Stay Tuned

 

 America not celebrating?

The media is awash in stories and speculation about the killing of Osama Bin-Laden. Seriously, almost every writer on the sites I follow has been fixated on this news. I can only imagine what American television coverage must be like. I'd like to watch 15 minutes of Fox News right now. Here's a pretty good article from The Atlantic about the ever evolving official statement about the raid - 'The Slippery Story of the bin Laden Kill'.
An interesting 'fact' to emerge is that DNA testing has been done. Wow, that was fast! How exactly did they have his DNA to match it with? And again, that seems kind of quick, no?
The photographic evidence has already been discredited. Here's your trusted CNN on the fake photo.
And here's the photo, yuk.

Not much reporting of dissenting views other than ridicule for Cindy Sheehan on being the first "Osama denier". A 'deather' they are calling her. Read her post on the 'Lamestream' media's response to her opinion about the Osama stories. It may open your eyes a bit.
The way people who attempt to speak truth to power or deconstruct the fables we live by are maligned is incredible. Far more outrageous that anything written here. 'Conspiracy theorists' is another way of saying those people are not to be taken seriously.

Responses in Daily Uruguay on this have been mixed. Believers in the American Myth are incensed, the rest of the world; non-nonplussed. What's fascinating to me is not that some people believe it and some don't, it's the deja vu of the White House parading a 'victory' that is largely unexamined and dutifully regurgitated by the media. ' panem et circenses' anyone?
Whatever percentage of skeptics there are now will likely diminish with time and soon it will become a 'fact' that opinions and attitudes are based on.
How many people still connect Iraq with 9/11? Did you know that Osama bin-Laden never claimed responsibility for that attack? I propose that the 'war on terror', terrorism, attacks against the US and it's embassies, the war against Iraq, the war in Afghanistan are all mixed up in people's minds. Maybe more than they realize.

This sentiment of good guys killing the bad guys is often used and widely believed. Christopher Hayes writes in The Nation about this aspect of American culture.
I hear it's more complicated than that. The way I've portrayed the US does not include all the thoughtful, intelligent citizens who care deeply about what's happening.
Let's start by recognizing the connection between the culture, the media and the government, instead of  patriotic posturing?