The words of the title attributable to Karl Marx go on to proclaim “first as a tragedy and then as a farce”. By now my readers know that I have an idle mind and sometimes I sublet it to the Devil to use it as his workshop. Lately I have been reading Quantum Mechanics amongst other things and revising my acquaintance with Feynman diagrams. In one of these, an electron and a positron annihilate, producing a virtual photon that becomes a quark-antiquark pair. Then one radiates a gluon. It struck me that an electron going forwards in time is the same as a positron going backwards in time. Having understood the complexity of quantum theory despite Feynman’s explicit warning, “I think it is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics”, I decided to analyze this business of Osama Bin Laden.

I am interested in phonetics and familiar with ethnic jokes in which Japanese and Chinese speakers have difficulty pronouncing the consonant “R” and mispronounce it as “L”. Thus fried rice comes out as flied lice. I also know that many north Indians pronounce the word station as istation and south Indians have lilting accents, while Gujaratis pronounce foreign as phhorin. The Swedes also have a lilting tone when speaking English and emphasize the first syllable while saying “three”. Canadians can be easily detected by the way they say the words “out” and “about” because their accents are like those of the Scots for those words. Germans get caught as they say “Vendy” instead of “Wendy”. Southerners have their drawls which vary and can be reliable in placing them in the fashion of Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion.

Under the circumstances when I heard Senator Mitch McConnell raving, ranting and railing about his life’s goal and raison d’etre, being to defeat Obama, I though it must be a variant of a Kentucky drawl or some lisping speech defect, as the consonant “B” which is a voiced labial is not interchangeable with “S” which is fricative. In Sanskrit, Indo-Iranian and Greek branch of Indo-European, “S” changes to “H” as in Soma becoming Homa in ancient Persian and Septa becoming Hepta in Greek. It was because of that I thought that McConnell with a Scotch-Irish mixture of Kentuckian brogue and burr, meant Osama, when he spoke Obama. Finally I realized that I had mis-diagnosed his problem and his burr was definitely not at the front end of his gastrointestinal tract. I realized it when I heard sundry prominent Retropubicans crediting Bush for the killing of Obama and Senator McConnell and his co-conspirators were not lisping but had their lasers focused on Obama’s defeat, not Osama’s.

I had known about repeating as a tragedy and farce ever since I was exposed to Hollywood and Bollywood and Rambo 1,2 &3, Rocky 1,2,3,4, Devdas (Saigal, Dilip Kumar, SRK), Pelham1,2,3 re-makes. I didn’t know that a new national motion picture and propaganda center had opened up near Washington DC in a studio called Pentagon. They had produced movies in the genre of Leni Riefenstahl and recieved the Riefenstahl award in their production of the “Jessica Lynch Story” and the “Pat Tillman Saga”, so they used their public relations firm of Leon Panetta, Jay Carney and Brennan to put out advance stories about the raid on Abbottabad and killing of Bin Laden.
 
Remember the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter living in Washington DC, who swore having personally witnessed Saddam, the Scum Bucket disconnecting premature babies from respirators, which he sold for Colombian cocaine to arm the contras, all from the lawn of the White House. Now there were only 25 Navy Seals who showed immense skill and bravery in the successful raid and yet the entire Pentagon, CIA and Executive Branch of the US government could not give the story straight and honest, twenty-four hours after debriefing them. They had to embellish it by non-existent constant firefights, using women and children as shields, claiming that live capture of the terrorist was impossible because of unarmed Rambo Osama’s  firefights and making contradictory statements about help from Pakistan. Then Obama ordered not to release the pictures of a dead Bin Laden, for fear of increased terror attacks, but felt it was proper to announce the same if it boosted his ratings.

Let us analyze the matter. The compound in which the building was attacked was said to be seven or eight acres. It was well within the capability of our superb air-force to use precision guided missiles or bombs to selectively obliterate the entire building and achieve the objective of killing its occupants without risking the precious lives of the brave Navy Seals. Didn’t Bush cut veterans health funding and neglect Walter Reed, while wasting time and money pretending to be an aviator on the deck of an aircraft carrier? We have done that with Global Hawks, Predators and Hellfire missiles in Pakistan itself, merely because of suspicion that the crowd below were insurgents and have turned out to be wedding parties, children gathering gasoline or elders gathering for a Shura. Raymond Davis shot two Pakistanis on a mere suspicion, so our bogus cry of being extra sensitive to collateral civilian damage and casualties rings hollow.

Pakistan’s claim that they were unaware that Bin Laden was living near their military is a matching lie. The ISI and the army chief probably offered him sanctuary and probably betrayed him to calm irritated America and continue receiving economic and military aid to prevent bankruptcy and compete with India. If they admit that they sold out Bin Laden, it would raise the ire of the jihadis, increase terror attacks in Pakistan and refute their claim of being the Sword Of Islam. As some American experts have remarked, I see Mr. Ten Percent angling at his game for the reward.

The most likely scenario is that Pakistan has given sanctuary, monetary and military aid to the terrorists of Taliban and Al Qaeda and has been selling them out one by one to obtain American aid. One cannot even be sure whether Obama is telling the truth or this whole story is a gimmick to raise his popularity, deflect attention from a stalled economy (a la Clinton -Lewinsky cruise missiles to avoid impeachment, or Sarkozy- Libya bombing to beat Le Pen in elections) and chances for re-election, like he dumped his pastor to win his first term.

To re-interpret Marx’s words that history repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce and collate it with quantum mechanics that an electron moving forward in time is the same as a positron moving backward in time, I come up with the death of Anti-Christ Osama being the farcical repeat of a tragedy of the death of Christ. To me it is obvious who played Caiaphas, Judas and Pontius Pilate this time. We have already heard the apostles Carney, Brennan, Panetta give their versions of the gospel truth and they differ just like Mark, Matthew and Luke. I am however more doubting than Thomas and will not be surprised whether Bin Laden is dead or resurrected. I also think the believers will grant him martyrdom and worry that a new avatar, prophet, imam or son of god will appear to replace him as long as there are gullible religious believers. P.T. Barnum, you were so right!

With apologies to Baroness Orczy

They seek him here
They seek him there
Yankees seek him everywhere
Is he in heaven, Is he in hell,
That damned elusive UBL