WaPo's 'Great' Osama? Obama Speech Signified 'One Great Man Taking Down Another'

No man has had a greater impact on American culture in the 21st century than Osama bin Laden. It’s hard to remember how frighteningly smart bin Laden seemed at first. He embodied precisely the kind of intellect that corporate America craves: a man who thought outside the box, who made no small plans, a man who knew how to harness the power of teamwork, a big-picture leader and a details guy at the same time.

He drew upon Stone Age tribalism and Iron Age tropes of battle, but he had also mastered personal mythmaking in the wired world of networks and video imagery. He knew the modern PR playbook, releasing videos filled with a horrifying mix of rationalism and phantasmagoria. A few months after the attacks, he starred in the dreams video, a compendium of nocturnal visions and prognostications that built a weird Jungian subtext for the attack.

But in the same video, he spoke like an engineer: “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower.”

Inside Style, on page C-6, the headline was "American culture, dominated by a solo show." Before Kennicott began praising the Osama bin Laden effect on culture and literature, he claimed movie villains suddenly turned Arab. That's clearly not what the critics of Arab portrayals in the movies thought, including an uproar about stereotyped portrayals in the 1998 movie The Siege. But the Post thinks he's on a roll, so no one edited it:

He became the hidden impresario of cultural life. Almost overnight, our movie villains changed complexion. The old exotica of Orientalism, operas about villainous Turks or magnanimous sultans, ballets about renegade pirates, were suddenly relevant in a way they hadn’t been for centuries. He reanimated the age-old bugaboos of history.

For a large part of the Western world, bin Laden invented what it meant to be Arab. He gave us a caricature, but the flip side of fear turned out to be intimacy, a passionate need to know the art and culture of The Other. Would the Kennedy Center’s 2009 “Arabesque” festival, devoted to the arts of the Arab world, have happened without Osama bin Laden?

Bin Laden was very good for book clubs, too, as readers sought out voices from the Arab world and beyond. Many of the voices that flourished in the age of Osama — Khaled Hosseini, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi — weren’t even Arab, but Afghan, Turkish and Iranian. It didn’t matter. Bin Laden had shifted the horizons of our curiosity.

Kennicott's so anti-Bush that he trashed Bush even when reviewing the architecture of his forthcoming presidential library in 2009: "Bush was so full of contradictions, so seemingly hostile to the very things that define most important architects — intellectual sophistication, metaphorical games, aesthetic refinement — that it’s hard to imagine a more meaningful building ever fitting him comfortably."