It may have come as a surprise when Osama bin Laden was finally killed, but nearly everything that followed has gone pretty much as you would have expected.
The nation celebrated. The president got a bump in the polls. The rushed White House-supplied narrative turned out to be flawed, because someone always needs to make the story better. (Bin Laden was a bad enough guy without the added — and incorrect — detail that he had used a human shield.)
It took a day for the late-night comics to weigh in. It took even less time for the politicians, some of whom were nearly as funny. For example, Sarah Palin couldn’t quite bring herself to credit Barack Obama by name. Meanwhile, David Koch, the anti-Obama billionaire, told New York magazine that Obama deserved no credit at all. As Jon Stewart would say, Abbottabad, abbottabing.
There were other expected turns. The morality of political assassination got a little play. The question of torture returned, with Bush defenders claiming bin Laden wouldn’t have been caught without some serious Gitmo-enhanced interrogation. If that’s true, and the waterboarders got the critical information six or seven years ago, it’s fair to wonder why they didn’t they catch bin Laden then.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush decided not to join Obama at ground zero Thursday, leading people to wonder if he felt snubbed by Obama or whether Bush was, in fact, the one doing the snubbing. It’s all a matter of endless speculation, because that’s what we do.
When Obama announced bin Laden’s death, he asked for a return to the spirit of 9/11, but that’s long ago, and the death of bin Laden doesn’t change that. The nature of the media beast demands that the narrative keeps moving, that sides must be chosen, that torture defender John Yoo would think it’s time to defend torture again.
But if there’s a surprise, it’s how the events have become framed — and maybe even defined — by two photographs, one we’ve seen and one we haven’t. They not only tell us something about the people involved, but also about how we react to them.
The first, of course, is the bin Laden corpse photo, which Obama has decided not to release. My guess it will come out eventually in our WikiLeaks world, but that’s another story. Obama said releasing it would be like a victory lap or spiking the football.
While I understand the notion, I don’t agree with it. I’m for full disclosure. It’s in the DNA of reporters. We spend our days trying to get public officials to reveal stuff to us, not to hide it.
There’s something almost paternalistic about not releasing the photo. The argument that the release would inflame some people in the Middle East is worth considering, but it’s likely that anyone potentially inflamed by bin Laden’s photo is probably inflamed already.
And the doubters will be doubters whatever you do, just as the after-birthers (that’s a great Onion description) will tell you that Obama’s long-form birth certificate was Photoshopped. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins pointed out, if The Donald thinks bin Laden is dead, that should be good enough.
The other photo — the already iconic photo that was released from the White House situation room — is the opposite of violence. It’s a photo of real people in real time looking at a screen we can’t see, waiting to see how their high-stakes gamble plays out, with not only politics on the line — as Obama risked being Jimmy Cartered — but also with real lives in the balance.
It’s a photo of people who look as if they don’t care how they look. Obama was in a smallish chair that might have been pulled from a corner of the room. Hillary Clinton had her hand to her mouth in what looked like dismay. She later said she might have been coughing, but the story doesn’t work that way.
The general is in full uniform. Joe Biden and Obama are tieless. Obama is staring intently at the screen, as if all will be written there. The day before Obama had ridiculed Donald Trump for firing Gary Busey on his reality TV show, saying it was the kind of decision that would keep him up nights. We now know that he already knew he would soon be in the kind of situation that actually would keep anyone up nights.
The situation room looked nothing like Hollywood would have designed it, which is perfect. Jack Bauer wouldn’t have been caught dead there. The room is small in the way, we’re told, many White House rooms are. The people are packed in, waiting, waiting. You can’t miss the tension.
The drama of the Pete Souza photo is that it looks both posed and unposed — in the way that life sometimes is when you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, when you don’t really know what to expect.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
