Obama x Osama

I can’t get out of my mind a photograph from 40 years ago, one where the bin Laden family poses, joyous and united, on a vacation to Stockholm. They are leaning on a luxury car, parents, uncles, cousins, girls and boys, expensive jewelry and clothes, all happy Saudi millionaires enjoying the West; and, in the middle of them, Osama, smiling, euphoric even, in Western dress, wearing a Rolex. That happy little boy was going to turn into the commander of terror.

I don’t know what made Osama change so much, but I can’t believe in his pure religious fanaticism. Osama was much more than a follower of Allah. For us it is very easy to demonize him, rail against him, so that he becomes an abomination, a primitive behemoth who attacked our cherished civilized values. But no, Osama was rich and civilized too, and, as the writer Fernando Savater said, “a sinister triumph of sacrosanct private initiative. (…) He and his followers are only the expression of the evils that our own system engendered.”

It is not for us to analyze the traumas of Osama, draw a Freudian portrait of the man. Osama continues to be an enigma. A handsome man, a narcissist, his calm smile gave the impression that it was not of submission to God. He considered himself a founding prophet, and, what’s more, I don’t know if he really believed in God. Osama bin Laden was called by his fans the following names: “The Prince,” “The Emir,” “The Director” … and he went around in his robes, elegant, with eyes and smiles that were discreet and “Western.”

The English writer Martin Amis wrote a fantastic piece about the last days of Mohamed Atta, the leader of the September attack on the towers, and he disclosed that the engineer trained in Germany was not a believer and was not fighting for political reasons. Amis concluded that Mohamed Atta wanted to know the “unthinkable,” wanted to feel “the final moment,” the centimeters before the collision of the airplane with the tower. Atta wanted to live the unspeakable — a kind of metaphysical terrorism.

I think Osama is like that. … He not only wanted to kill thousands of innocent people to build with their bodies what he always dreamed of — a new Islamic caliphate, where he would, of course, be the sultan Harun al-Rashid. More than this, he wanted to interrupt, disrupt Western time. Islam does not want change, progress — it craves the immobile and the eternal. Osama lived outside of History, contemplating it with hatred and fascination from the desert eternity of his native land. Osama invaded Western history to demoralize it, ridicule our illusions of continuity, of logic, of finality. Osama attacked modernity with a very “modern” style. He brought being “out of touch with the times” to the start of the 21st century, which we thought would be comfortable, secure, controllable.

I was reading an essay by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben — “What is the Contemporary?” — and I found there some lines taken from Nietzsche’s second “Untimely Meditations”, perhaps his most appropriate text to define us today.

As Nietzsche says, his meditations are untimely, or rather, “out of touch with the times,” because he is trying “to see as a contemporary disgrace, infirmity, and defect something of which our age is justifiably proud, its historical culture.” Nietzsche locates the essence of modernity, of the contemporary, in a disconnection, in a dissociation from the present. The contemporary is a singular relation with time itself, which adheres and, at the same time, takes critical distance from it. Barthes also says there: “The contemporary is the untimely.”

Osama brought us this sudden, terrible awareness as an armed philosopher, a thinker-bomb. He messed up our international judicial order, our idea of compassion. He fractured ethics with which we supported ourselves. The history that we had such confidence once followed a linear, successive rhythm changed its countenance. Facts lost their solidity — we only have hopes and expectations today. He brought back what was missing in the West since the start of the old War: fear, the pressure of death that walked hidden, sublimated in things like films and hamburgers.

Osama made his act resemble a natural catastrophe, like an earthquake. And the strangest thing is that after it, everything got worse, like a vengeful alliance of Allah with nature. Osama fascinates us also because he is a “subject of history,” as Marxists used to say.

But, at the base of such fanaticism and religious dreams, there was, I believe, an immense vanity. Osama wanted to be a celebrity, and not only in the East. He succumbed to the vanity of being a superstar.

In that photo in Sweden (or Denmark?), there in his happy smile, in his gold watch, was the basis of his narcissistic project.

He did not have the sad and dirty humility of common fanatics; he did not want to grovel on the ground with his bottom up in the direction of Mecca.

He wanted to parade his elegance and his beautiful lips and smooth, dyed beard.

He felt himself a veritable Muhammad, justifiably so, as never had a single man changed the world so much, with nothing, with the weapons of the West. He inaugurated the “Age of Horrorism,” as Martin Amis named it and bequeathed us the image of the towers falling for all eternity. He set the stage for one of the most notable moments of the century, like the storming of the Bastille, the fall of the Roman Empire, and so forth. … Osama is different than Gadhafi or Assad. He was not after political power; he wanted to reign alone over the “nothing” he created.

It was an aesthetic “nothing,” the annulment of everything that was not his project, like the aesthetic dream of Hitler for the millennium and, like him, totalitarian, anti-individualist (for others) and irrational.

Obama understood along with Osama that he had to do something that was also incomprehensible. He was brutal with Islamists, who now claim that he should have been more “ethical” and Western. Obama copied Osama and was “out of touch with the times,” cruel and implacable. And, in my opinion, he did very well, because his transgressive decision heralds a thousand advances for us, most importantly to stop the Neocons returning to power. Have you tried imagining Newt Gingrich as president? In the middle of a history turned upside down, in a perplexed world without solutions, this by itself justifies the act of Obama.