I found it pretty disconcerting to watch the jubilation over Osama bin Laden’s death last week. In the first place, it just seemed all wrong—more like the reaction you’d expect to a football victory than a serious world event, especially one that began in horror and whose human and financial costs have since reached yet more unfathomable heights. One does not dance on graves, certainly not in a majority Christian country, in which “Love your enemy” is common enough a line that even a liberal and godless Jew like myself know it.
In the second place, I was uncomfortable because once again I felt like a complete alien, missing what was so obvious to everyone else, unable to give even a small yelp in a culture that often expresses itself in wahoos! and babys! What a relief, then, to see, over the course of the week that followed, that for once I wasn’t the only one. Numerous commentators, from across the spectrum, were disappointed as well. Not only those who question the legality of assassination found the tone all wrong. Many of those who had lost loved ones on 9/11 and in the wars since found little joy, even as they might have some “closure.” I was particularly moved by this one by Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband died in the towers.
Most interesting, though, is recognition that one of the major axes dividing celebrants from more sober observers is that of generation. To be sure, who else besides college students—and college students a few blocks from the White House—would assemble for a party at midnight on a Sunday (particularly given the desire for diversion during exam week!)? We also know from extensive research, particularly that of Howard Schuman and colleagues, that the age at which an event is experienced is a major determinant of collective memory. For Schuman, following in the tradition of Karl Mannheim, however, the critical age for definitive experiences is early adulthood. Mature enough to understand events, but not yet set in identities to withstand their disturbing effects as much as older people, young adulthood is the time when shared experiences constitute generations.
However, the celebrants were, in many ways, too young on 9/11. This is why some of the common themes younger commentators have drawn on to explain the reaction is particularly disturbing, especially to codgers-in-waiting like myself. For instance, in a Washington Post blog entry, Alexandra Petri explained: “Osama is our Voldemort. He’s our Emperor Palpatine. He is the Face of Evil, a mythical holdover from when we were too young to realize that evil has no face.”
To be sure, Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler just as Superman was designed to vanquish him. Nevertheless, these were reactions to, rather than frames for, our understanding of evil. Petri may be right that some of the college students who hit the streets shouting USA! USA! were viewing events through the lens of Star Wars and Harry Potter. These were frames they acquired at about the same time they experienced 9/11. Those who are college students today were too young in 2001 to make a sharp distinction between the real and the fantastic; they were still equally, or even more, scared by the movies as by the news, with which they didn’t have much experience.
Nevertheless, it is concerning that, ten years later, many still do not seem to have learned the distinction. One could suppose it is a good thing that Voldemort and Palpatine, rather than Hitler and Pol Pot or Son of Sam, are the obvious frames for today’s college students—it means the losses and traumas were distant enough at the time to be childhood fantasies. For those of us who rushed to school to pick up these same creatures on that clear September morning and to hold them close all day while we slipped into the other room to view the horror, however, nothing about this will ever be a fantasy, and Osama will never be a comic book villain. So, I don’t feel the same urge to cheer as I did when I first saw Star Wars as a teenager, or again 30 years later with my kids. I guess we can hope that today’s college students—shaped as much by the Empire and Hogwarts as by televised war, never learn the difference the hard way. Then again, many in their cohort who aren’t in college today because they are in the military already have. Reasonable politics depends on their sobriety and realism.
Place also matters here. The “USA!USA!” college students didn’t shout and celebrate in an in-the-middle-of-nowhere town in Alaska but in front of the White House. A variety of audiences amplify their representativeness of their generation (see this TIME picture: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2069455,00.html). How many young college students really celebrate this killing or just say “okay, finally” or “who cares?” Can they just represent those sophomores from George Washington University (or whatever university 5 to 20 miles away from the White House)? Although I believe generation is certainly an important factor, which I am preparing a research paper on this, I believe Mannheim’s another concept “generation unit” might be more interesting to think about the issue. In other words, “USA!USA!” shouters and country boys in Nebraska belong to the same generation but have quite different experiences of events that are most meaningful to them. Even if they watch the same Harry Potter(s), they might have different ways of framing their mental schema.