Quick Shots - 28 Feb 2019

Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell, Pederast

I've not blogged anything serious in a long while and the main reason for that is I got burnt out by the stupidity of politics. There's only so much Tony Abbott and climate change denialism and rank class warfare one can take, beyond which came the presidency of Donald Trump. After all of that was the spectacle of various Royal Commissions that laid bare how morally bankrupt our society had become, when it came to making money and getting away with illicit crimes.

Yet, today of all days kind of moved me to blog this date in history. For today is the day Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell finds himself in prison for having molested choirboys in the 1990s, while he negotiated away the issue of the Catholic Church's culpability in protecting pederast priests. The irony is simply too much. And if that weren't enough, the Ex-Cardinal got himself excellent character references from two former Prime Minsters of this land.

I am not a wowser. If anything I hate wowsers, so I find myself pleasantly delighted that a man who was the arch-wowser of our times was found out to be exactly the sort of sinner he excoriated from his bully pulpit. The irony is simply too beautiful not to go without being remarked upon. As obvious it is - like the sun in broad day light, really, - this was one man who ought not to have - pardon the phrase - pontificated on the ills of homosexuality when he himself was sticking his penis into the mouths of boys. And I don't for even a single moment mean to suggest it would have somehow been better had he had stuck his dick into the mouths of girls, no, no, no!

And Pell (which is a contraction for Pederast in hell) still insists he is innocent and that he intends to appeal. His lawyer sought a lighter sentence on the grounds that it was a 'vanilla' kind of transgression. Clearly the good counsel has not heard the joke about fucking one goat. It doesn't matter that it only lasted six minutes long, you get judged on the act itself for a reason.

A Father Brennan sought to cast doubt on the judgment itself by suggesting it was impossible to get a penis out to stick it into the mouth of a choirboy from under a Cardinal's robes. It's quite funny because the defence amounts to the same as the idiotic joke wherein it is claimed rapes are impossible because men with trousers around their ankles cannot run after women with the skirts up. It is as if the Catholic Church fraternity have learnt absolutely nothing from the Royal Commission, or the trial and verdict of George Fucking Pell. Creating plausible deniability is hardly the way into the Kingdom of God, Father Brennan.

Two Arseholes in Search of (De-)Meaning

That brings me to the two idiots, the Dishonourable John Howard and Despicable Tony Abbott.

As for the two former Prime Minsters who provided character references, it suggests more about them than it endorses the character of George Fucking Pell. After all, how can they claim their opinions of the man are unchanged in spite of the verdict? Are they thumbing their noses at the court? Are they casting doubt on the system of justice that leans upon jurors? Are they oblivious to the cries of the victims of sexual abuse? Or are they simply dirty old white men circling the wagons around their fellow white man with a conservative weasel mind and a willingness to forgive the errant penis?
In short, have they no embarrassment that they are endorsing a man who shoved his penis down the maws of thirteen year old boys entrusted in his care?

And the answer is clearly not; not, one, bit.

Here's the thing about these men Abbott and Howard. They created the Australia that needed these Royal Commissions. The Royal Commission into banking and insurance had to be done because both of their governments underfunded ASIC and APRA, and came up with terms by which they couldn't go after the most egregious offenders. The Royal Commission in to child abuse by institutions came up because both men presided over governments that privatised out foster care to religious organs, and never looked too hard into the problems when they were Prime Minster. Even the current Royal Commission into Aged Care emerges from the cutting health care budgets and privatising out care for profiteers. The Royal Commission to come on Disability Patients will show the same issue - that successive governments have privatised care out to private profiteers without accountability, and this has resulted in terrible abuse of the most vulnerable.

