To say that I’ve been following the Boston bombings case throughout the past week would be a considerable understatement. I’ve read every major and tangential article about it, often multiple times. I’ve rotated a slew of hashtags (#Watertown, #Bostonbombings, #Tsarnaev) through the search bar on Twitter several times a day, and a few nights when I’ve woken up at 4am. I’ve seen each of the fifteen or so pictures that are making the rounds, from the photos of the bombing itself, to the surveillance photos of the brothers, to the brothers’ five or six photos culled from their social media sites, to the play-by-play over the 20ish hours of the manhunt: snack-run gas station photo, swat guys on someone’s shed photo, bullet holes through the wall and chair photo, Dzhokhar’s hangdog boat-staddling photo and his shirt-pulled-up, skinny-ribbed photo, and his blurry, bloody-faced ambulance photo. (I would link to these but you’ve probably seen some if not all of them already.) I even managed to accidentally see the grotesque Tamerlan’s-dead-body photo. I’ve been, ashamedly and in a word, obsessed.
While the story itself is fixating in the way an airport adventure novel is fixating (bombs? A police chase? Calling in the FBI? A shootout? A manhunt? Shutting down a city?), I would probably, under normal circumstances, have moved on by now. The news cycle is, bit by bit and rightly so, starting to. But it wasn’t really the action element that hooked me, that made me obsessed.
While the story itself is fixating in the way an airport adventure novel is fixating (bombs? A police chase? Calling in the FBI? A shootout? A manhunt? Shutting down a city?), I would probably, under normal circumstances, have moved on by now. The news cycle is, bit by bit and rightly so, starting to. But it wasn’t really the action element that hooked me, that made me obsessed.Much has been made of little brother Dzhokhar’s Twitter account (ominous tweets!), and I looked into it on Saturday out of curiosity.
Friends’ accounts in the media are adamant about how nice the kid was, how normal and social and funny he was, how shocked they were. People say things like this after people snap pretty often (“quiet, a good student”) because most sociopaths do OK blending in socially. But Jahar’s world of tweets completely captured me–because it so perfectly and utterly reflected the exact opposite of what I would expect a terrorist’s Twitter feed, were I asked to imagine one, to look like.
It is the bro-iest thing I’ve ever seen. Mainly he tweets about cars, pot, TV shows, girls, food. Sometimes he shares jokes or mundane observations. He retweets uncontroversial, random facts or pictures from users like “Science Porn” and “Not Common Facts” and “Earth Pics.” (...)
As horrifying as it sounds, I kind of get why people are susceptible to the conspiracies—because both Dzhokhar’s jokey online persona (“Beemer, benz, bentley? Honda, bro” [December 23]) and his moody good looks (moppety hair, clean/symmetrical features) make him seem an unlikely terrorist (see: the halo effect).
But I’m not a conspiracy theorist—he was spotted in surveillance images, he was involved in a carjacking and a shootout, he ran from police and emerged bloodied from a boat, and he allegedly admitted involvement from his hospital bed. It seems highly unlikely that he did not bomb people in Boston on April 15.
It’s just that when my mind tries to leap from Jahar (“Peanut butter, fluff, and nutella #iwentthere”)—to Suspect #2, coolly planting a bomb next to an 8-year-old, shooting at the police—it falls into the void every single time. Even when taking into account the heavy influence his brother most likely had. When you’re young you sometimes get mixed up in things, but they’re not usually bombings.
Because if he drank, and smoked weed, and immersed himself in American pop culture (The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones), and loved cars, and loved money, and loved women, and blew up three people and wounded hundreds more on a Monday afternoon in the name of Allah, that makes him either a brilliantly deceitful sociopath—which I have trouble believing—or, somehow, a casual terrorist, showing up to a bombing the way I might show up to a protest.
I admitted my obsession with the Tsarnaev case the other day to a friend, who responded pragmatically, “There’s probably a lot we don’t know.” While it’s absolutely true, why do I feel like I know this kid, like having never known him even I have a right to be shocked?
by Emilie Shumway, The Point | Read more:
Image: uncredited
