His brother said: “He’s not crazy. He’s not a psychopath. He’s not a sociopath. He’s a man on a mission.” His sister described him as a “very patriotic,” man who “had grown frustrated with the public debate over [our] two major wars [as] the main cause had been forgotten [which was that] a man ordered a hit on our country, so we went to war.”
. . . reports the New York Times on Gary Brooks Farber:
An ailing, middle-age construction worker from Colorado [who] armed himself with a dagger, a pistol, a sword, Christian texts, hashish and night-vision goggles and headed to the lawless tribal areas near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan to personally hunt down Osama bin Laden.
First question for Focal Points readers: Is this vigilante, however much he may be tilting at the windmill of a possibly dead bin Laden, deserving of any admiration whatsoever? Flipping this around, personally I’ve long been somewhat embarrassed by how little interest most Americans have ever shown in tracking bin Laden & co. down. It’s also rendered inexplicable by how we as a nation gorge ourselves on vengeance-based entertainment.
Updating what I wrote in Counterpunch in 2005 . . .
Let’s examine the forces that are ostensibly strong enough to make us jettison the impulse to vengeance.
1. We’re too busy. Living in the most overworked developed nation, we scarcely have the time, even if inclined, to chew over how we were wronged as others in the developed world might, or stew over it like the underemployed of developing nations.
2. Vengeance is so primitive. To many on the East Coast, anger and vengeance are akin to fire and brimstone, that is, the Red states. It’s aggravated by therapy-nation’s credo that anger is not about how we deal with what provoked us, but how we handle the feeling itself. While recent polls [at the time] show Americans favor restrictions of Muslims’ civil liberties, in Manhattan no one turns a head at Arab music issuing from a Middle-Eastern, sidewalk-food-vendor’s boombox. Unfortunately, this comes off less as a commendable reluctance to profile than, once again, an inability to feel and express anger.
3. We’re not actually angry. Many Americans dwelling in points distant from the attacks felt unaffected by 9/11. Others, though it’s seldom spoken of in polite company, we’re secretly glad that New York and Washington were struck. Despite their disdain for the Islamic religion, they weren’t above feeling grateful to its most extreme representatives for wreaking havoc on their biggest enemy: big government and liberals.
4. We ain’t got no quarrel with them Arabs (no disrespect to Muhammad Ali intended). The conventional wisdom on why President Bush was reelected was summed up by Jeff Jacoby in a Boston Globe column: “Americans trust Bush’s judgment on the overriding issue of our time: the West’s life-and-death struggle against Islamist fanaticism. . . he got the core meaning of 9/11 right.” If that’s true, it’s only because the administration sensed, perhaps because of their own pet Saudis, that Middle-Americans had no innate antipathy toward Middle-Easterners. Thus, the string of terror alerts that the administration issued during the election year [2004] may, in part, have been a means of jolting Middle America into upgrading Middle-Easterners to their “A” list of hatred along with gays, Mexicans, and the aforementioned liberals.
5. Bin Laden is not enough. Half of those polled by Zogby International in New York City on the eve of the [2004] Republican National Convention agreed that the administration had foreknowledge of the attacks. While that may be chalked up to fashionable urban cynicism, more and more Americans suspect the administration either commissioned or was complicit in 9/11.
Second question: Granted — 9/11 was a form of blowback. Nor am I personally calling for revenge. My concern is what does our continued nonchalance about bringing back the head of bin Laden say about the mood of our country?