soon it's further than you ever said it'd go / four stars in the Rolling Stone OHHHHHH
Today, 7/22/13, is Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev's 20th birthday! I'm sure he's having a great one, wherever he's being detained and most likely viciously beaten and tortured at every possible opportunity.
aaaand this concludes the "Playing with Fire" segment of this week's entry.
...sort of. but not really.
Don't get the wrong idea. I am not just trolling or making any kind of light of the tragedy in Boston. I am not some wackjob Tsarnaev sympathizer. What he did, if he did it, was positively horrific and deplorable on the most profound and despicable level. There is no ideology, no possible explanation or motivation, that could possibly excuse what went down at the finish line on April 15.
Children and police dead, hundreds maimed for the rest of their lives, thousands of locals / not-so-locals permanently and deeply affected, an international event practically defining a major US city's identity contaminated possibly forever... yes, I get all this, I truly do. And of course I absolutely condemn Tsarnaev for whatever role he may have played in what happened three months ago in Boston... just like I would absolutely condemn the perpetrators in the horrific acts like this, being committed all over the globe, every day.
Here's the thing, though: I have never lived there, but I've always thought Boston and the surrounding areas must be one of the most enlightened regions in the country. I mean, the place is more dense per square mile in universities than virtually any other place on earth. And we're talking some of the most prestigious and productive institutions in the world. Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston College, Wellesley, Brandeis... all within the metro area, just to name a few.
I've always associated the local presence of major universities with a comparatively high level of local enlightenment / actual thoughtfulness, something I've come to believe in through extensive personal experience with such regional combinations of good school and good people.
But it seems to me that the Boston bombing turned everyone in Boston-- heck, everyone on the Eastern seaboard-- into a member of a mouth-breathing, club-and-torch-wielding angry mob of hellbent-for-vengeance neomorons that make the Tea Party look kinda rational and well-reasoned by comparison.
Or at least this has been my experience whenever I end up talking about the bombing or anything related to it with someone from Massachusetts on Facebook. Again, I'm careful to selectively surround myself with smart people with equally smart friends on that particular abomination of a social network. But I've ended up in more "fights" with people about this event this year than I can count.
Mostly, I'll admit, it's because I can't tolerate people standing around screaming irrationally / calling for blood without due process, and can't help myself from jumping in and putting such a person in a public headlock of sense / reason / logic / facts / sanity until they cry "uncle." It's not one of my more endearing traits, perhaps. But hey, in today's world, someone has to call people out when they cease to even try thinking rationally.
Less than an hour after the photos of Tsarnaev and his brother were released-- and remember, this is before the authorities had shown us anything compelling whatsoever regarding their targets' guilt-- I got into one of these debate-altercations with a particularly nasty example of pure mindlessness, who was going on about how she hoped the then-unnamed suspects were simply shot on sight.
At some early point after my corrective entry into this "discussion," she pulled out the "well, obviously you don't have kids" line. That was a big mistake, followed by her promptly getting served and eventually taking her ball / going home.
Parents, when faced with someone who openly questions one of your statements and is confronting you with debate, do not attempt the "you don't have kids" "argument." This is a cop-out of the highest order; secunda will take your sad volley and smash you to a most humiliating end if they are any good whatsoever at reason and/or rhetoric. Just as nothing excuses what the bombers did, having kids does not excuse you from rationality, and a mere allegation that someone has harmed a child is not grounds for suspension of due process.
Then, this week, we had the Rolling Stone cover "controversy," in which Bostonians once again swarmed and displayed their drastic anti-intellectual transformation en masse.
I gleefully locked rhetorical horns with at least five such "outraged" people this week, and ended up being labeled "a total fucking jerk" at one point (after daring to ask what, specifically, was so outrageous about the cover) before earning the "say whatever, I'm done responding" victory by default (ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED).
It's this simple: If you're "angry" about a very neutral, average-looking cover shot of Tsarnaev that the magazine didn't meaningfully doctor, didn't even take (and wasn't even the first to fucking run), just because it doesn't depict the kid making a pressure-cooker bomb while kicking puppies under the table and/or stabbing infants in the chest with his free hand...
...yyyeah.
I don't care if you were there, I don't care what you believe the guy did to you or people you loved (and this is NOT to say I don't sympathize or am not sorry for your loss).
RS was not attempting to "iconify" Tsarnaev or do anything positive for his public image. They were running a story on him, not even a devil's-advocate sort of thing nor a particularly interesting / well-researched story, and they just needed a shot of Tsarnaev that worked with their usual cover format. They found one and used it, just like the New York Times did two months ago for their front page.