In fact, these two men contributed greatly to the environment where the Royal Commission were needed because of their polarising politics. The continued cultural wars waged by these two men made it impossible to govern the country in any sensible way. This meant government oversight was limited, understanding dim, knowledge scanty, and mostly blind to abuses in all these areas. All of this was done in the name of fiscal responsibility and tight budgets with a surplus, damn the consequences. Well, the consequences have come home to roost, and none of these Royal Commissions have painted a positive picture of the Federal Government as run by the Coalition.

Really, these men ought to have their platforms taken away in the same way Kevin Spacey had his taken away. They have nothing positive to contribute in public life if what they want to do with their platform is to endorse George Fucking Pell's character.  In most parts of our society, you don't get to claim to have character once you've been convicted of pedophilia.

Even Ray Hadlee thought it was a bit much. And I think Ray Hadlee is a bit much - but that's another rant entirely.

The 121st Day In Sodom

The other ironic thing is that all these people wanted Pier Pasolini's 'Salo' banned. Howard, Abbott, Pell, and Hadlee. Fuck freedom of speech, let's just censor a film based on the Marquis de Sade's big opus, they said. Isn't power to control what other people se or watch corrosive? Probably more than the things they seek to ban.

If you've read '120 Days of Sodom', you would know that a Mayor, a banker, a judged and a bishop get together and create their own little sadistic sex slave haven, and a lot of times spent sexually abusing minors. It's a terrible book, really, except for one thing: it shows us the relationship between the ability of power to corrupt and the libido itself. De Sade wrote this stuff a good half century before Freud, and Co. really nailed his targets. So much so they had his book banned and had De Sade locked up in the Bastille.

It's especially funny to think upon this because if anybody was the highest priest of the land, it was George Fucking Pell, and he turned out to be exactly the kind of monster De Sade said he would be. John Howard is singularly without insight so he is too stupid to understand how it might have happened that his good friend George Fucking Pell turned out to be a monster. Tony Abbott, I suspect knows better, for I suspect Tony Abbott himself is psychosexually perverted by power, and that is why he has remained in Parliament. Being in Parliament being Tony Abbott the wrecker, fuels his libido. It helps him bang Peta Credlin better.

In any case, we now understand better who these men are, thanks to the Marquis de Sade. Don't ever tell me banning his works is a good idea.

How Can Catholics Stay Catholics In This Country After This?

Look, I always bag out religion because I think they're all suspect. That being said, I don't know how Catholics in this country can stay Catholics after a Cardinal has been found to have not only protected pedophile priests, minimised financial pay outs to victims of pedophile priests, and removed the church itself from being sued for damages by those it abused, but also personally abused choir boys in his care?

How can you be okay going back to this church and confessing in the booth to a bunch of people you can no longer trust? Logically, one would look for a personal connection to God that doesn't involve going through priests, and of course that's exactly how the Reformation began. That's just logic, though.

If I were in the Vatican looking at all this, I'd be more than little worried about where Catholicism can go in Australia after this. I guess bullshit is eternal, and I need not worry about the emotional well-being of Catholics, but it has to be said, going back to Church on Sunday would be misconstrued by the rest of society as tacitly supporting these arsehole priests who would protect pedophiles in their ranks.

I mean, are you really going to be okay with that? If so, how fucking low are you willing to go as a society? I'll tell you how low I'm willing to go. From now on, I'm not going to hesitate to ask any Catholic priest how many pedophiles they personally know about and whom they're protecting.

The World Is Stupider Than You Hope

I just want to note Donald Trump is in Hanoi talking to Kim Jong-Un in hopes of reaching a nuclear detente. It won't happen because they're too far apart. All the while Trump's former lawyer who flipped on him was bagging him out in Congress. If you thought that whole scenario wasn't crazy enough, India and Pakistan have started a shooting war without actually calling it a war. Imran Khan was on TV asking to meet the Indian Prime Minister. Who knows if that would work. It would be ironic if World War III started over Kashmir between India and Pakistan exactly while the more likely culprits in Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un were busy trying to defuse the bomb they made.

