When monsters look normal
by digby
A Massachusetts State Police officer has released never-before-seen photos of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which show him bloodied and bruised as sniper teams take aim at his head.
Sgt. Sean Murphy, a tactical photographer with the state police, handed over the photos to Boston Magazine on Thursday. He released them because he was furious with Rolling Stone for running the now-infamous cover photo of Tsarnaev that many say glamorizes the Boston bombing suspect. He told the magazine that he wanted to counter the message he says Rolling Stone conveys.
The gory pics are here if looking at them will make you feel better. They didn’t do a thing for me. But then bloody pictures of terrorist suspects don’t generally turn me on or somehow compensate for the pain and suffering of their victims.
I don’t really have an opinion of the Rolling Stone cover. I read the article and it indeed shows that Tsarnaev was, on the surface, an exceedingly normal-seeming young man, even exceptional in some ways. That was their point — that you can’t judge a book by its cover, as it were. I accept that it hurts people to see him on a newsstand looking appealing in any way because they understandably see him as a monster, but as Michael Shaw pointed out at BagNewsNotes:
Rather than write off these people as evil and “other,” what distinguishes us as a civilized society is the attempt to understand who and why. (It’s what I was trying to get at with that suicide bomber pic the other day.) I mean, why did someone as personable as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev go over to the dark side? Is it such an act of humanity just to realize it’s not a one word answer, especially if that word is “Islam”? Is there no relevance to the implosion of the Tsarnaev family, that crazy hostile mother and the residual weight of Jahar’s relationship with his terror of a brother? (Before dispensing with the cover as completely gratuitous, by the way, it’s worth noting it does legitimately exploit the sympathy Jahar engendering on the lam based on speculation he might have been under his brother’s power.)
Now, does that justify framing the kid as a heartthrob — especially on Boston newsstands? Of course not. But in the media sphere, the devices are pretty staked out by now. As such, exaggerating and elevating the kid’s likeability might be justifiable if it leads citizens beyond the knee-jerk opposite — framing these young men as simply monsters — to look and think more deeply.
And how seeing him bloodied with gun sites on his forehead makes up for the hurt of seeing him on the cover of Rolling Stone looking normal, I don’t quite understand. Or maybe I do. It’s human. But it’s not exactly civilized.
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