When Osama bin Laden was murdered

Glenn Greenwald righteously denounced a certain ugly-American response to the news--

one of those events which, especially in the immediate aftermath, is not susceptible to reasoned discussion. It’s already a Litmus Test event: all Decent People — by definition — express unadulterated ecstacy [sic] at his death, and all Good Americans chant “USA! USA!” in a celebration of this proof of our national greatness and Goodness (and that of our President)

 --although he may have been mistaken as to how far such vulgar behavior extended among the population (lots of us found reason to stay sober, and for that matter I don't recall Mitch McConnell dancing out by the White House, say,  or any self-described Republicans, though their reasons were certainly different from mine), or how long it was going to last.

Human sacrifice as represented in a label from the reign of Djer, second king of the First Dynasty (ca. 3100 B.C.E.), after which the Egyptians are said to have abandoned the practice

He also added, primly, [jump]

I’d have strongly preferred that Osama bin Laden be captured rather than killed so that he could be tried for his crimes and punished in accordance with due process (and to obtain presumably ample intelligence).

Here, I disagreed. I distinctly remember telling myself that that it was a good thing our nation was spared the spectacle of arguing over the venue and manner of his trial (it would surely have ended up at Guantánamo), and the years' worth of interrogating the prisoner (far more ample intelligence was on the computers in the hideaway), and the ten thousand weeping witnesses that would have been called to prove that Osama was a bad person in case we could not work that out for ourselves, and his own lyrical effusions translated into kitschy movie Arabic ("O my brethren!"), and his eventual solemn condemnation and execution according to all the ancient and accepted forms and procedures (which would in fact have to be completely invented for this special occasion), maybe sometime in 2016, in time for an election.

I'm so against capital punishment I think murder is better! No, seriously: murder is a lot of karma to put on your shoulders, but there's such a lot of it around already, and murder as a ritual of the theater-state, to bring "closure" to "the families" and heal the whole wounded polity watching from its couch like Titurel in his coffin (or creeping out of the trap door in the attached video)--the enormous hypocrisy of murder that's OK because it's according to the rules--is really bad.

The Grail ritual is about Life, though--everybody is even a vegetarian!

Which is where I want to stand with reference to Greenwald, advocating a discourse that doesn't get stuck in sterile legalism...