That's how deeply in the clutches of stupidity we have ended. Way to go world!
Hey don't look at me. I didn't make it like this.

'Orange Is The New Black' - Seasons 1-3

'Prisoner', American Style

I used to watch 'Prisoner' as a kid in NYC. IN the reverse of my current situation where I pine for things New York, I was in New York, oddly pining for things Australian. The accent, the diction, the delivery, the clunkiness was all oddly appealing. I think it was broadcast on one of the loser stations that didn't have baseball. It may even have been PBS. Anyway, watching a TV series about a female prison keeps evoking those memories, although I have no particular fondness for the genre of prison stories or lesbians in prison stories. I read 'Papillon' when was 13 and it left a lasting impression of just how awful any kind of incarceration gets, so if anything, it's a genre I'd rather avoid.

Still, OITNB gives us an updated, fresher, more upfront and frank view of life behind bars for women in America. The drama is sort of unfocused, but there are plenty of interesting, compelling characters running around.

It's hard to watch in a binge sitting. There's a lot going on and the subject doesn't lend itself to wanting to see a lot of it at once. It gives you this pall of depressing dread about incarceration, and then springs some black humoured moments on you in-between. Mostly I wanted to run out of the room for the first 3 to 4 episodes; it's good but I felt "I don't really need this in my life!" for a long while. After a while I learned ignore it - but honestly I'd much rather be watching Ricky Gervais' 'Derek'.

What's Good About It

The story is pretty simple. Piper's ex-lesbian lover is a mid-level drug trafficker who gets caught and offers up the main character Piper to the authorities, which places her in this minimum security prison. There, we get to see what life's like in minimum security prison as she awaits her time to pass. Of course, this being prison, waiting quietly just doesn't figure into it the way it might in other circumstances.

Considering the material and the risk of it turning into a soap or a serial sitcom, the performances of the actors is what stays with you the most. I'm not big fan of the main character Piper, but Taylor Schilling is remarkable in the role. Kate Mulgrew's Red Reznikov is a fantastic study and a far cry from Captain Janeway (another character of Mulgrew's that I liked), while the lesser known black actors keep turning in amazing character studies, episode after episode.

I found myself empathising with most of the characters' backstories, whether it be the transgender firman turned hairdresser, or the lesbian army brat or the political activist nun. There's a lot of meat there to these stories that offer up a kaleidoscope of American society in different strata. All the characters are motivated and energetic. It's surprising how well the cast and writers have put together this series. It's great watching whole stretches of screen time centred around non-white people having very involved scenes. Some tremendous performances are being captured and some amazing ideas get explored by this part of the show.

What's Bad About It

I really don't like Piper Chapman. I haven't read the book so I don't know but I imagine I wouldn't like Piper Kerman whose book this is all based upon, much either. It's hard to like somebody so shallow, manipulative, self-satisfied and dishonest as Piper. This makes it a bit of a struggle to stay with the show. But that's probably just me being a moralist with the luxury of freedom.

The show can also be tedious at times. I'm not sure if any of the slow burn stories are going to amount to anything and this being television, the obvious villains that come and go are perfunctory and boring when compared to the complexity of the actual characters we regularly see. Vee Parker who comes in to lead the black women is a psychopath. Her charges are more interesting than anything Vee has to offer up, but the dynamics demand that Vee be the antagonist and the story - as loose as it is - lumbers around the psychopathic persona of Vee for the entire season.

Overall, it is a good show so my complaints are purely personal taste things. It's on a losing wicket with me: It's about prisons, lesbians, psychos, and the brutality of solitary confinement within the  incarceration. They're not exactly things that excite me. It's sort of in contrast to something like 'Mad Men', which has great production design, with loads of beautiful things I like looking at. This is decidedly not a show about beautiful things - it's more a show about ugly things and ugly truths. It gets a little trying after a while. I found it much harder to binge watch this than the ugly politics in say, 'House of Cards'.

