Cut the head off the snake and find it's a hydra?

Negativity isn't normally what I set out to broadcast to people, honest. Personal pessimism, maybe, but negativity isn't my default setting. I just try to point out the glaring flaws in a lot of peoples' celebrations sometimes, with a touch of what I like to call common sense.

I should note, before I go any further, that I am not talking about, nor will I mention again, the mass hysteria with which 24-hour rolling news would convince us the nation was gripped in the run up to Friday. Most people don't care and were sick of it, so I'm going to leave it well alone.



This morning I awoke, having spent last night sat in a pub which advertised a quiz (there was no quiz), watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead and my perennial favourite Stephen King film Misery and then spending hours writing because I was unable to sleep, in a sort of fuzzy haze. My stereo alarm was blaring at me at the regular time of 6:30 despite being on a volume of 5, and the grey dawn filtering through my skylight was burning into my corneas. It was that sort of stumbling, fumbling wake-up, until I heard a news story which snapped me right into conciousness and alert attentiveness.

Osama Bin Laden (not to be confused with one of the perpetrators of his downfall, President Obama- I'm looking at you, Fox News) has died after an American military operation in Pakistan. People are happy with this, as they should be, it's a good day for symbols of hope, a blow has undoubtedly been dealt to the organisation he founded and then operated as head of for over twenty years, yadda yadda yadda.



I'm as willing as the next guy to say that this is a good thing. It's great that with a certain amount of intel there was an operation which moved from the hills of Afghanistan to another country and eventually found him. However, announcing so quickly that he has been "buried at sea" may not have been the wisest of moves given how most of the world users of the internet, about 70%, part-time as conspiracy theorists and will make much of the apparent lack of a body as proof.

Then there's the Americans themselves, and the reflection of their unbridled celebration and frenzy which the Brits are showing on that oh-so-exceptional measure of public feeling, Facebook. Within minutes of the news breaking, the New Yorkers surrounded the 9/11 site and have been there since in some sort of hysterical vigil. British students and other people on the social networking site previously mentioned have also "gone mental", devoting statuses and posting pictures to illustrate that Bin Laden's death is the greatest victory we (because every keyboard activist is actually on the frontline of SWAT ops, dontchaknow) could have achieved.

Perspective may be necessary here, but I am correct in thinking Bin Laden is one man, aren't I? A man who was small enough to be believed to be hiding in caves, even though he was actually in a military style compound. A man who couldn't afford a decent DVD or Blu-ray recording facility so sent VCR recordings. And he has probably not left the Afghan/ Pakistan region. He hasn't, for example, visited England, or America, where his atrocities were carried out. He operated as the head of the organisation, certainly, but how directly? Was every plan approved by him? In the same way that there is doubt among historians and people who read all the material surrounding the Final Solution as to how much of the plan was Hitler's idea, action and order, is killing Bin Laden and still being surrounded by student cells, a minority of militant mosques and an interwoven culture of terrorism hiding around the world really as huge a day as it is being made out to be?



There are others, second-in-commands, hundreds of people who subscribe to the Al-Qaeda mantra and believe in that cause. The head, in this case, was relatively small, and the remaining body of the snake is huge and possibly writhing violently in metaphorical pain. What will it hit out at blindly, or indeed calmly?

At the risk of falling into the trap of sounding like a fear-mongering Fox News man, and at the risk of sounding as exaggerated as Glen Beck in particular, I just think we should watch out. The country apparently had its much needed spirit-/moral-boost this weekend when some vows were made by two people the population had never before cared about. Adding the death of a leader who can be easily replaced to that with exaggerated ideas of what it will actually achieve is not on.