‘Closure’: Americans find comfort in clear ending

A note is left at the Sep­tem­ber 11th Memo­r­ial at Exchange Place in Jer­sey City, N.J. on Mon­day, May 2, that reads “He’s Finally Dead. May 1, 2011.” (AP Photo | Pamela Suchy)

TED ANTHONY

AP National Writer

To surf Amer­i­can air­waves, to read Amer­i­can com­ments on the Inter­net by the thou­sands, to walk Amer­i­can streets on the day after Osama bin Laden’s aston­ish­ing demise meant you’d almost cer­tainly hear some vari­a­tion of a sin­gle telling word: “closure.”

As in end­ing. As in end of story — at least, the pri­mary story arc of Osama bin Laden, which for most Amer­i­cans began in the east­ern United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and ended in Pak­istan in the early moments of May 2, 2011, in one of the most dra­matic undo­ings imaginable.

While Amer­i­cans rev­eled in the demise of global terrorism’s most pub­lic face, the pre­vail­ing mood was unsur­pris­ing for the cul­ture that pro­duced Hol­ly­wood: After so many years of uncer­tainty and mass aggra­va­tion over no res­o­lu­tion at all, here, finally, was some kind of coher­ent ending.

Lis­ten to Repub­li­can Rep. Peter King, one of many whose sat­is­fac­tion in the hours after bin Laden’s death focused on res­o­lu­tion and wrap-up. Of the 9/11 vic­tims’ fam­i­lies, he said this: “Now they can finally have some sense of clo­sure and some sense of justice.”

Or Mike Low of Batesville, Ark., whose flight atten­dant daugh­ter died aboard Amer­i­can Air­lines Flight 11: “It cer­tainly brings an end­ing to a major quest for all of us.”

Or Lisa Ramaci, cel­e­brat­ing early Mon­day in New York’s streets, where the champagne-and-goodbye-chants atmos­phere at times resem­bled that of a major pro sports vic­tory: “We had this 10 years of frus­tra­tion just build­ing and build­ing, want­ing this guy dead, and now he is.”

Surely one man’s erad­i­ca­tion can­not off­set sur­vivors’ years of pain. But the Amer­i­can hunger for defin­i­tive Hol­ly­wood end­ings is bound­less — to the point where we grow deeply irri­tated if some­thing seems too open-ended. The quick-cut, sound-bite cul­ture so frus­trat­ing to politi­cians and other lead­ers pro­duces an appetite for res­o­lu­tion that’s hard to satisfy.

Add to that the endur­ing, hor­rific echoes of 9/11 and two pro­tracted wars that have no dis­cernible end­points in sight, and you have a pop­u­lace primed to applaud the end of a major chap­ter, even if it isn’t unfet­tered victory.

Part of it is the nature of U.S. war­fare in recent decades. Amer­i­cans today are as likely to fight wars against amor­phous ene­mies as they are nation-states. Because of that, con­flicts tend to lack dis­tinct end­ings or for­mal sur­ren­ders like a York­town or an Appo­mat­tox — events that say, “Hey, the war’s over.”

There was no Treaty of Ver­sailles with Sad­dam Hus­sein, and cer­tainly no one in Amer­ica expects ever to have a V-E Day or V-J Day with al-Qaida. In mod­ern U.S.-backed war­fare, the big, solemn, iden­ti­fi­able end­ing is vir­tu­ally obso­lete. So a major mile­stone like bin Laden’s death is, for the United States, a cause for buoy­ancy in a frus­trat­ingly unre­solved conflict.

That’s how Demo­c­ra­tic Sen. Charles Schumer cast it. “The war on ter­ror is not over,” he said Mon­day on MSNBC, “but maybe this was the Saratoga or the Get­tys­burg where things turned.”

But there’s some­thing else at play, too. Bin Laden him­self was the clos­est thing the mod­ern world had to a James Bond-style supervil­lain — some­one who, to hun­dreds of mil­lions of West­ern­ers, was truly, mono­chro­mat­i­cally dastardly.

Owen Gleiber­man, writ­ing on Enter­tain­ment Weekly’s web­site, iden­ti­fied it imme­di­ately in a piece called “Say Good­night to the Bad Guy.”

“That per­cep­tion of 9/11 as big-screen-action-disaster-gone-real, wide­spread though it was, seemed rather inde­fen­si­ble at the time because to say it, or even to think it, risked triv­i­al­iz­ing the dev­as­ta­tion,” Gleiber­man wrote.

“Yet 9/11, there’s almost no deny­ing it, did live in our minds like a giant motion pic­ture,” he wrote, “and part of what made it so wasn’t sim­ply the vast­ness, the sheer ter­ri­fy­ing spec­ta­cle, of the tragedy. It was that behind it lay a vil­lain of nearly mytho­log­i­cal proportion.”

And now we get to the heart of the mat­ter. Could it be that, for a wor­ried and weary nation, such a soul-wrenching event as 9/11 required an appro­pri­ately cat­a­clysmic res­o­lu­tion for the man who mas­ter­minded it? Would a bomb from the air — or, worse, a rev­e­la­tion years later that he had died — have been as satisfying?

Would a less sharply defined bin Laden death have allowed for the jubi­lant sum­mon­ing of Amer­i­can res­olute­ness that was being bandied about so freely Mon­day from the White House to the streets of New York City and Washington?

When you take in the words that peo­ple in Amer­ica used Mon­day — “emo­tion­ally held hostage,” ”finally,” ”a sym­bol,” ”an impor­tant mile­stone” — you real­ize what the end­ing of bin Laden means right here, right now: It gives Amer­i­cans some­thing to pin their feel­ings on, to carry with us when we say, “What has all this meant?”

It means, for now, that one of the key demands of a story — that some­thing actu­ally hap­pens that means some­thing — has just unfolded before our eyes. The fact that the man­ner of bin Laden’s death might have fit per­fectly into a pre-governor Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger movie is not incidental.

For the moment, Amer­i­cans have our res­o­lu­tion — some­thing to pin our feel­ings on. We have all-important clo­sure, even though — in the real, messier, non-cinematic world — the coun­try of big end­ings still must wake up tomor­row and fight another day.

Posted by AP News on May 4 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.