What the Death of Osama Bin Laden Means to Me

I’ve been trying to figure out the answer to that question ever since I saw the crowds of people gathering the evening of May 1, 2011 until 2am to celebrate the event in New York and Washington. What were these people so happy about? What was I so happy about? My wife, Lisa, took a much more somber stance on the whole ordeal—wondering whether or not retribution would follow or whether the wars would now end. I told her it felt to me like someone choosing not to cheer a victory for fear of some future defeat. My new daughter, Rachel, said she didn’t celebrate anyone’s death. That made sense to me, but I felt a need to explain to her why I felt this sense of relief…of joy.

The name Osama Bin Laden is linked in my mind to George W. Bush. It seems I had barely gotten over the Supreme (Court) insult that placed W in office over the rightful winner Al Gore before 9/11 happened and suddenly this man, who had hardly any respect in our country, became this hero to the media and the world. In some sense, Osama Bin Laden represented the day the world turned fully upside down.

The tilt began on election night 2000. Al Gore had been declared the winner of the election and there sat George Bush on TV saying quite comfortably, “Eh, eh, I would wouldn’t count Florida out yet.” Why not I wondered? His brother was the governor of Florida at the time and the chairperson of Bush’s election was the Secretary of State Kathleen Harris.  At the time I lived in Chicago, but I was considering a move to Fort Lauderdale. In Chicago the mayor at the time was Richard Daley Jr. His father had been the mayor for years earlier. Yet in all my time there, as dirty as Chicago politics was, I’d never witnessed anything so wonton as that declaration. “I wouldn’t count Florida out yet.”

The vote was close. Katheleen Harris then declared George W. Bush the winner. What? A recount was ordered. Votes were missing. Confusion. The Florida Supreme Court took up the matter. The justices there were liberals. They ordered a recount. Bush appealed it to the Federal Supreme Court, which promptly—against Bush’s own conservative “state’s rights” leanings—overturned the Florida court’s decision and stopped the recount that would have put Al Gore in office as the President of the United States. That was the tilt--the initial jolt that started the wobble. Something was wrong in the universe and we were stunned. Eight years of Clinton had left America in fantastic economic shape. We had a balanced budget and a surplus to begin paying down the huge national debt. Of course Al Gore got more votes. Bush had run Texas. Texas was number one in only one thing—death row executions. They were last in education. George Bush Jr. had been a drunk and drug addict until his forties. What the hell was going on?  The only business he’d run he’d been given by his daddy. Why did this man get any votes at all?

Then came Al Gore’s concession speech. Bizarre! Why was he conceding? Fight, damn it. Then Bush declared that the surplus he’d been handed by Clinton “is your money, so I’m going to give it back to you.” And he cut taxes. Everyone I knew at the time got $300 to $600 in a check. They were happy to get it too. It is what calmed their rage. Later, when I entered the mortgage business after I moved to California, I met people who’d not gotten $300 checks from that tax cut but who’d gotten $300,000 checks. And they'd taken those checks and bought collectible cars, fire trucks, and more cars and, of course, donated to republicans. The unnecessary and un-requested tax cut wiped out the surplus and set our nation back on the road we’d fought so hard to curtail after the Reagan/Bush I years.  The world tilted further.

Then Bush disappeared. He took vacation after vacation. He had nothing to do as President. He cleared brush. He golfed. 

Around that time, I had decided to change careers and move to California to become a screenwriter. While still in Chicago, I had producers calling to buy the script I’d written that placed in the Chesterfield Film Company’s Writer’s Film Project and a fresh new terrorism based action screenplay that was starting to attract some attention. So on August 31, 2001, I moved my family across the country to Burbank to start a new life.

Then came 9/11. And the world flipped completely upside down.

