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Osama, looking vaguely like Che Guevara, in Dutch graffiti.
(Photo: Ben Mulger) |
From his beginnings as a Gautama-like outcast prince from the richest of families, to the CIA’s teaching him how to be a terrorist, to his crazed dreams of the return of the caliphate, to his bogeyman beard, to being the ostensible flash point of two separate wars, to being a kidney-dialysis patient living in a Tora Bora cave, to his face on nearly as many T-shirts as Che Guevara, to being shot dead in front of his wife surrounded by piles of porno tapes—could Osama have been a more perfect villain?
From the archives
• The Obama Spring (New York Magazine, May 8, 2011)
• Post-Osama (New York Magazine, May 8, 2011)
• The Blockbuster Effect (New York Magazine, May 8, 2011)