End of story. The rest of us can all see it clear as day. And we think you're nuts. Your experiences do not justify some out-of-proportion, completely fucking insane interpretation of the cover shot.
Rolling Stone probably thanks you, though, for making national-park mountains out of previously-uncontroversial public-domain molehills... because no one has given a good goddamn about Rolling Stone in years, and now they're very likely to end up with recent-record circulation of this issue due to wishfully-thinking eBay speculators alone. Cha-ching. Thanks, nutcases.
Now, if Rolling Stone had done something like what I did above with the same pre-accused-bomber selfie portrait of Tsarnaev for their cover, then we could definitely talk about justified moral outrage. (Also, it would have been very interesting to see WaltDisneyCo's reaction.)
Does the picture of Tsarnaev make him look like a normal guy? Absolutely. Is that a problem? It shouldn't be. His trial is still ages away, not that I expect him to get a fair one, not that I expect Americans to ever learn the full truth of his story. But if he is the terrorist they say he is, he is but one of many, many thousands in the world.
An awful lot of those people look, seem pretty normal too. Any human is perfectly capable of killing another. You don't need to be a sociopath, or a supervillain, to decide to take others' lives in your own hands for some dumb "cause."
But for some reason, a lot of us feel we have to map labels like "sociopath" or "pure evil" onto terrorists anyway, which does nothing to help stop terrorism / murder / you name it, and certainly doesn't help us come to any kind of broader understanding of how to minimize global risk of such events befalling innocents.
This is perhaps one of the most unfortunate natural tendencies of humans - when someone harms us, hurts us, does something unspeakably evil even if they themselves are not evil on the whole... they become "other" to us, not even human. They're "them" now. They're no longer "us."
When it comes to "them," anything goes, fuck due process, suspend their human privileges and basic rights, do whatever you like to them, punish them to the fullest, cruelest, most perverse extent possible. "We" condone it. "We," in fact, demand it.
And, interestingly enough, this is the very same senseless, 100% unjustifiable mindset that permits so many otherwise "normal" people to commit horrific acts of terrorism in the first place. It just goes to show you that "we" are, in fact, not so different from "them" after all.
Irrelevant note: The lyric quoted in this week's subject line is from Sebadoh's "Gimme Indie Rock," a [edit:] 1991 classic, released contemporaneously with the last time that anyone in the world gave two shits about Rolling Stone magazine.
aaaand this concludes the "Playing with Fire" segment of this week's entry.
...sort of. but not really.
Don't get the wrong idea. I am not just trolling or making any kind of light of the tragedy in Boston. I am not some wackjob Tsarnaev sympathizer. What he did, if he did it, was positively horrific and deplorable on the most profound and despicable level. There is no ideology, no possible explanation or motivation, that could possibly excuse what went down at the finish line on April 15.
Children and police dead, hundreds maimed for the rest of their lives, thousands of locals / not-so-locals permanently and deeply affected, an international event practically defining a major US city's identity contaminated possibly forever... yes, I get all this, I truly do. And of course I absolutely condemn Tsarnaev for whatever role he may have played in what happened three months ago in Boston... just like I would absolutely condemn the perpetrators in the horrific acts like this, being committed all over the globe, every day.
Here's the thing, though: I have never lived there, but I've always thought Boston and the surrounding areas must be one of the most enlightened regions in the country. I mean, the place is more dense per square mile in universities than virtually any other place on earth. And we're talking some of the most prestigious and productive institutions in the world. Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston College, Wellesley, Brandeis... all within the metro area, just to name a few.
I've always associated the local presence of major universities with a comparatively high level of local enlightenment / actual thoughtfulness, something I've come to believe in through extensive personal experience with such regional combinations of good school and good people.
But it seems to me that the Boston bombing turned everyone in Boston-- heck, everyone on the Eastern seaboard-- into a member of a mouth-breathing, club-and-torch-wielding angry mob of hellbent-for-vengeance neomorons that make the Tea Party look kinda rational and well-reasoned by comparison.
Or at least this has been my experience whenever I end up talking about the bombing or anything related to it with someone from Massachusetts on Facebook. Again, I'm careful to selectively surround myself with smart people with equally smart friends on that particular abomination of a social network. But I've ended up in more "fights" with people about this event this year than I can count.
Mostly, I'll admit, it's because I can't tolerate people standing around screaming irrationally / calling for blood without due process, and can't help myself from jumping in and putting such a person in a public headlock of sense / reason / logic / facts / sanity until they cry "uncle." It's not one of my more endearing traits, perhaps. But hey, in today's world, someone has to call people out when they cease to even try thinking rationally.
