Osama bin Laden, The Matrix and the fight for reality
Enslaved humans dream of a life in a 20th century cosmopolis, but life is an illusion. The bravest thing to do, as computer hacker Neo learns, is to make the choice to wake up to reality and fight the machine. Afterwards, as my friend and I, minds reeling, waited in the subway for the train […]
Enslaved humans dream of a life in a 20th century cosmopolis, but life is an illusion. The bravest thing to do, as computer hacker Neo learns, is to make the choice to wake up to reality and fight the machine. Afterwards, as my friend and I, minds reeling, waited in the subway for the train to come, I half expected the concrete pillars to crumble, to wake up and realize my life was a dream and that reality was something much larger, much bleaker, much scarier.
That beautiful September morning, a few months later, I woke up, as in the film Inception, out of one dream into another, and the new reality was large, bleak, and scary. I watched from a familiar Brooklyn pier as the tallest buildings in New York, the symbols of the city, and world capitalism, were consumed from within by a gangrenous fire and collapsed into dust. When I first arrived at the pier and saw the towers, the first thing I thought of was, not The Matrix, but the Will Smith movie Independence Day, in which aliens from outer space attack the world, pulverizing its greatest monuments. “It’s just like Independence Day,” I thought, the rest of my mind blank. I could make sense of what was happening only through reference to a film. Those who had plotted the attack on America spoke the language of Hollywood, executing a “reality show” replay of America’s own imagination. In the media war that erupted out of the attack, both attackers and the attacked claimed to be on the side of truth and justice. Both sides claimed to be the human beings fighting an alien evil that needed to be wiped from the earth.
A few months after 9-11, back in Nigeria, I gathered with neighbors in Jos to watch The Matrix again. But in the scene where the hero Neo and his friends mow down dozens of innocent bystanders in a gun battle with computer-generated security agents, I grew nauseous. I had to leave the room. I have not been able to watch the film, brilliant as it is, again, since that day. In the world of The Matrix, those bystanders didn’t matter. Their world was a delusion. The larger goal of saving the earth from the machine was far more important than the small illusory lives of those killed in the streets. “The Matrix is a system.” Neo’s mentor Morpheus tells him, “That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy.”
Yet, this is exactly the philosophy of those young men who believed so passionately in their cause that they were willing to board a plane and blow themselves up along with thousands of other human beings. Their victims did not matter. They were only collateral damage in the greater fight for what they thought was justice, God’s will as understood by a select and privileged few who had “woken” from the illusion of life’s pleasures.
The horrifying results of Al Qaeda’s disregard for human life are illustrated in their attacks on Kenya, America, and elsewhere. Yet, it’s not just Al Qaeda who has bought into this rhetoric. The “war against terror” was spoken of by then U.S. president George W. Bush in the pared down, black and white words of an American western movie, a genre which has often justified historical American expansionism. The hunt for Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” became the quest for truth and justice. It was Independence Day, the rallying of the nations of the earth against an “alien” force that had infiltrated an “American-led” world. Yet, this simplified language of good and evil, black and white, crusade and jihad, so beloved of American style movies, has ended up lumping together a terrorist minority with anyone who dislikes American-style capitalism. This misunderstanding is as dangerous as the oppositional world of right and wrong promoted by Osama bin Laden. When America invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and later Pakistan, the same Americans who were so aghast at the death of innocents in the World Trade centre, accepted the death of innocent women and children in bombs meant for terrorists. The same Americans who saw themselves in a superior moral position to those who celebrated in the streets after 9-11 down played the degrading torture of prisoners by American armed forces at Abu Graib. The deaths of women and children, the abuse of those in Iraqi prisons, was “collateral” damage, the unfortunate side effects of a war for justice. This “moral vision” has become muddier and muddier as the years have dragged on and there have been far more deaths in the wars there were in the initial terrorist attacks on American targets. Both those who support the “war against terror” as begun by George W. Bush and those who celebrate Osama bin Laden as a hero buy into simplified rhetoric. In real life, it becomes much more ambiguous. Who is fighting for truth? Who is fighting for justice? Who is behaving with honour?
I first found out about the death of Osama bin Laden when I woke to the chime of a text at 5:55am on Monday morning, 2 May 2011. I groggily read a message from a friend who had met me in Jos shortly after 9-11: “Sorry again for your loss that day. How do you feel today that bin Laden’s dead.”
“Bin Laden? What?” I thought and I went back to sleep. I didn’t remember the text until I later signed online and turned on Al-Jazeera, where I saw Americans celebrating on the streets.
In 2001, I wanted nothing more than to see him dead. In 2011, now that he was reported dead, I felt blank, as I had when I first saw the burning towers. The taste of ash was in my mouth. The death of bin Laden does not bring back the Kenyans killed and blinded near the blast at the US Embassy in Nairobi, the people of many nationalities killed in those towers in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, or in the air on their way home. I can understand how those who lost loved ones in the attacks could feel a sense of closure and relief. But I cannot jubilate. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, perhaps put it best: “Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibility of each and every one of us before God and before man, and hopes and commits himself so that no event be an opportunity for further growth of hatred, but for peace.”
The events of 9-11 came at the same time as the crisis in Jos, where thousands of innocents were killed. Ten years later, as Bin Laden is killed, angry youth on both sides of the Christian-Muslim, ethnic-political divide are willing to take the lives of those who could be their father or brother, mother or sister. Their cause, their revenge, their fury takes precedence over a recognition of mutual humanity. The crisis in Nigeria now feels more personal to me than the grand Hollywood-style battle between Al-Qaeda and America, the anger closer to home, but the dangerous effects of hatred remain the same.
In his music video “Not Afraid,” American rapper Eminem performs the psychological alienation he raps about. Caught in a maze of mirrors, he eventually breaks through to an apocalyptic landscape, where the city spills into an abyss. Eminem’s “breaking out of this cage” is his stand for individual human responsibility and his realization of the importance of human love. Rapping about his complex history of anger and abuse, he sings “I’m not afraid to take a stand /Everybody come take my hand /We’ll walk this road together, through the storm / Whatever weather, cold or warm/Just let you know that, you’re not alone.” Here he strikes upon a truth, that transcends the self righteousness rhetoric of those who kill for their interpretation of reality and echoes St. Paul, who wrote that after all things on earth cease and pass away, love will remain. In this humble certainty, even the most flawed human being can find comfort.