They poured on to the streets in a frenzy of excitement, fists pumping, chanting, waving flags, giving praise to God and country. A great Satan had been destroyed.
The countdown to this ecstasy had been a long time coming, and now it took hold of the crowds with a vengeance, buoying, lifting, agitating their patriotic fervour to new and unified heights of thanksgiving and devotion.
Yet another demonstration of the kind of public hysteria we have become used to seeing in countries across the Middle East?
In fact, quite the obverse. Late on Monday, the spontaneous reaction in cities across the United States to the news of Osama bin Laden's death spilled out into public squares and boulevards.
The cathartic effusion of patriotism and relief underscores just how deeply lodged in the psyche had the bogeyman bin Laden become following the atrocities of September 11, 2001.
And while, of course, the personal grief of those who lost family members, friends or lovers on that tragic occasion - and in other atrocities carried out elsewhere in the world at the behest of al Qaeda and its offshoots - cannot and should not be underestimated, it also highlights just how persistent symbolism and the personification of ideology and evil has become.
And, perhaps, how prone to patriotic and religious impulses much of the world now is. While the citizens of the god-fearing Christian United States can be forgiven their explicit expressions of joy at bin Laden's killing, it seems that rationalism is on the retreat, and a visceral, decontextualised emotionalism has taken its place.
To locate the perpetration of 9/11 and the jihad in just one man is to strip it of its essential social and political milieu, and to misconstrue the nature and extent of the threat to the West. Bin Laden may be dead, but there are hundreds of thousands of young radicalised Muslims - many, incidentally, drawn to the cause by the US' Iraq invasion folly - who have been only to ready to take up the cause.
Why? A messianic leader? A radical and corrupted reading of the Koran promoting jihad against the infidel? Or poverty, cultural marginalisation, land dispossession and an aggrieved and festering sense of injustice?
One thing's for certain, violent nihilists are succoured by their symbols, too, and most commentators seem to agree the death of bin Laden will be a blow to many. But it has also been pointed out that bin Laden has not been active in al Qaeda for many years - and that his revolutionary project of overthrowing Arab governments in favour of imposing strict Islamist regimes run according to Sharia law has been truly subsumed in the spontaneous and largely peaceful demands of a younger generation of ordinary citizens across the Middle East seeking democracy and a more equitable dividend of their countries' wealth and social justice.
President Barack Obama will almost certainly harvest his own dividend as a result of bin Laden's demise. He has, at a stroke, overturned many of the reverses he has been labouring against as he sets out on the long campaign road to a second term in the White House.
Perhaps now that he can put this victory on his resume - the president who killed bin Laden - more of his fellow citizens might be inclined to believe that he is actually entitled to be their commander-in-chief.
Only last week he was forced by a celebrity TV personality with the worst comb-over in history to produce his birth certificate and prove he is constitutionally qualified to be president of the United States of America.
Billionaire Donald Trump had in recent months become the new champion of the "birther" movement - which peddles the patently false notion that Mr Obama was born outside the US - and given it renewed momentum. It gathered force not through any objective validity but through a combination of prejudice, sly insinuation, blind ideological zeal and sheer repetition.
As of last week, up to one in four Americans - who seem to rely for information and their convictions as much on the inane utterances of reality TV hosts as on any rational examination of evidence - believed that their president was not an American.
Given the potency of symbolism and the superficial in the formation of today's belief systems, it is little wonder that by their reaction a great number of Americans would seem to believe Osama bin Laden marked the beginning, the middle and the end of the terror threat.
It may well diminish the danger.
But, if it does, it will be for reasons a lot more complex than the departure from this earth of America's public enemy No 1.
• Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
