One thing that we know about ourselves as a race is that we do not deal well with uncertainty, open endings, fades to black. We want the orchestra to swell, the curtain to be run down, and the actors to come to the apron and receive their applause.

We require a child-like reassurance that everything that has transpired on the stage was indeed a fantasy, so that we can now move on to appreciating it, savoring it, recalling it back later to share with others so that they, too, can gain some enjoyment from the cleverness or wisdom of a line.

I don’t know how ancient Greek theatre-goers understood the productions they attended. Did they also feel this tenuousness between fantasy and the real; this phenomena, where one can forget himself for stretches of time and become so enmeshed in the drama of the play that there is a suspension of disbelief, and a sense of time being lost, of having been some place else for a while?

Probably. But historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists all generally agree that the function of the earliest drama we know of (think Oedipus, Antigone, etc.) was a descendent of rituals whose function was to 1) appease the gods and 2) to restore order and peace to a community.

Many of these rituals involved animal sacrifice, in which the spilling of the blood of an animal was a stand-in (scapegoat) for the taking of a human life or lives by the community. The animal sacrifice was a kind of burying of the hatchet, a symbolic defusing of a bomb from an old war still in danger of exploding, and setting off ever-widening waves of violence.

The Catholic French cultural anthropologist Rene Girard has theorized that violence is mimetic. Violence is a “contagion” introduced by an original act of violence (think Cain and Abel) causing subsequent vengeful acts that if left unchecked could lead to an “epidemic” of violence that throws the community into chaos.

It’s a very complicated theory, but to cut to the chase, Girard sees Jesus as the scapegoat who has the power to end the mimetic cycle of violence for good—if only we believe.

If we try to set aside the theological dimension of Girard’s theory for a moment, his thinking is enlightening, as he seems to see collective violence and scapegoating in terms that many in the post-9/11 Western world can understand.

With each new act of collective violence the community experiences a wave of euphoria that reconfirms that which is good and true about the community, and those virtues and truths become part of a larger story, a story depicting the time since the original violence (now avenged) as though a prophecy fulfilled, a story that reasserts the avengers’ victimhood and thus the righteousness of their actions.

This is what many Americans are feeling right now. We have made good on a promise made in the hours immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a promise renewed and reechoed every year for almost a decade: that we will find those responsible for this terrible tragedy, and bring them to justice.

Of course, you can figure it out from here. Girard would say that Osama bin Laden is the scapegoat, and that his killing is the sacrifice that will pull us out of the chaos and darkness that has hung over our heads since that preternaturally beautiful day in September of 2001.

And he would say that not only has bin Laden’s killing restored order, faith, and confidence, but it has reasserted America’s primacy as the world’s superior military (and moral) power.

Furthermore, Girard would say, yes, bin Laden’s killing has brought about all of these reactions and feelings, but not without also asserting that our power—and the euphoria we draw from it—is fueled by blood.

But perhaps Girard’s view is overly-determined. Perhaps you don’t believe in ascribing any meaning to bin Laden’s killing; that his death is cold comfort since the contagion that is “radical Islam” is still alive and well.

Or, perhaps you believe that bin Laden’s killing was justified, and that we have every right to be glad that he is dead.

Whatever story we tell ourselves about bin Laden’s killing, and whatever interpretation of that story others might ascribe to it, violence remains the constant. What’s so important about Girard’s thinking on mimetic violence is that he tells the truth about violence: it is never destroyed—it is merely transferred.

I don’t need reassurance that bin Laden is dead. I don’t question whether what has transpired is real or fantasy. I don’t need a photograph of his corpse.

What I need to do is from time to time look at the now-iconic photo of the President and his advisers in the “Situation Room” tensely watching the raid unfold, their grave yet fascinated expressions, frozen, to remind myself that we cannot seem to shake the habit of constantly looking for the living among the dead.