The blogorama and blatherfests operated at full chortle last week, chewing over revelations about bin Laden by a Sudanese writer who claimed to have been his lover. Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof, published in February, had managed to elude scrutiny until Harper's reprinted an excerpt. Boof, 37, once wrote for the daytime drama Days of Our Lives, and her tale reads like a soap-opera arc: "Bo flies to Morocco to rescue Hope, enslaved by a terrorist mastermind ..." Boof relates that Osama smoked dope, made her dance to "Rock Lobster" and longed to claim the addled Houston for his harem.
Several terrorism "experts," though, have disputed the tale. Elsewhere in her book, Boof apparently remembers encountering bin Laden associates who were dead at the time. Her tale is attractive, though, because it makes bin Laden seem the superannuated frat boy, Mideast variety—every bit the hip sensualist we presume he is not. The official White House line is that he hates our freedom, but Boof's story makes it sound as if he'd like to expand its reach to include murder and concubinage.
Bin Laden has said several times we've got him all wrong. Freedom, schmeedom, he told us in one of his tapes from the cave, just before the 2004 election; if it's all about freedom, how come he doesn't attack Sweden? Officially, at first, he wanted to cleanse Saudi Arabia, his home and Islam's holy land, of our infidel presence. We have pretty much accommodated him on that point, all the while fretting about freedom.
Of course, what he says he wants and what he hopes will incite Muslims around the world to hate and kill us are distinct matters. We have unwittingly played into his strategy by taking on the role of crusaders in another Muslim land. We turned Iraq into a terrorist nursery while empowering its ancient rival, Iran. As The New Yorker reported in the summer of 2004, the Israelis—who know something about combatting terrorism—warned us a year earlier about securing Iraq's borders with its eastern neighbor, but we ignored that threat. Now, with troops eyeing endless tours of duty in Iraq, we contemplate military action against Iran. It's all about freedom, you see.
The "Hate Our Freedom" refrain resounds only in the context of pious Islam, and no doubt much of the support al Qaeda enjoys around the world derives from a religiously motivated suspicion of our commercial success. Many Muslims see nothing but greed, gluttony and hedonism in the United States and its Western allies. Some of this resentment, surely, is equally sincere and nonviolent. Not a few Christians in this land feel the same way.
Conversely, the idea of Osama kicking back in his cave with some single-malt, Thai stick and a stack of Whitney discs—He-e-e-e will always love her—only nicks irony's iceberg. One has to imagine, watching men in Yankees caps chanting "Death to America," that for many godly anger shrouds unholy envy. As Thomas Friedman and others have pointed out, secular despots have long ruled over lands in which a distorted Islam remains the only outlet for the rage of the poor and repressed.
But it appears a more complex rage animates the true terrorist, as Western authors seem to have understood before our leaders. In a short story for The New Yorker earlier this year, Martin Amis imagined Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11 attacks, as an impious misanthrope who found cover for his pathological hatred in a pinched Islamism. Parsing John Updike's recent Terrorist for The New York Times Book Review, novelist Robert Stone sees the central conflict animating Updike's troubled, half-Egyptian, teen protagonist arise from the notion of "Americanization"—what this country means to itself and to the world.
This is worth considering as the fifth anniversary of bin Laden's cruelest evil approaches—aside from the fact that he is still, unaccountably, at large. Much of the world, including our allies, sees little but witless rapacity and ego gratification in our land. And what are we about, if not the marketing and consumption of things, in the complicated process of which we forge identity? This is not altogether bad. It certainly beats medieval theocracy.
Our challenge lies in finding meaning in something beyond marketing, beyond the ruthless aggrandizing of self. We might start with a renewal of national community, being American instead of market-driven niche identities. That alone will not soften the hearts of those who hate us, but it might help us understand why, and who, we fight.