What's Interesting About It

Watching this show, you'd think that gender outlines are a lot less firm with women than men. I don't know what to make of it, but half the main characters are either practicing homosexuals or bisexual, except the abject religious nut who rails against homosexuality. There's also the feeling you get that the best thing about lesbianism is that it is all a girl's own sexual adventure. Having it explained that the best technique for making a woman come is "two (fingers) in the pink and one in the stink" is at once amusing but also confronting. Once you get past that, it's all a blur of girls behaving badly in prison.

I'm no expert but I never would have guessed that gender identity amongst women was this fluid. The transgender Sophia stands out as being somebody who is totally fixated rigidly on their gender identity, but of course, she started as a he. Otherwise all kinds of characters are seduced into homo-sex in a way that is hard to imagine with a male population. You learn something new everyday.

Absent Fathers

There is a layered motif in this series, which is the absence of fathers. There is a warden to this prison in Litchfield who is never seen. Presumably he is like an unseen God-like figure of the microcosm that is the prison. Late in series 3 the warden is replaced by a corporation, and it happens completely off screen.  It's worse than a silent God; it's more like a silent Wizard of Oz who says he's in charge but the place is totally out of control.

Similarly, Piper's own father is hardly seen at the prison and we are shown how absent he was from her life while growing up. The whole prison is a hellish nightmare for her precisely because it has the dynamic of a schoolyard but on perpetual camp. All of this gives the impression that the emotionally immature are being sadistically schooled in the ways of a cruel world. Echoes of Marquis de Sade's writings come to mind as well as 'Milgrim's 37' experiment.

The show certainly presents a strong argument that if the state insists on strong Law & Order implementation and incarcerates people, it certainly has the obligation to better look after the human beings it incarcerates. Of course, the way the show sees it, the authority figures are habitually absent and so the lower level corrections officers are made to bridge the unbridgeable gaps to sustain the system. It seems entirely appropriate that as a Gen-X text, the absent father is central to the construction of both the riskiness of character as well as the sense of being adrift in chaos that pervades the show.

Embracing The Inner Criminal

It is hard to fathom what the point of incarceration is, from the point of rehabilitation. The show makes an explicit case for how institutionalising people results in recidivism, just to get back into the institution, which is a perverse outcome. Worse still, you don't get the feeling that the COs - the corrections officers - do any 'corrections' at all. People are essentially incarcerated under our justice system to be taken away from normalcy as punishment. As such, there is really no thought given as to what kind people they become through the institutionalisation, and in what shape they are returned to society.

Piper spends much of her time struggling to fit in and accepting she is there because she committed a crime. This leads her to accepting herself as an inmate that is deservedly inside the prison. From there, she rationalises that her criminality is somehow integral to her being. It's an alarming mentation, but we are forced to accept it as the audience because we ca;t conceive of how she will rereleased and whether she can truly return to the outside world.Instead, we are forced to share this notion that prison is a place where people discover their inner selves and often this inner self is a criminal.

If this is the point of the justice system, it makes you wonder how anybody can return to the world, with their mental health intact.

Mad Women - The Unattended Insanity 

One of the more troubling episodes involves an elderly inmate who clearly has advanced Alzheimers. Unable to deal with the inmate having such a condition, the prison releases her on "compassionate grounds" so it does not have to deal with her illness. We are led to believe the old woman who is without any kin or friends, will die as a homeless person in the wider world. It is one of the grosser ironies of the system wherein they are happy to make people mentally ill through the prison system, but the very system is totally unwilling to deal with the mentally ill subjects in its care.

There is a broader issue of whether we are medicalising criminal problems, but in some ways watching this show you get the feeling that there is a lot more of criminalising medical problems going on. The character Suzanne Warren clearly is suffering from something that looks like schizophrenia and nobody seems to be noticing it as a problem walking around the prison compound. There are plenty of other characters exhibiting mania and manic depressive behaviour. Even Piper seems to be somewhat manic. Mind you, she also displays signs that she is a psychopath, so it's hard to say.

