Most Wanted, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #126

May 4, 2011 Arthur Tebbel 6 Comments

Dear Art,
What a week I had.  Not really I guess, but a hell of a Sunday night.  A team of US Special Forces killed me in a Pakistani suburb.  I won’t mince words because I’m dead and I really don’t have the time, are things cool between us now?
Osama bin Laden, Dead Guy

OBL,
No, they really aren’t.  The 9/11 attacks were a really terrible thing to go through for anyone.  That is especially true for a 17 year-old kid in a high school six blocks away.  A lot of people have a variety of answers to the question “when did your childhood end?” but for my classmates and I we can point to one specific instance and that was a really fucked up thing to do.  I had a lot of reasons to move to LA but the one I very rarely talk about is how I couldn’t bear to go outside during clear fall days.  There might not be a lot of comedy in this one folks, you might want to punch out and come back next week.

If you had asked me during late 2001 if your death would make me feel better I probably would have said yes.  And while I’m ashamed to admit that your death did kind of get me jazzed it really doesn’t change anything.  You were a symbol.  You were a symbol back then when you took sole credit for this massive terrorist organization.  You’re a symbol now when we pretend that without you Muslim extremism is over.  No amount of death was ever going to undo what happened.  Whether it was all those soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan or you in a million dollar house in the suburbs.  People in New York and DC threw some street parties (and in LA, which was strangely underreported) and by Monday morning people were back to talking about how egocentric the President is and how Donald Trump is a skyscraper-sized douche.

At the risk of sounding like I’m supporting you I would like to call out President Obama and a legion of people in the media and on the Internet for calling what happened to you “justice.”  It wasn’t that.  It was vengeance.  We as a society have decided what justice means and it involves things like trials and juries.  I used an important word there though, society.  You spent decades deciding that society was not for you.  That you wanted to form a pseudo-governmental body and mass murder people, that it was better to throw rocks at perceived glass houses.  You discarded society and, with it, the right to justice.  You were killed in a slightly nicer part of a shitty country while using your wife as a human shield.  That sounds about right to me.  Enjoy oblivion you son of a bitch.