Less than an hour after the photos of Tsarnaev and his brother were released-- and remember, this is before the authorities had shown us anything compelling whatsoever regarding their targets' guilt-- I got into one of these debate-altercations with a particularly nasty example of pure mindlessness, who was going on about how she hoped the then-unnamed suspects were simply shot on sight.
At some early point after my corrective entry into this "discussion," she pulled out the "well, obviously you don't have kids" line. That was a big mistake, followed by her promptly getting served and eventually taking her ball / going home.
Parents, when faced with someone who openly questions one of your statements and is confronting you with debate, do not attempt the "you don't have kids" "argument." This is a cop-out of the highest order; secunda will take your sad volley and smash you to a most humiliating end if they are any good whatsoever at reason and/or rhetoric. Just as nothing excuses what the bombers did, having kids does not excuse you from rationality, and a mere allegation that someone has harmed a child is not grounds for suspension of due process.
Then, this week, we had the Rolling Stone cover "controversy," in which Bostonians once again swarmed and displayed their drastic anti-intellectual transformation en masse.
I gleefully locked rhetorical horns with at least five such "outraged" people this week, and ended up being labeled "a total fucking jerk" at one point (after daring to ask what, specifically, was so outrageous about the cover) before earning the "say whatever, I'm done responding" victory by default (ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED).
It's this simple: If you're "angry" about a very neutral, average-looking cover shot of Tsarnaev that the magazine didn't meaningfully doctor, didn't even take (and wasn't even the first to fucking run), just because it doesn't depict the kid making a pressure-cooker bomb while kicking puppies under the table and/or stabbing infants in the chest with his free hand...
...yyyeah.
I don't care if you were there, I don't care what you believe the guy did to you or people you loved (and this is NOT to say I don't sympathize or am not sorry for your loss).
RS was not attempting to "iconify" Tsarnaev or do anything positive for his public image. They were running a story on him, not even a devil's-advocate sort of thing nor a particularly interesting / well-researched story, and they just needed a shot of Tsarnaev that worked with their usual cover format. They found one and used it, just like the New York Times did two months ago for their front page.
End of story. The rest of us can all see it clear as day. And we think you're nuts. Your experiences do not justify some out-of-proportion, completely fucking insane interpretation of the cover shot.
Rolling Stone probably thanks you, though, for making national-park mountains out of previously-uncontroversial public-domain molehills... because no one has given a good goddamn about Rolling Stone in years, and now they're very likely to end up with recent-record circulation of this issue due to wishfully-thinking eBay speculators alone. Cha-ching. Thanks, nutcases.
Now, if Rolling Stone had done something like what I did above with the same pre-accused-bomber selfie portrait of Tsarnaev for their cover, then we could definitely talk about justified moral outrage. (Also, it would have been very interesting to see WaltDisneyCo's reaction.)
Does the picture of Tsarnaev make him look like a normal guy? Absolutely. Is that a problem? It shouldn't be. His trial is still ages away, not that I expect him to get a fair one, not that I expect Americans to ever learn the full truth of his story. But if he is the terrorist they say he is, he is but one of many, many thousands in the world.
An awful lot of those people look, seem pretty normal too. Any human is perfectly capable of killing another. You don't need to be a sociopath, or a supervillain, to decide to take others' lives in your own hands for some dumb "cause."
But for some reason, a lot of us feel we have to map labels like "sociopath" or "pure evil" onto terrorists anyway, which does nothing to help stop terrorism / murder / you name it, and certainly doesn't help us come to any kind of broader understanding of how to minimize global risk of such events befalling innocents.
This is perhaps one of the most unfortunate natural tendencies of humans - when someone harms us, hurts us, does something unspeakably evil even if they themselves are not evil on the whole... they become "other" to us, not even human. They're "them" now. They're no longer "us."
When it comes to "them," anything goes, fuck due process, suspend their human privileges and basic rights, do whatever you like to them, punish them to the fullest, cruelest, most perverse extent possible. "We" condone it. "We," in fact, demand it.
And, interestingly enough, this is the very same senseless, 100% unjustifiable mindset that permits so many otherwise "normal" people to commit horrific acts of terrorism in the first place. It just goes to show you that "we" are, in fact, not so different from "them" after all.
Irrelevant note: The lyric quoted in this week's subject line is from Sebadoh's "Gimme Indie Rock," a [edit:] 1991 classic, released contemporaneously with the last time that anyone in the world gave two shits about Rolling Stone magazine.