It's not a problem unique to America. One is reminded of a survey in the early 2000s that found 70% of the NSW prison population were depressed. The warden made a statement in response to the findings that that was the point of prisons - to make people feel bad for the crimes they committed and if there were a low number of depressed prisoners, he would feel he wasn't doing his job. While I don't know what the solution might be, prison systems seem to be a form of punitive mental asylum in the manner of 19th century asylums.

Lesbianism As A Way Of Life

The main character Piper emerges in the show as a lesbian. We are first introduced to her as having a fiancee and being essentially white, upper class and normatively heterosexual. This stereotype is steadily eroded to reveal she was a lesbian in the past and a willing lesbian in the present tense, while she cheats on her fiancee. She is surrounded by lesbians of varying assertiveness, but if her natural inclination isn't towards homosexuality, it's hard to conceive of the appeal as being so appealing as to be easily overcome. This is the bit where I just cannot fathom this show. On one level, it is about criminal incarceration, but on another level, it seems more like "Piper's lesbian holiday camp".

Early on in Season 1, Pipers pursued by Crazy Eyes who was to make Piper her 'prison wife'. Piper refuses the advances, and we are given the strong impression that this is because Piper has fiancee outside of the joint, but in actual fact as the show progresses it becomes evident that it isn't lesbian sex she's worried about, nor the infidelity it represents, but the fact that Crazy Eyes is black. On that level, Piper is not above the rank racism that swirls around her in prison.

It's a strange show too in that you see more moments of lesbian intimacy than heterosexual intimacy, and heterosexual sex is portrayed in a very unflattering and uninviting way, whereas the lesbian sex - particularly the bits enjoyed by Piper - are portrayed around shots of ecstatic carnal abandon on Piper's face. The show is decidedly down on regular straight sex, and idealises lesbian sex. Which is, neither here nor there, but effectively (and oddly) in praise of prison life. Piper's having a gay old time; she just won't admit it because she's meant to be ashamed to be in prison, but it is hard to argue she is seriously inconvenienced. She has a departure date, and so she is merely a tourist from the affluent world, slumming it for fun and pleasure. Her complaints are largely ornamental.

Hollowed Out

The Unbearable Lightness Of All Being

I'm still reeling from the Martin Place siege. I didn't write about it yesterday, but I am specifically distraught about one of the victims Katrina Dawson. Sydney is a small enough that there are people around me whose lives intersected with hers and her family. It's like 2 degrees of separation, sometimes 3. Above all, her life and career to date reads like an exemplary human being we would all want to spire to or at least have our kids grow into. I'm sure she had her foibles but it's rare you find a life that reads like a perfect record.

She was by all accounts a remarkable human being. Topped her school, topped her state in graduating; topped the law faculty at Sydney University; got a masters at UNSW; topped the class in her bar entrance exam; a loving, admired mother of three; by all accounts she was the best of the best - and her life came to an abrupt end at the hands of a malicious jerk. To tell you the truth I'm aghast at this turn of events for her and her young family.

I'm doubly aghast because her death seems to open up a void, a nihilistic space of nothingness that stares back, absent of meaning. The religious sermon delivered does not fill it; philosophy can only abstract it, but it cannot fill it; it just feels like if you wanted conclusive proof that nothing in this life has any profound meaning, you could point to this siege and her death. The violence that befell her didn't come looking for her specifically - she had not made an enemy of this man. There really was no rhyme nor reason to the violence that felled both Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson. The allegedly political stance taken by Monis was hardly credible, legitimate, or real - it was just some bullshit he came up with in order to try and give some meaning to his senseless stupid life. But if there's one thing that's certain, his life was devoid of any serious meaning. He sure made sure of that one by ending on a note of gratuitous violence.