From that day forward the name Osama Bin Laden became synonymous with George W. Bush. Bush’s father had dealings in an investment venture called the Carlisle Group with other Bin Laden family members from Saudi Arabia. WHAT?! This is too much. But it was true.  Knowing Osama Bin Laden was in Afghanistan we promptly attacked there and… Iraq of course.  Sadaam Hussein, who had been good friends with Bush’s daddy until 1991, was suddenly the Butcher of Baghdad. Pictures of Sadaam smiling with Donald Rumsfield and Bush Sr. were surreal. Sadaam had Weapons of Mass Destruction even though the German inspector from the UN said he did not. Everyone said he did not. They had been destroyed as he said. There were no weapons—no reason to attack. But attack we did. Two wars in two middle-east nations—one small one to go after the guy who actually did something to us and one big one just for the hell of it. Politics became a 24 hour game and Fox News and every other News station became propaganda—beating the drums to wars that had nothing at all to do with 9/11.

I remember not being able to write for months. I was dazed and confused. I tried a comedy script. I rewrote other ones. Finally, I landed an agent right around the time Bush was running for re-election and I was certain we were finally going to correct the mistake of 2000. The Democrats ran a genuine war hero—not a draft dodger who didn’t understand war. Yet somehow, old men got on TV and lied about John Kerry. The term “swift boat” was everywhere. On top of that, it came out that Condaleeza Rice had brought a memo to Bush’s attention in the days before 9/11 entitled, “Osama Bin Laden determined to strike inside the US,” which detailed the plot to hijack commercial airplanes and fly them into buildings.  YET George Bush won reelection—this time by a substantial margin.  People everywhere claimed that Bush “had kept us safe” from another attack. It seemed they had completely forgotten who was president when we got attacked. And no one cared that we were all being spied on or that we could be arrested without reason and held indefinitely just because we were said to be "suspect." No one seemed to care that we’d been lied to about Iraq. No one cared that the news was lying to our faces and fearing to confront the president for fear of being thrown out of the Whitehouse press room or out of the embed truck. And no one cared that Bush was no longer saying he was going to get Bin Laden. He now began saying that he didn’t care much about him.

No Bin Laden. No end of war in sight. Crazy was ruling the world. It was everywhere. In the mortgage business, new loans started showing up. First there were “stated” loans—you just told the bank how much you made—no proof necessary. Then came “no income/no asset loans”—if your credit was good enough, you didn’t need money. But then came negative amortization loans. I remember the day the rep from World Savings came to our office to discuss the loans that didn’t even require the whole interest to be paid. You only paid 1% of a 7% or 8% loan as a minimum payment. The rest would simply go on the back end of your loan. After all, housing values were increasing $10,000 a month in Southern California, the two, three or four thousand that got tacked on to the back of the loan would easily be covered by the increase in value. In fact, you’d still be making six to eight thousand in equity growth. WOW! 

And why not? Everything else in the world was fucking nuts. Why not this too? Most of the guys in my office were in their twenties. I was in my early thirties. My direct manager was making $150,000 a month and there were others in the office on my level making $100,000. The two owners of the company were rumored to be making $1,000,000 a month. My best month I made $50,000. That’s because I was a screenwriter, remember? That was my part time job. Most of my days were spent going around to studios and pitching movies.

I thought the housing prices were crazy and that the same money that blew up the tech market (in which I’d lost a fortune in Chicago) was now in real estate. But when a house that was purchased for $400,000, given $25,000 in upgrades and resold two months later for $650,000 crossed my desk--and got financed on stated income--I knew I’d better jump on board and buy some property. Crazy was the way of the world. It took five years for me to buy into it, but buy I did.

Then reality came knocking. Stupidity had run its course. Those who understood the game had cashed in and gotten out. I was stuck with a $900,000 house that was now only worth $600,000. I was also stuck with a $620,000 house that was now only worth $450,000. The guys who owned our company did well. I saw one driving around in a $290,000 Ferrari just a few days ago. Most of us though… not so good.

