the problem with lex talionis

Music: Pearl Jam: Ten (1991)

Sitting outside at a café in my old, high-school days haunt, Little Five Points, I can barely hear the piped in Pearl Jam, no doubt a celebration of its twentieth year. “You can move with that thing,” says a homeless man to me passing by. I don’t know what he’s referring to, perhaps the laptop?

Inside the café grabbing my drink, television screens blared the “Ding Dong” song, This American House has landed on Osama, curling his toes and sending him into the deep green sea---apparently an insult to militant Muslims everywhere and a measure to prevent the inevitable Afghani musical to come, Wicked II: Osama Bugaloo.

I awoke this morning to an invitation to a happy hour, apparently organized by graduate students: “This is a Big Fucking Deal Happy Hour,” with the advisory, “obviously, we need a drink, and a debriefing. In that order. Come to hole and we can chat boots in the ass--the american way, as well as implications for our work.” Huh. A debriefing and discussion is definitely in order, but I don’t know if a celebration is to be had. I cannot attend anyway, emerging from mourning with my family here many states away.

I have always had a problem with “an eye for an eye,” which equates to what I would call “dirty justice,” otherwise known as “hard ball.” When I head the news that Bin Laden was given a “sea burial”---which means, of course, he was rather unceremoniously dumped in the ocean---I thought it was so odd, given that Saddam was brought to justice and afforded every international right available to him. The gesture made with Hussein was no doubt costly and highly controversial, but it at least communicated to the world that the West was not above the law---the rule of law, which amounts to the promise of one’s word. The rule of law is perhaps the most noble achievement of human kind, and stands in civil distinction from lex talionis.

The assassination of Osama itself is a thorny issue, and I’ll need to think more about it. The celebration of the assassination, however, is morally problematic. Such a celebration plays into the rhetoric of monstrosity, a patterned discourse rooted in a soul-deep habit of scapegoatism that functions by projecting personal weakness and misdeeds onto some monstrous other for absolution. The ticker-lines that read, “Osama is Dead; Justice is Done” is not the justice of the rule of law, but the justice of “an eye for an eye,” the justice of righteousness and vengeance, not the justice of the rule of law. No one that I know would defend what Bin Laden has done, or his beliefs, or his actions. Nevertheless, he was a human being, not a supernatural monster, and by treating him like a monster we are no better that haters who kill other human beings by stripping them of their humanity.

I don’t mean to be self-righteous here. I am sad. I am sad to see the celebration of assassination. I would have been a happier man had Osama been apprehended and brought to justice, the justice of the rule of law. We should not celebrate vengeance. “Victory, not Vengeance,” is the motto of a synth-pop band I like; I think that would have been motto for today (and, you can dance to it).