Our own liberalism offers very little help in all of this mess. Officials from Iran claimed that they asked to extradite this Monis back to Iran and they said our government refused. Our government presumably refused because having issued political asylum to this man it must have assumed that a return to Iran would be giving him up for political reasons and therefore against our sense of freedom (or whatever liberal principle we might have had). After all what could possibly happen to the man? Probably torture, so they said 'no'. Our government probably didn't look too deeply into the possibility that the Iranians genuinely/legitimately wanted this man for fraud.

So we held on to him in Australia because giving him up to Iranian authorities would mean we were giving up on our liberal principles. He wrote disgusting letters to the family of dead servicemen. He was convicted of harassment but his sentence was only 300hours of community service. Rather than just do the community service, he fought the sentence al the way to the high court (and lost). He had his wife killed and set alight. He pretended to be a healer and sexually assaulted women. Each time he found himself in front a of a judge he got the benefit of the doubt and got bail. At each and every turn where this man might have been taken off the streets, our very liberal principles put him back onto the street.

Hence you'll have to forgive me if I feel a little shirty about my own small-'l-liberalism just for this week. We effectively fight for the rights of the very people who would kill us senselessly. It sure makes you want to embrace fascism and looser gun laws, even if only temporarily. There is no meaning to any of this. Nothing bloody well matters.

I don't envy the task of her widower husband who must explain mummy's death to three kids. I can't possibly imagine how he's going to frame it with any kind of meaning when he explains what happened. In my humble opinion, there is not a sensible conversation to be had there. If it is just tears and embraces, that would make more sense than any words that can be uttered. There's nothing but the meaningless void.

We should all be nice to each other a lot more. Life's really short.

The American Psyche?

Revenge Tragedies

Goodness, sometimes I really detest the opinion pieces the SMH puts out there. This one here by Waleed Aly about an episode of 'Newsroom', trying to anlayse the so-called psyche of America just takes the cake.

This episode isn't really about broadcast journalism at all. It's about America's relationship with bin Laden and the September 11 attacks. It's an artefact of our age that helps us define September 11 as a social, cultural and psychological landmark.

And if Sorkin's world is as accurate on that score as I think it is, the take-home message is this: that for Americans, or at least the American mainstream reflected here, September 11 was deeply personal. These characters are scarcely interested in bin Laden's death as some kind of strategic gain. They barely discuss anything that approximates the consequences of bin Laden's killing. But they very clearly exude a spirit of revenge finally being secured.

The newsroom cheers raucously when the news editor announces the news; news anchors jostle for the right to share the triumph with the American people in a manner that seems about more than professional ego; a peripheral character whose father was killed in the Twin Towers withdraws from the celebrations feeling hollow rather than elated, but even she agrees this is a moment for festivity.

And in perhaps the episode's cheesiest moment of patriotic triumph, a producer trapped frustratingly on a United Airlines plane stalled on the tarmac while his colleagues enjoy the exhilaration of going to air, looks the captain in the eye, then fixes on his badges and stripes, and declares solemnly that "our armed forces killed Osama bin Laden for you tonight".

Hmm. the article then goes on to argue that the killing of Osama bin Laden was mere revenge, and somehow this makes the act of slaying Osama bin Laden, somehow lacking in greater legitimacy. Well, I hate to break it to Waleed Aly, but the brokerage of revenge is actually one of the most important functions of state. The reason we have states and the judiciary predates the power of kings in Germanic tribes - and many of our law codes come to us out of those kinds of laws.

It pays to understand this a little bit more. Historically speaking, the need to broker the act of revenge exists so that society does not fall into a chaotic feud. If one reads Icelandic sagas such as Njal's saga, it is pretty clear the purpose of most laws in the Icelandic 'Althing' are to do with "making settlements" and by that, we mean brokering peace deals. Revenge is not condoned because going it alone without the wider understanding by society renders the act something that sets off a cycle of violence. This is why the law brokers settlements, and by way of brokering settlements, revenge is also brokered.