But stupid wasn’t done yet. It was time to bail out the banks. They had been conned. Poor people had done them in. What?! Poor people? Really? No. Some poor people got homes, but most of the deals I saw were people with 700+ FICO scores buying way more house than they could afford with the idea they would refinance it or sell it later when it was worth $100,000 or $200,000 more. Actually, it wasn’t even that they were buying way more house than they could afford. My $900,000 house was only 2,000 square feet, three bedrooms and two baths. Anywhere else in the county it would have sold for $150,000—that’s all it cost to build—but the land was worth $750,000, or so everyone believed. People were just trying to buy decent homes that had the electrical systems to handle their new computers and what not. The cheap money simply inflated everything. But when your note is $6000/mo and you’re making $50,000/mo, it’s okay, right?

In 2006, when we first heard Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, someone suggested he might be the choice for 2008. I laughed—brilliant, yes, but too young…and black to boot. No way. Hillary. Hell, the GOP had a dynasty, right? Then came Huffington Post and blogs and organizing and somehow enough smart people came together that Obama won the nomination.

Now it was time for crazy to introduce their next champion—the gob-smacked stupidest of all stupidity stupid people I’d ever seen put seriously into the national political spotlight since Potatoe man Dan Quale—Sarah Palin. And I’ll be damned if it didn’t just keep getting nuttier and nuttier. She reads all newspapers. She sees Russia from Alaska. She’s for family values with a pregnant, unwed daughter that you can’t talk about. Yet Obama refused to play. When Obama’s pastor wasn’t Christian, Obama took the podium and gave us all an education in American racial history. We were impressed. Amazed. Educated. Still it continued. Obama’s a muslim. Obama’s a socialist…

But Obama won. The smart guy won. And he did what he said despite being opposed and lied on the whole way. He passed healthcare. And crazy, as Sarah Palin would say, reared its ugly head as people on Medicare (a government healthcare program) stood up to declare they wanted nothing to do with government healthcare. A new term emerged, “Astroturf”—fake protest paid for by GOP donors. And it turned out these were the same people behind stopping the recount in Florida. There was a genuine conspiracy afoot.  But healthcare passed. And dozens and dozens of other bills that made sense.

So we come to last few weeks. Huffington Post, began to get wacky with misleading headlines, then the once a reliable voice of viewpoints not owned by the corporate media sold out to AOL/Time/Warner—one of, if not the biggest media conglomerate in the world for $300M. Suddenly the GOP is on Huff Post. Meanwhile, the US media has given way to so much insanity that a game show host, that everyone knows has no plans whatsoever of actually running is the most respected candidate the GOP has for office.

Then came this past weekend. In one amazing fell swoop, President Obama released his long form birth certificate and then put Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and all the GOP in their place at the White House Correspondents Dinner. During his speech Obama joked that Donald handled all types of hard decisions on his game show—decisions that would “keep me awake at night”—like whether to fire Gary Busey, Meatloaf or Lil Jon.  Everyone laughed. The absurdity of Donald Trump suddenly became apparent. The lights had come on. The lights came on. The curtain was pulled back. And at that very moment President Obama was overseeing the killing of Osama Bin Laden. President Obama kept his eye on the ball. President Obama proved that smart people are the best people for running this nation.

I didn’t lose loved ones in 9/11. I’m grateful for that. I’m in sympathy with those who did. My life didn’t stop in the way that other people’s lives stopped. What stopped for me was a world of reasonable, intelligent understanding. What the death of Osama Bin Laden means to me is the end of the error of George W. Bush. That’s what I hope. Not just the end of the “era” of Bush, but the end of the “error” of Bush—an end to stupidity’s reign in our nation. 

When President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, and again when he concluded his speech at the correspondent’s dinner, he said,  “America has serious issues to deal with and we don’t have time for these games.” The next day, those serious issues were vividly revealed in the killing of Bin Laden. Now if we can stay serious for a while longer, and let the smart guy run the nation as he was elected to do, maybe we can fix a few more things.