No More Home Videos

It's a little bit surreal forcing yourself through tiredness, being directed to rolling news channels and watching a live address from the American president, so I guess it's just as well people don't capture and kill the world's most wanted terrorist leader every day. Yep, no more home videos from Osama bin Laden in this lifetime. What seems to be even more surreal is how seriously the Americans are taking this though. Al-Qaeda didn't just attack them; people were brutally taken out of existence in Kenya, Yemen, Madrid, even London (if you can be bothered to remember as far back as July 2005), but those streets are just normal today. I'm assuming that anyway since there's no media coverage of crowds around the London Underground. And why are there no crowds out in London? Because it's a fucking bank holiday, that's why! People don't want to spend this precious day off getting stuck in a mass crowd in the streets. Christ, it's bad enough dealing with the morning commute of any other day. That, plus we're all "mass-crowd"ed out from the Regal Union. The Americans are having their own mass gathering of Royal Wedding proportions on the streets today, though, just so they don't feel left out this long weekend, I guess.

Of course, Americans don't do things by halves. When they celebrate something, they go the whole hog and bring out the flags, the cameras and the mob mentality. Oh, and that mind-grating chant of "U-S-A" over and over, and I can't help feeling that without the Pakistani intelligence they received, they wouldn't even be celebrating today in the first place. If anything, they need to modify that tri-syllabled "U-S-A" chant to include "Pa-ki-stan", while Michael Jackson leads the afterlife celebratory movement with "This-is-it" and Janice from Friends shouts "Oh-my-God".

Nevertheless, I can't help feeling all this celebration will horribly backfire looking at the bigger picture. I mean, this man was the head of a terrorist organisation but all he really did is give the orders and make rubbish videos. Meanwhile, it was the groups of followers who were the ones to force their way into cockpits and kit themselves up with self-explosives. Those followers are still alive and I'm guessing they's gonna be reet pissed off a bit that their leader's been killed. If the Americans had captured bin Laden alive, he'd at least be in exile or whatever (I'm not that clever with politics), but the fact that they've killed him outright and declared his corpse to the world means there ain't no going back on it now. I'm all for justice and peace and everything, but I can't see this being the end; if anything, this is a horrible new beginning.

Going back to the celebrations in Washington and New York, I can't help feeling the Americans are drawing far too much attention to themselves and practically just asking for trouble, but right now they're acting too wrapped up in their own bubble to realise that even though the leader's gone, there are still followers and, if anything, they'll be wanting to avenge his death. Even though in the long run, what we essentially have is a small organisation vs. the rest of the world in the humanity stakes, we've seen what those guys are capable of doing to us "rest of the world" folks and I'm just hoping that should there be a 'next time', it won't be as catastrophic as previous attacks.

Osama bin Laden's life may be over, but there's a scarily massive potential for a whole new wave of destruction beginning. In other words, America: CALM THE FUCK DOWN!