This is a political post, because I am slowly catching up on the news. My month of crashing health has culminated in a sinus infection and I spent a lot of yesterday either talking to doctors or playing phone tag with them. Today I am just wiped.
I was really, really not all right with Dzokhar Tsarnaev not being read his Miranda rights when he was arrested. That worried me deeply, especially when I heard the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts defend the decision on the grounds of terrorism. So I am glad to see that he was read them in hospital. Anything else, I would have had to start figuring out who to write letters to, wondering if it would make any difference in a world where terror is apparently a country with citizens we can all recognize on sight.
For similar reasons, I am glad to see that he will be tried in a civilian court, not as an enemy combatant. I was not all right with the Tsarnaev brothers, presently and posthumously, being treated as some kind of junior-grade al-Qaeda because they used bombs rather than automatic rifles. I do not want to downplay the atrocity of targeting a sports event—a pride of bodies—with weapons intended to maim even more than murder. But it seemed to be one of the contributing factors in their othering, as though the bombing was not American, as a gun massacre would have been. I kept thinking of anarchists as they turn up in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction, so often from Russia or other foreign countries where bomb-throwing is a thing. I really wish my book about Émile Henry (The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (2009), John Merriman) was not in a box somewhere. Its point is that explosions are quite easily homegrown. We have had them in this country before.
That said, I do not understand the charge of using a weapon of mass destruction. I do not think it is possible to level a city with a pressure cooker unless you're xkcd. Everyone on the internet before me has already agreed that school shootings and mall shootings and shootings in movie theaters add up to higher body counts than the toll on the Marathon, sickening and shocking and long-echoing as it will be. So maybe we are back to the foreignness of a bombing after all, the people on the other side of the war from us, whose weapons we would never use (even if we do); this is just the way of getting it in. And the death penalty. I am not surprised to see it in the conversation, but I don't know what it's going to do, other than give me another reason to loathe social media if that is the outcome of the trial. Massachusetts took it off the books in 1984. That's within my lifetime, all right, but I'd like to keep it that way.
I don't think I have anything profound to say. I am glad our judicial system is not as badly broken as I'd been assuming it was. The other thing in the news right now is the funerals of the marathon dead and the MIT police officer who turned out to live in Teele Square, which I hope are easy on their families and friends; it's not my grief and not my place to say anything for them.
Stay away, Adresteia.
I was really, really not all right with Dzokhar Tsarnaev not being read his Miranda rights when he was arrested. That worried me deeply, especially when I heard the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts defend the decision on the grounds of terrorism. So I am glad to see that he was read them in hospital. Anything else, I would have had to start figuring out who to write letters to, wondering if it would make any difference in a world where terror is apparently a country with citizens we can all recognize on sight.
For similar reasons, I am glad to see that he will be tried in a civilian court, not as an enemy combatant. I was not all right with the Tsarnaev brothers, presently and posthumously, being treated as some kind of junior-grade al-Qaeda because they used bombs rather than automatic rifles. I do not want to downplay the atrocity of targeting a sports event—a pride of bodies—with weapons intended to maim even more than murder. But it seemed to be one of the contributing factors in their othering, as though the bombing was not American, as a gun massacre would have been. I kept thinking of anarchists as they turn up in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction, so often from Russia or other foreign countries where bomb-throwing is a thing. I really wish my book about Émile Henry (The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (2009), John Merriman) was not in a box somewhere. Its point is that explosions are quite easily homegrown. We have had them in this country before.
That said, I do not understand the charge of using a weapon of mass destruction. I do not think it is possible to level a city with a pressure cooker unless you're xkcd. Everyone on the internet before me has already agreed that school shootings and mall shootings and shootings in movie theaters add up to higher body counts than the toll on the Marathon, sickening and shocking and long-echoing as it will be. So maybe we are back to the foreignness of a bombing after all, the people on the other side of the war from us, whose weapons we would never use (even if we do); this is just the way of getting it in. And the death penalty. I am not surprised to see it in the conversation, but I don't know what it's going to do, other than give me another reason to loathe social media if that is the outcome of the trial. Massachusetts took it off the books in 1984. That's within my lifetime, all right, but I'd like to keep it that way.
I don't think I have anything profound to say. I am glad our judicial system is not as badly broken as I'd been assuming it was. The other thing in the news right now is the funerals of the marathon dead and the MIT police officer who turned out to live in Teele Square, which I hope are easy on their families and friends; it's not my grief and not my place to say anything for them.
Stay away, Adresteia.
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