The more sophisticated our society has become through history, we have constructed elaborate narratives for what crime and punishment are, and what the point of the penal system might be; but at the heart of the function of the law in the state apparatus is to administer justice, and justice is in most part brokering settlements for grievances and revenge. This is why capital punishment still exists in parts of the world we consider otherwise civilised - like, say, America.

That the point of going after Osama bin Laden and killing him is revenge is not particularly insightful, given that we know how many perished in the 9/11 attacks (and I say this putting aside all the conspiracy theories for a moment). If the United States Government did not exact vengeance on the man who claimed responsibility for the attacks, it would be amiss in its duty of brokering the revenge. After all, it would be illegal for the aggrieved kinsmen to go after bin Laden on their own, seeking to kill him. That's called a lynch mob.

So it goes without saying that Waleed Aly is willfully misrepresenting what state-sponsored revenge actually is, in order to come at his pithy conclusion:

...Sorkin doesn't employ the explicit good-versus-evil terms that, say, George W. Bush did. There's no need. It's simply assumed. It's not in the content of the script because it's in the underlying grammar of American public culture. The Newsroom's treatment is an artefact because it does nothing more than faithfully reproduce the mythology of bin Laden that prevails amongst its audience.

That is to say, Sorkin treats bin Laden as an icon. Almost in the religious sense. As the show's star anchor Will McAvoy takes to the air to break the story, the production staff rise to their feet and look on in solemn reverence. Hereabouts it is clear this is not a news broadcast. It's a rite. A sacrament.
"For the first time in almost three decades the world has no reason to fear Osama bin Laden," begins McAvoy's eloquent monologue. It's powerful. It's moving. It's also wrong.

Bin Laden remains potent in death. He is more powerful as a symbol than a field commander, and as such lives longer than himself. That's the nature of icons.

Now, what is wrong with this? Waleed Aly is in effect complaining that Osama bin Laden has been made into a kind of straw man cipher for Islamists, while mounting his own straw man argument against America's satisfaction at having had Osama bin Laden killed.

The real complaint we should be leveling is that Osama bin Laden was killed and not captured alive; that his body was disposed at sea without so much as an autopsy. The physical being of Osama bin Laden was sent into the shadows of history pretty much the same way he came into our consciousness - through the murk of Afghanistan and Pakistan local politics and local history.  The real complaint that I for one have about the slaying of Osama bin Laden is how long it took, and the damage it has done in the mean time to our own cherished democracies. In fact it didn't get done during the tenure of George W Bush as POTUS, which leads us to wonder about all those conspiracy theories out there on the internet.

Be that as it may (as they say in Mafia movies), complaining that Osama bin Laden is understood to be 'not even political' but merely 'evil' is a bit rich coming from a muslim apologist (who only a couple weeks ago wanted to lend legitimacy to those rioting in Sydney's streets over some stupid Youtube video). The adage about living and dying by the sword fits Osama bin Laden perfectly - He chose to live by terror. That his death should be shrouded in the state sponsored terror of Navy SEAL Team 6 is entirely appropriate, and complaining about the meaning assigned to Osama bin Laden in the wake of the hit is a bit like complaining that the term 'monster' overstates the wrongdoings of say, Stalin or Idi Amin or Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il after they've done all their killing and repressing and torture and hell-making.

Somewhere there is a gallery of history's great assholes; and there is no doubt in most people's minds that Osama bin Laden has earned his spot in that gallery, well and proper. The only quibble about that is whether he was actually some kind of CIA Black Ops operative blowback asshole as per the conspiracy theories; or whether he was an autochthonous Islamist asshole; but an asshole of historic proportion, I have no doubt that's what he was. There really isn't much mileage in arguing that Osama wasn't an asshole but a projection of the embittered American psyche. You'd have more success splitting his beard hairs at the bottom of the sea where he sleeps with the fishes.