Remember Where You Were

I was at the office on a slow Monday afternoon when the news broke of Osama bin Laden's death. More importantly, I was on Twitter.

My Twitter feed is full of reporters, pundits, newsroom staffers, bloggers and everyday political wonks, so when the White House announced that the President was making a statement with almost no warning we all dropped what we were doing and started speculating. I was one of the people who guessed it had something to do with Libya. Others thought it might be the tornadoes in Alabama – but why wait until late on a Sunday night in the US to speak about that? Just to interrupt Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” on TV, someone joked. We all laughed and retweeted it.

Then we heard it had something to do about national security. “Gaddafi stepping down? Bin Laden dead?” a blogger guessed, and I replied “Wouldn’t that last one be something.”

I saw the first official rumours a few minutes later, from reporters at the New York Times. It was another ten minutes before the major TV networks announced the news and another half-hour before the President finally spoke, but online the astonished reactions were coming in so fast it was hard to keep up. Twitter later reported that comments about bin Laden hit an average of 3,440 tweets per second.

Rachel Maddow was in Washington DC and hurried over to join the crowd forming in front of the White House. “Guy with giant US flag just arriving – yelling 'Winning!! Winning!!'" she tweeted from her phone. Later, “I didn’t even know there were American flag socks.” A lot of us were reacting like that, making flippant remarks about patriotism (“America, Fuck Yeah!”) and mocking the newscasters (is it true that CNN’s John King was drunk?).

The jokes and celebrations are now being criticised as jingoistic – a “dumb, sporting-event type reaction ... idiotic” is the way The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill put it. I’m sure some of them were, but most of the time it didn’t seem that way to me. Beneath all the sarcasm and levity I almost felt like I needed to lie down. I’ve been emotionally worn out for the last ten years waiting for this to happen. We need to step back and have a serious conversation now, but I can’t bring myself to condemn the crude reactions of that evening. It’s been too long, and we’ve screwed up too many times.