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What if I take my problem to the United Nations?
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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What I wonder about is the impetus that takes young people from sitting on the couch playing video games to blowing marathon spectators up. Because I didn't know many nineteen-year-old guys who could be arsed to care that much about anything.
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Thank you for this post. I wonder what defines a weapon of mass destruction. Many people were killed, but so many were injured. Is death or intent to kill outright the specified destruction? I am asking in earnest and have not followed the media closely on discussions of this.
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That is, it's not unreasonable to call a bomb a WMD. Had those bombs been placed differently (like higher up), had medical personnel not been on site already, and had Boston hospitals not been fantastic, it's easily possibly that the death toll could have been in the hundreds. A WMD doesn't have to level a city, it just has to have the potential to kill a lot of people.
The potential for mass death and destruction is what makes a WMD, not the actual results. Releasing harmful biological or radiological or chemical agents in a public location is a WMD attack, regardless of how many people actually died - even if that number is zero.
Had the brothers sprayed the crowd with gunfire, the death toll also could have been at a WMD level. But guns cannot be classified as WMD for political reasons.
Totally agree on the basic issue, though. Newtown is considered a criminal act but not one of terrorism, even though it created plenty of terror and no one has any idea why the guy did it - his motives certainly could have been political - but the murderer was a white Christian and he used a gun.
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True...there were also the bombings by Weatherman and other groups in the late 60s/early 70s. Even though many of them considered themselves to be at war with the United States government, they were still tried in civilian court.
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I wish you healing, and that Adresteia will keep her distance from you.
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Thank you. I have various political issues with how the police and the DHS handled this incident, and you've touched on some of them.
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Let's not forget the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
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Nine
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THIS RIGHT HERE. I have been trying to explain this to a few family members who have really got the whole "those damn foreigners again" viewpoint going on *headdesk* I doubt they'd be willing to pick up the book you suggest, but I can at least try pointing them to Wikipedia...
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Thank you for the clarification. I had been thinking of WMDs primarily in terms of biological, radiological, or chemical warfare, or larger-scale efforts like firebombings.
but the murderer was a white Christian and he used a gun.
This is a real question: is "Chechen" not presently seen as "white"? Or is just that the Tsarnaevs are Muslim and to most of mainstream America that disqualifies them straight off?
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The ghost of John Adams had better feel guilty about the Alien and Sedition Acts, because they stand as precedent to some of these problems. (Seriously, John, that was where you had to fall down politically? I mean, I'm glad you didn't have a mistress of sketchy consent, but you were so good about so many other things!)
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My mother, on any form that asked for her ethnicity, always checked "Other" and then wrote "Jewish."
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It couldn't hurt. I mean, it's Wikipedia. That's the most reliable source on the internet!
(I am sorry you are having those arguments with your family. I hope at least some of the facts get through.)
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I did not want to not talk about them. I suspect there are very few things I could say on my livejournal that would make any difference outside of a small number of readers, but nonetheless: it seemed important. Being entirely silent felt like complacency, or acceptance, or worse, not even noticing.
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The New Yorker is now writing about this.
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