"Osama bin Laden was already made an old fool by the Arab Spring"
Excellent meditation on OBL's irrelevance at the time of death by Dana Vachon in The Daily Beast:
Osama bin Laden was already made an old fool by the Arab Spring. It was a million young bodies, their unsated creature needs, a generation of Arabs who were only 9 or 11 when 9/11 happened, that pushed the Middle East into modernity, in the end. It was taxi drivers and street vendors and people with no jobs. And they revealed bin Laden for what he always was, a trust fund brat peddling delusions of past grandeur as a cure for the present's pains.
There is real elegance to his passing now, as spring turns to summer, and to the Revolutionary generation's greeting of his death with indifferent shrugging rather than wailing lament. I suppose he may yet become a martyr; Che Guevara was martyred once too, but only as prelude to a second career as unsalaried silkscreen superstar, the face of the revolutionary dream turned logo for shirts and thongs, Chinese slave labor their only connection to Marx or Lenin.
