inalienable if sometimes unpalatable truths they contain.

It doesn’t matter a displaced fig leaf that Johnny-been-there-and-Donne-that wrote these words centuries ago.

Johnny D was the Johnny Depp (as in handsome spunk) of his day. And of this day.

He’s dead in body, but not in spirit. Like Osama bin Laden.

What is Donne cannot be undone.

But what is done in our name needs to be undone to transparency; otherwise we need to place wreaths not only upon memorials for our dead, but also for the living, at the shrine of The Tomb of the Unknown Truth.

I will not rejoice in the death of Osama bin Laden.

Even if he had died of natural causes, of kidney and ideological failure, I would not have rejoiced but felt a sense of uneasy relief.

I never thought that Osama bin Laden initially had the degree of power and influence that George W Bush attributed to him. He didn’t.

Bush stupidly gave it to him.

In the form of an imprimatur when bin Laden’s personal jihad on the House of Saud, which ultimately manifested itself on American airspace and soil on 9/11, was not defined as a war crime against the United States and the human family, but instead was given legitimacy as an act of war.

And what’s more, it was Halal.

By doing so, Bush conferred holy orders upon bin Laden, giving sovereignty to Al Qaeda’s borderless state of mind and ministries of hate.

In effect, what Bush did was to turn Al Qaeda from the disparate and desperate groupings of wahabis and other wannabees, into a tangible entity – a deadly, albeit homeless, nation state – and he publicly anointed Osama bin Laden its monarch, thereby genuflecting to the terrorist’s status.

Bin Laden and AQ was to expeditiously grow into the designer branding promulgated by the Bush Administration, gaining international traction and a coherent strength partly through deed, partly through intimation, intimidation, implication and threat; the critical ‘intangibles’ that are part of the terrorist’s formidable armoury.

Bush and Bin Laden – brothers in arms

Both Bush and bin Laden were brothers in alms as well as brothers in arms. Monies for War. War for Monies. Done deal.

They needed one another. They were both feeding off the same plate. The rest of us were served the leftovers.

Those leftovers weren’t Halal. They weren’t Kosher. They weren’t even edible. You can’t eat lies but you can cook them.

You can’t force feed us with them. Even though we swallow them for a while. They were served up every which way. Lies overdone. Lies underdone. Lies easy over. Lies done over. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time; doesn’t stop our governments trying.

This bin Laden was a pigment of Dubya’s malevolent imagination and needy ego, crayoned by

the likes of The Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove, who gathered around steaming cauldrons of war, beating drums in time to the thoughtful piano playing of their beholden and strictly coiffed Whitehousekeeper, Condoleezza Rice.

Remember the Coalition of the Willing? What was all that about? Does anyone care?