I was woken just before 8am by the bin men, who contrary to one of the many jokes that would be circulating in the next few hours were actually working on a bank holiday. I had hoped to have a long lie-in this morning and this seemed like only a temporary set-back: I would surely just go back to sleep. But I checked Twitter on my phone, seeing an odd comment about Osama Bin Laden that made no sense and then a less cryptic one claiming he had died. In the bleary space between sleep and wakefulness I assumed this was all part of some joke I didn't understand, but after I followed some links I discovered that according to reports Bin Laden had been found and shot in Pakistan (I doubt that anyone reading this will not have already known that, but sorry I didn't break it more gently if you didn't).
I desperately wanted to go back to sleep, but I also wanted to stay up and find out more about what had happened and also follow the story on Twitter. When big world events and deaths happen Twitter is at its most entertaining and I wanted to join in the game of seeing who could make the best joke about the extinction of someone's life and/or the way the story was being covered and the implications of the death.
My first bleary-eyed comment I think was probably the most incisive, "Isn't the real story here that Bin Laden was actually alive?" It was hard to believe that he had actually survived this long and I had pretty much assumed that he had died in a cave at some point in the last decade. So really the fact that yesterday he was sleeping in a big bed, with slightly embarrassing bedding in a mansion in Pakistan was a surprise. Though of course it wouldn't be long before people claimed that he hadn't been alive at all and that the whole thing was a stunt on behalf of the Americans. Which wasn't helped by the unusual decision to dump the body at sea within 12 hours. I presume they may have taken some photos (which conspiracy theorists will claim are faked) or some DNA (ditto), but even if they had filmed the whole thing or kept his severed head on a spike the people who want to believe that nothing is true would also just say that all the evidence was faked. Which isn't to say that it definitely isn't faked, just that there is no way you can argue with people who are certain that nothing is as it seems. If the governments of the world were as controlling and evil as these people think, I reckon they might have done a better job of providing evidence. The basic incompetence of human beings makes me think that the most likely explanation for all historical events is that people don't really know what they are doing and everything that happens usually happens quite randomly. So in the case of 11/9 I think it's much more likely that the terrorists got through because things aren't really all that controlled at all and our leaders are not all powerful than the whole thing being orchestrated by an evil George W Bush.
But it's also unlikely that we'd be given all the facts about everything, which allows these ideas to breed and grow. But if Osama Bin Laden is still alive he could always just come out of his cave and shout, "I'm not dead. Look here I am" and we'd all know. In fact this might be the Americans clever plan.
If nothing else Twitter does prove that if everyone is sitting around trying to come up with a joke about something, a lot of people will come up with the same idea (something that should calm the paranoia of comedians who think they have had a line ripped off, when in fact they have just come up with the obvious line). I commented straight away that deaths come in threes (Ted Lowe, Henry Cooper, Bin Laden) and that this was in fact why Wills had not been able to go on honeymoon this weekend because he was involved in the raid - and immediately on posting them saw similar commments in an unread bit of my timeline. There were already dozens of cracks about Donald Trump needing to see the death certificate and the sea having turned evil by homeopathy and the fact that people didn't know that they took the bins out on Bank Holiday (which I knew for a fact that they did). They were all the kind of jokes that if you had got in there first there might be some kudos, but if you were still tweeting them ten hours later you looked like an idiot who had come late to the party.
I don't think I managed to find much in this that was original, but as usual was astonished by how literal large amounts of people can be. So when I sarcastically tweeted that presumably now all security at airports would be taken away, I found it hard to believe how many people felt the need to tell me that the opposite was true.
I was a bit perturbed by the triumphalism of certain Americans. Whilst understanding their anger, it didn't seem to me that taking almost a decade to find the man who was partly responsible for 11/9 was something that showed America in the best of lights. Know this world, if you attack America you will only get to live another ten years in your mansion before we find you. It isn't like the end of World War II, where wild celebrations might be appropriate. You might be quietly relieved that he has finally found some justice, but his death is not really going to change anything in the short term - it's not like Al Qaeda is an organisation run by one person and even if it was, that person wouldn't be Bin Laden. Similarly although there might be some terrorist attacks as a reprisal, it's not like Al Qaeda had proposed a ceasefire. They were going to carry on attacking us anyway. They can now say it's in retribution for Bin Laden, but it wasn't like they were waiting for a reason to attack.
I hope that I never dance in the street over the news that someone has died, however much I was opposed to their ideology. I am not going to mourn Bin Laden because I think the things he did and the reasons he did them are wrong, but if you start celebrating murder then you're starting down the road that makes you think it's acceptable to fly planes into buildings of people as revenge for something that no one you've killed had any direct responsibility for.
So there plenty to take the piss out of on both sides and it was fun to be a part of the live commentary both as a reader and a contributor. Not since Michael Jackson's death had Twitter buzzed in this way and in some ways Bin Laden was even more evil than him. But after a couple of hours the jokes on Twitter start to annoy and pall and the whole thing seems a bit childish. It's a community, but can become a community of idiots all trying to outdo each other and sometimes the jokes can overwhelm the serious content (which is also important) and you start to crave some analysis rather than flawed jokes about binmen and bank holidays.
I needed a sleep in the afternoon, but even so was too spaced out to get anything of any worth done. I tried to watch a couple of films, "The Tooth Fairy" just because it has my friend Stephen Merchant in it. He is very funny in it, but the film is pretty awful and I only got part way through. Then I had a look at "Hamlet 2" with Steve Coogan, which I thought might be good, but which was very messy and odd and weirdly though it looked like it was trying to be a knowing, art-house comedy, Coogan's performance was so over the top that it wouldn't have looked out of place in "The Tooth Fairy". I gave up on this one too. It was odd and I didn't care about any of the characters. I wish our comedy talent would stay in this country and make funny British films, rather than heading to America and appearing in crappy ones. Only Sacha Baron Cohen has done anything good out there recently. Coogan is coming back to do an Alan Partridge movie, which I think he will look more comfortable and in place in.
