THE 9-11 POP CULTURE REPOSITORY
DIGITAL EPHEMERA (DISPOSABLE MATERIALS):
OSAMA BIN LADEN

Page 4: "Insult and Reference to Other Pop Culture/Part 2"

In these graphics, the warload is considered less than human and deviant.

Here is an example of professional ephemera -- it was created by political cartoonist Mike Thompson (also artist of the Moose Goose & Grimm comic), found on the Internet and converted into an e-mail attachment. Bin Laden is being abandoned by everyone, including, comically, his life insurer, because he's such as high-risk customer.

MasterCard's "Priceless" ad campaign had started in the latter half of the 1990s and was still going at the time of the terrorist attacks. Here the assorted tools of revenge and the means to travel to a place to exact it are listed as the credit card charges. The last "priceless" thing? An easy bin Laden target. In addition to referencing the pop culture of the MasterCard commercials, this graphic also expressed Americans' great need to avenge the 9-11 victims and reassert American strength in the world.

In this graphic, entitled "Where's Usama?" parodies the Where's Waldo?" children's book series (right) by Martin Handford. These stories, with bright, comic strip-like illustrations, featured a bland, smiling young man in a red stocking cap and glasses. Here a Handford-like picture has a few men in turbans, women in burqas, a camel or two, and an invitation to find the terrorist leader. Bin Laden's location was a source of great energy during the war on terrorism. "Usama" is a spelling variant of bin Laden's first name; such variants occur when names are transliterated from one alphabet to another.