My first staring contest with the seventh Bin Laden son was on a wintry night in the desert in southern Jordan. Snow was occasionally falling, a rarity for those parts, and I had been loosely chatting with a taxi cab driver in Arabic. In the passenger seat was a man, dressed somewhat traditionally and in a way that suggested he was a cleric or a Muslim religious figure. I was twenty, fairly young, and had been told that despite what I had been told, I shouldn't feign a Canadian nationality abroad as it wasn't necessary. But for those ten minutes I doubted it. While trying to have a normal conversation with the driver and the strange man in the middle of a desert at 11:00 PM at night, I was staring a familiar figure. Below, in Arabic, were a list of crimes and polemic against the country I had just admitted I was from. I asked my girlfriend if she saw what I saw, and we remained on the edge of our seat.
That driver dropped us off in the hotel and stayed with us until the hotel reception clerk came and got us a room. Never saw him again. Two weeks before, at the Turkish-Syrian border, a man approached us in a jolly manner and when he found out that we were Americans; he pointed out that he was a Tunisian by the name of Osama, the first I had met in my life and not the last. The name does reek pungent to many, but a variant and uncommon word for a "lion," it is just merely a name. Who knows what its future is; the only Adolfs you'll meet nowadays are Icelanders because Germans have rejected that name and others for past connections.
His picture was occasionally viewable in some more village/rural areas of the Middle East. You'd certainly see more of Saddam Hussein's face and Yasir Arafat's, even though it was sometimes in odd kitschy ways (Saddam Hussein tire covers were big in Yemen). Yes, it was odd to see pictures of controversial figures, though not ubiquitous-Hussein's face certainly wouldn't be seen in Syria, where the second Ba'ath party still is in power. A leader's picture was everywhere in his country-and there was a certain tragicomic element to it. Bashar Al-As'ad, president of Syria, who's currently facing violent demonstrations in his own country, was enshrined in a gold-rimmed heart on top of a blue tissue box surrounded by other pink and red hearts cluttering the box. Experiments with then-developing Photoshop technology sometimes produced chaotic results...a Pizza Hut in Aden where a picture promoting the (so he claims) soon to resign president showed him standing over the Pizza Hut. Given the fact that the way the picture was put together, the (yes, famously) petite president was made a menacing 25-meter tall figure, Godzilla the Arab president attacking a random lackluster US chain restaurant.
In the past few paragraphs, I haven't really mentioned much about Bin Laden. Well, he didn't come up too often. Arab states are states fraught with problems of their own, insecurities of their own, and I think a realization of that, which should by now be fairly obvious with the various revolutions, minimalizes the impact Bin Laden has had over the past ten years. Living in the United States, he can seem monstrous, powerful, and became unfortunately representative of Arabs at least in looks, which more or less ended up in the harassment of the US Sikh populations (most civilian Arabs do not cover their heads and dress in relatively Western fashions).
Bin Laden's death is not the most unwelcome thing for the US. Positive stories have been thin over the past couple years. I feel strange as I watch over news stories showing my countrymen cheering and shouting out the famous "USA! USA! USA!" chant. A single death isn't a victory, more a placebo which tastes kind of like victory, but I suppose it isn't the worst thing. Unfortunately, when I moved to Argentina, I brought no US flags or flag shirts or flag track pants (I personally find it disrespectful to the flag to wear it on my ass, so take that, "patriots"). If anything, with regards to the psyche of the US and the Arab world, I think that when you attempt to weigh the issues of: did we help ourselves more or did we do meaningful damage to Al-Qaeda, the first is certainly true. If nothing else, we have eliminated practically every "evil" Arab that most people from the US have ever heard of, and hopefully the negative and unfair associations between Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden and others will cease. My countrymen are only left with Kim Jong-Il, so hopefully positive things can come of this, in a time when the Arab world is at its most chaotic.
I visited Wadi Do'an, the ancestral home of the Bin Ladens, and the neighboring Wadi Hadhramut, in Yemen, some four years ago. It's an unreal setting that is a place I've been fortunate to visit, given the difficulty of going to Yemen, crossing the country from west to east, and being in Yemen at a time when there isn't chaos. It's a beautiful valley of barren desert mountains and palm trees, weirdly filled with Indonesians and Malaysians (there's a religious school in one of the towns). The most bizarre thing is watching darkness fall and the choice illumination of villages that haven't changed much since the sixteenth century: kms and kms of street lights, placed very close together, on a brilliantly asphalted road. This generous donation is one of a few, including the only traffic light in the nation, that was made by Saudi families like the Bin Ladens.
Everybody will reflect on where they were during September 11th. I was in class and thought somebody was joking when they said the World Trade Center was attacked (there are a lot of tall buildings in the US, it just seemed unlikely that it happened twice). Classrooms were turned onto news channels, there were tears. But in the end, for me, for many, life went on, and it's more important where I've been since September 11 and where I will be. We remain in power over the ability to choose our own destinies, destinations, and adventures, and that in itself is a simple victory over Bin Laden and his ilk.
