Word: taping
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...holiest place in Afghanistan. It is the World Trade Center site that has become hallowed ground and the secular values of a free nation that inspired the unity, charity and victory he imagined. It was not just his army that was routed, but his dreams. He made his tape; now we are making ours...
...secular West no longer thinks in those terms. But radical Islam does. Which is why the Osama tape, reveling in the success of Sept. 11, is such an orgy of religious triumphalism: so many dead, so much fame, so much joy, so many new recruits--God is great...
...cannot watch the tape without thinking of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase "the banality of evil." Because 9/11 has caused such reverberations in the world, people have subconsciously endowed bin Laden with the size and force, the diabolical cunning, of a supervillain or, in some parts of the world, of a superhero. The video produces a severely diminishing effect--something like listening to the Nixon Oval Office tapes (though radically different orders of crime are under discussion). The grainy video brings down the image of bin Laden in something of the way that the Taliban blew up the giant statues...
...conversation of a madman? No. An evil genius? Part of the deflation is an atmosphere of ineffable near-stupidity. The recollected premonitions in dreams about soccer teams made up of airplane pilots, for example. Stupidity is evil's dimwit half-brother. It dawns on you as you watch the tape that bin Laden may be like one of those not quite bright real-life hoods who strut around with the Godfather movies unreeling in their minds, the theme music playing in their inner ears; Al Pacino has given them the dialogue, a myth of themselves. Bin Laden is the John...
Editor-at-large MICHAEL ELLIOTT snagged the plum assignment this week of examining one of the most eagerly anticipated bits of video in recent memory, featuring Osama bin Laden. Elliott explores what the tape tells us about bin Laden--and writes about the future of al-Qaeda. Chat with him about the tales of the tape on Tuesday...