Ignorant Victory

Illuminatus: My god, there's so much bin Laden death porn, my hands have grown misshapen and ill from use. From “USA USA" to "O, to celebrate the death is so wrong, I do not because I'm drowning in shit!"

pH: If we killed the fucking king, I'd celebrate. If they hung up Mubarak, I'd toast. Al-Assad. Sarkozy. Marine Le Pen. George W. Bush. I'd drink to those cowards. They are actual oppressors.

Illuminatus: Bin Laden's just a whore-killing pimp.

pH: Bingo. If some one lost a family member on 9/11, the USS Cole, in the embassies, they have their right to revenge. I applaud their pleasure. The rest are a bunch of frat boys and lumpens one lay away from fascism.

Illuminatus: Sex nationalism lives!

pH: The doctrine of terror, the doctrine of symbolic exchange, the doctrine of capitalism, from Robespierre to bin Laden, Thiers to W: all deaths are equal when considered only as spectacle. America kills Arabs, so Arabs kill Americans. Never mind the actual role any empirical individual plays (or doesn’t) in the perpetuation of systematic violence. Never mind whether it's 3,000 Americans or 100,000 Iraqis (and never mind that they’re Iraqis). The actual numbers don’t matter, only the images. On the one hand, who needs a mountain of corpses, when just one image of destruction can be infinitely reproduced? On the other: no matter how many people you kill, you’ll never be able to blot out that one hideous face.

Illuminatus: This is justice, but it's the justice of war, which is terrible.

pH: What is justice? It is legitimate violence. What if you could separate the legitimacy from the actual violence? Then it's all legitimate.

Illuminatus: Lust of fear!

pH: We made, if not bin Laden, the swamp that bred him. We've cleaned up one particularly vicious death gator. So what. All I feel is shame.

Illuminatus: I don't particularly feel anything.