Friday column: What kind of person tweets nonsense?

“What kind of person celebrates death?"

If Rashard Mendenhall’s tweet had stopped there, he would have been OK.

I have my own questions about the rah-rah nature of the reaction to the killing — the justified killing — of Osama bin Laden. Two Tao Te Ching lines from my Eastern mysticism days came to mind:

“Go to war as if conducting a funeral” and “the victory celebration is a funeral service.”

After watching TV coverage of the story, the Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey wrote that the reaction to bin Laden’s killing was “in inverse proportion to how closely 9/11 touched their lives.

“Those closest to the hijacked jets — victims’ families, surviving New York City firefighters, colleagues of flight attendants who died — greeted bin Laden’s death with solemnity. Those who came to know the terrorist mastermind mostly as a symbol — the young who grew up under the terrorist threat but didn’t suffer personal losses — tended to holler, preen for cameras and carry on as if they were watching a ballgame.”

A Roman Catholic priest, Howard Beck, made a related point on Fox News, saying that even when deadly force is justified, it remains “a necessary evil” and shouldn’t be celebrated “like a Super Bowl win.”

Mendenhall, who has played in two Super Bowls with Pittsburgh, knows something about that atmosphere. Using that experience, he might have made a similar point as the priest, then gotten off the stage — in this case, Twitter.

Alas.

Referring to the man who orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks that killed thousands, Mendenhall opined, “It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side … ”

I don’t know where Mendenhall’s head is when it’s not in a Steelers helmet, but Al-Jazeera has been broadcasting bin Laden tapes for a decade, his writings have been published, and his biggest statements — those written in the blood of others — are rather hard to misinterpret.

“We’ve only heard one side” is bad enough. But Mendenhall’s tweet got worse.

“We’ll never know what really happened,” he wrote. “I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style.”

Lest we think this conspiracy babble outrageous, Mendenhall went on to tell us he was just encouraging us to think, adding, “There is not an ignorant bone in my body.”
Look again, Rashard.

After a predictably negative reaction by his employers, Mendenhall tried a little damage control, apologizing for “the timing as (sic) such a sensitive matter” and trying to get back to his original point — all the while ignoring the most inflammatory of his posts.

In this Internet world, good luck with that, Rashard. Like herpes and extinction, tweets are forever.

Mendenhall styles himself a “conversationalist and professional athlete.” If he wants to continue being the latter, he might want to rethink being the former.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.