Good people can argue about all this. But what's not in dispute is that the past decade or two has dropped America into a giant economic hole and put Americans into a general state of fear and anxiety. You see it disaggregated into ones and twos everywhere as people's expectations are dashed, jobs are lost and homes are foreclosed on.
We are a nation that likes to see itself as "exceptional," and we suffer from a concomitant unwillingness to face hard truths, which are no fun and suggest we may not be so exceptional after all. In this condition, citizens have become reliant for comfort on symbols; we're all vulnerable to their power. President Reagan understood this better than most, and he manipulated Americans with symbols like a master. Move to 2011, and there is nothing more symbolically powerful than the focused competence of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Against the backdrop of the frightening mess we're in, it's a symbol that really works.
Who could blame an American for having a weakness for such a well-planned, well-executed and timely revenge killing of the greatest boogie-man in modern US history? You'd have to be an extraordinary individual -- or an anti-war leftist -- not to be sucked in by all this.
Adults and children across the land are out in the streets pumping their fists in the air screaming, "USA! USA! USA!" My favorite was a You Tube of a pot-bellied cracker roaring toward the camera in an open field, with one hand on the wheel of his all-terrain-vehicle that featured a huge American flag on the back, and the other shooting an automatic pistol into the air as he screamed "USA! USA! USA!"
The trouble is, while highly competent focused killings like that of bin Laden may feel good, they do nothing to address the worsening consequences of all the incompetent and destructive decisions that preceded it and make it so powerful.
The Press as Military Camp Followers
One of the more amazing journalistic exhibitions was MSNBC's Chris Matthews of "Hardball," who for two days following the raid seemed like a teenage girl swooning over Ringo Starr. This is a guy normally completely uninterested in our wars, preferring to follow the stats and keep score of the domestic political game.
The New York Times put the following piece of emotional prose in paragraph four of its first-day, front-page, above-the-fold news story of the killing:
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