Osama bin Laden: hi from Earth.
Hey there, Osama bin Laden. You left this planet twelve years ago after experiencing a brain hemorrhage. Yeah, some bullets cracked open your skull and hemorrhaged the heck out of your brain.
Thinking about recent events and how my country has changed since 9/11, I have this feeling that, wherever you are, you are laughing your ass off.
Speaking of that awful day in September, I am writing to you because the Mayor of 9/11, Rudy Giuliani himself, got ordered to pay $148 million in damages to two women he targeted with a racist smear campaign. He showed no remorse for telling lies that endangered these election workers’ lives and the court slammed him with a bigtime ruling. Bigly. Sadly, we don’t know how much money the plaintiffs will see. There’s a good chance Rudy’s buddies within the system will help drag out the settlement and create legal roadblocks.
Yeah…the country you attacked has gone downhill in the last twenty-two years. I wrote about it here, here, and here. The first post is about how privilege, rather than religion, guided your horrific plan. Thanks to a childhood of wealth and pomp, you knew what made rich white guys tick. The second post shares a moment from before the election of Barack Obama. A retired doctor told me that you, personally, sent Barack Obama, Sr. to the US in the early 1960s to, as he put it, “impregnate a white woman.” (You were quite the toddler, I guess.) The third post offers my thoughts about how al-Qaeda won that day and we Americans should just admit it.
9/11 wasn’t about killing a few thousand folks and knocking down buildings. Your people wanted to shatter the red, white, and blue veneer of exceptionalism that my country conjured up. You succeeded. Our fragility, you saw it. The USA’s desire to be a kakistocracy masquerading as a democracy — al-Qaeda revealed this truth.
After September 11th, rich white trash carved up the world’s goodwill into billions of pieces and fed it all steroids, then capitalized. Every last bit of sympathy from around the globe got squandered, with the earnings stashed in tax shelters.
Financials aside, your cohorts understood Right-wing blowhards and knew that a catastrophic strike would lead to disproportionate levels of retaliation from insecure men who fear being perceived as weaklings. While you most likely anticipated our gigantic missteps in Afghanistan, the 2003 Iraq invasion must have felt like an unexpected surprise.
And guess what? Twenty-two years and one month later, another terrorist group copied your 9/11 blueprint. They leveled a vicious, barbaric hit on a Right-wing government that, like the one running the early-2000s USA, sought to disenfranchise its citizenry and be the ruling minority. This government also ignored warnings from their intelligence communities about imminent violence. Just as the Bush administration did in the months leading up to September 11th, the Netanyahu administration in Israel failed to put two-and-two together. Afterward, Dubya and Bibi both bombed civilian targets to demonstrate that they were the alpha males.
People like you weaponize Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism because you see bigotry as nothing more than a tool to be exploited. Sadly, the rest of the world keeps proving you correct. Reports of hate crimes against innocent Jews and Muslims have skyrocketed.
Heading into 2024, our world is in a bad place, Osama.
But I see positivity as well.
I’ll write about that good news in part II of this post.
Also posted at my website. Earlier posts:
• Back to work.
• Operation Week Off.
• The era of anti-Semitic tightwaddery.
• NYC vacay. May, 2003.
• A gigantic thank you, from me to Rush Limbaugh.
• Open letter to a selfie of my drunk-ass self, taken on August 11th, 2001.
I also write fiction. I have two dark comedies available, Fearkiller (Volume 1) and Notes from Trillionaire Island: Fearkiller (Volume 2), as well as Revolutionizer Alpha, the first book in a sci-fi series. I also wrote a story about God. It was weird, but then I decided to make the story and its sequel free. And all of the sudden, it didn’t seem as weird. Writing about God is much less weird when you write about God without charging money for it.
