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cali

(114,904 posts)
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 05:45 AM Apr 2013

Adam Gopnik's take in the New Yorker: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Lost and Found

I don't really have a position on whether the decision to close down Boston was the right one, but I think Gopnik's piece is insightful and worth the read. I've posted the final 4 paragraphs because they touch on issues that I've thought about quite a bit:


<snip>
However the details turn out, this is certainly a tragic story about America far more than it is a tale about the exotic elsewhere. Whatever had happened, it had happened here. Surprises surely await us as we go on, but an intuitive scenario—in which an older brother who had struggled with the promise and disillusion of American life and turned to extremist Islam for comfort, dominated and seduced a younger brother not born or made for violence—seemed plausible. But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists.

And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that) the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace.

The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.

Experts tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen; poets and novelists tell us the meaning of what they haven’t seen, either, but have somehow managed to fully imagine. Maybe the literature of terrorism, from Conrad to Updike (and let us not forget Tolstoy, fascinated by the Chechens) can now throw a little light on how apparently likable kids become cold-hearted killers. Acts of imagination are different from acts of projection: one kind terrifies; the other clarifies.

<snip>

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/04/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-is-found.html

6 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Adam Gopnik's take in the New Yorker: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Lost and Found (Original Post) cali Apr 2013 OP
say the murderer of Officer Collier instead of the haterperp name graham4anything Apr 2013 #1
gobbledygook. cali Apr 2013 #2
Funny, your answer(but not post title) here is in my long post I just put up. graham4anything Apr 2013 #3
This (and my worry about precedent) was the point of my thread malaise Apr 2013 #4
This is very very silly Benton D Struckcheon Apr 2013 #5
Think what these two assclowns were able to do, and now consider the Mumbai attacks hatrack Apr 2013 #6
 

graham4anything

(11,464 posts)
1. say the murderer of Officer Collier instead of the haterperp name
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 06:17 AM
Apr 2013

have a long answer, but will make a separate thread on it.

 

cali

(114,904 posts)
2. gobbledygook.
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 06:21 AM
Apr 2013

and no, I will not. His name is his name. That he lost his humanity is not a reason for me to lose mine.

 

graham4anything

(11,464 posts)
3. Funny, your answer(but not post title) here is in my long post I just put up.
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 06:37 AM
Apr 2013

obviously you didn't read my new thread as we were both writing at the same time.
But unwittingly, your answer was directly answered in some detail.

Shame that those don't see how these two private people haterperps are the ones that took away freedom and liberty.THEY are, in their quest for their 15 minutes of FAME, they want their name to live Forever.
Fame(c)Michael Gore/Dean Pitchford.)

As Don McLean said "Fire is a devil's only friend".(actually someone else said it earlier, but I specifically reference American Pie for a reason.)

malaise

(267,823 posts)
4. This (and my worry about precedent) was the point of my thread
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 06:49 AM
Apr 2013

The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace.

Benton D Struckcheon

(2,347 posts)
5. This is very very silly
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 08:24 AM
Apr 2013

It was a decision made after a very specific set of events: the assassination of the MIT officer, and then that amazing gunfight where 200 rounds were exchanged along with IEDs and homemade grenades. And then they found another device at a Boston subway station as I recall, something along those lines.
So there was imminent danger from having one of these two still on the loose, with no one knew what still on him. In the London case there was no such huge gunfight.
Now, I do question shutting down Boston itself. Watertown, Cambridge, maybe one or two other towns, but it was pretty obvious he wasn't going to be able to make his way back to Boston if they knew he'd ultimately fled the scene of that fight on foot. But considering they'd already committed one carjacking and he could have committed another, it's tough to question that one either.
I usually like Adam Gopnik, but this column was seriously inane.

hatrack

(59,442 posts)
6. Think what these two assclowns were able to do, and now consider the Mumbai attacks
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 08:30 AM
Apr 2013

Use the police & government reaction in Boston as your starting point.

Now imagine 20 or 30 of these guys, spread out at random, murdering people, blowing shit up, and imagine what that would do to a major metro area.

Americans haven't been the only ones glued to TV & Twitter. Lots of people in Yemen and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia are watching and learning, and imagining a new variation on asymmetric tactics.

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