Should We Celebrate Osama’s Death?

So, Osama Bin Laden is riding the gravewave and everyone is celebrating. It seems weird that in 2011 people celebrate the death of someone. Seems super barbaric, you know?

This reminds me a lot of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. He says we’re so ‘civilized’ that we privatize punishment because we don’t like to be involved in it. Executions used to be public, notably: the guillotine was a source of daily entertainment during the French Revolution. Now we don’t really want to see this. It causes us to feel sympathy for an awful person and it probably glorifies someone like Osama more than it should.

But I think the desire to not experience Osama’s death publicly is short-sighted. What happens if we don’t do this, though? THis makes me think about the privatizing of animal slaughter as well (bear with me).We’ve largely privatized the process of producing the mean we eat. I watched an episode of The Real Housewives of Miami this season and one of the characters refused to eat at a pig roast because the pig had been slaughtered and prepared for the occasion. She used the word barbaric. Her reasoning went something along the lines of “it is okay to raise and kill animals in a more cruel way if I don’t know about it, killing an animal in a more humane way is not okay if it causes me to think about it.”

The more barbaric thing is to let people do this in secret, because there is no accountability. This is how I have been thinking about Osama. The idea of celebrating someone’s death will always make me a little uncomfortable, but better that it’s done in a way that people can see and verify and are forced to respond to rather than in secret.

Jeff

I made the mistake of voicing a very similar opinion in school today. I think that Obama, as any president should, handled Osama’s death correctly. He was mature about it; he treated it like business and not like revenge. The brutal murder of any human being is an event that should be handled seriously, and while I acknowledge many Americans’ relief with his death, I do not support their excitement. Tell me that the chanting you saw in Time Square this morning didn’t look like footage from a third-world country. I think we ought to all settle down and act like civilized human beings.

Here’s another article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-gerloff/the-psychology-of-revenge_b_856184.html
James

I am going to celebrate Osama’s first anniversarynin hell with some pork; probably spare rib tips with brown rice. And maybe some cake and ice cream. I wish I could afford to throw a block party for the neighborhood, with a whole roast pig. Instead of”burial at sea”, his carcass should have been cut into thousands of pieces; to be buried under pigsties around the world. The warrior who put the fatal shot into him should have been permitted to take off his head, and make it into a drinking cup. if he wanted. And to take his scalp. Bush wanted his head kept cold with dry ice. He probably would have held it up, at a press conference on the White House lawn. like Conan heldup Thulsa Doom’s head. His head should have ben kicked around, like Celts used to do with their slain enemies’ heads. When the team entered the building, they should have shot everyone of fighting age. Osama’s family might have been armed and resisted.
3301

I guess I’m not civilized. I’d like to have given the families and friends of those he killed the opportunity to publiclu urinate and spit on his carcass, at the Pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania, and Ground Zero. Ithink his foul remains should be shown the same respect as was shown to American dead in Somalia -Black Hawk down. Drag him through the street; drench him in spit and urine; cut him up into many small pieces for burial under the pigsties of the world.

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Should We Celebrate Osama’s Death?

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