Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City: Boston, What We Know and What We Don't

For most of the world - and, if we are being truthful, for most of the people in the Boston area - the events unfolding during and after the Marathon bombing were experienced at some remove, even for all those locked in their homes. Mobile phone, internet, TV, radio or some other electronic approximation of reality.

So, it's useful to remember that as we try to make sense of what happened this week - and more importantly now - as we try to figure out why. Because it seems likely that the two Tsarnaev boys who did this deed and who have, or will, pay for it probably lived much of their lives and received many of the impulse to act from the same sources.

Boston is one of those American cities through which many people, often young, cycle for a few years. It has hundreds of colleges and universities. It's pretty, walkable, sports-crazy, historic, intelligent, entertaining and fun. It usually leaves a positive imprint. I have lived there, as have - and do - members of my family and a whole bunch of friends. Once I had called or emailed to make sure everyone was ok, there wasn't much to do but watch events unfold. You knew these guys were going to be caught quickly, but the overarching question was why they acted.

The first inkling I had was when Dzokhar Tsarnaev's Twitter feeds were released. 'Aint no love in the heart of the city,' he tweeted in one of his first messages. Which sent chills down my spine because I have that tune on my iPod.

It's a song that was first recorded by Bobby Blue Bland in 1974. It's since been covered by other artists. It's a haunting melody about pain and fear and sadness and alienation. The Tsarnaevs contributed to that lack of love with their bombs and the destruction they wrought. But something about our world and the way we live it made them susceptible to its message. This is not to blame the internet or modern mores or Russians, Chechnya's miserable history or to imply any sort of collective guilt. To understand the brothers' motivation so that we can try to prevent someone else from following the same path seems important, however.

As one commentator has already written, this act seems more like the school shootings at Columbine or Sandy Hook than 9/11. Emotional youths, not hardened ideologues or terrorists. Senseless, angry, dismissive of human life's possibility and hope, especially the perpetrators' own. Investigators may well find a global terror connection, but it seems reasonable to suspect these boys were used, not users.

As a civilization, we find the emotional support we need on the 'net if we can not find it in 'real' life. Which further cements and encourages our alienation. That singularity, in turn, allows anger to build - and justifies it. We are often too physically disconnected from those who would salve our hurts and moderate our behavior. These influences are all around us, if we care to look. Learning how to identify and manage them, then finding the will to do so, is a huge task, but probably a good place to start. JL

Adam Gopnik comments in The New Yorker:

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.
As always in America, what actually happened near Boston braided entirely into what was being shown and said, so that the two became inseparable. There were two, and then one, terrorists on the run in a Boston suburb; there were two, and then one, terrorists at large in the American imagination. The strange grim day wore on into the blue-and-white flashing night, with the apparent and blessedly peaceful and rightly well-applauded surrender of a more or less intact Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Then, of course, the cops spoke and officials stepped forward to claim credit, or at least a piece of the spotlight, for the arrest. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz announced that now “my journey begins.” One imagined the real heroes and heroines of the occasion standing back in the shadows, smiling ironically at the politicians’ posturing. All the while, though, you couldn’t help separate thinking about terrorism from thinking about the way that we represent it.
The incomparable A. J. Liebling wrote once that there are three kinds of journalists: the reporter, who says what he’s seen; the interpretive reporter, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he’s seen; and the expert, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he hasn’t seen. The first two—reporters and interpretive reporters—have been largely undermined by economics and incuriosity. But the third category never stops growing. We are now a nation of experts, with millions of people who know the meaning of everything that they haven’t actually experienced.
There are still paradoxes and ironies, surprising heroes and unexpected goats in the new reign. Sometimes the professional experts really are undone by the amateurs. Waking up at six-thirty on Friday morning and hearing what had happened in the night, I followed my own generational instincts, honed on Vietnam and Watergate and the Gulf War, and turned on the television to see the usual stern-jawed “terrorism experts” being stern, scary, and obviously not knowing what the hell they were talking about. Within an hour, with the help of my eighteen-year-old, who insisted on turning from television toward the Web, we had the Tsarnaev brothers’ names, school history, wrestling involvement, vKontakte (Russian Facebook) pages, YouTube videos, and boxing photos.
And we already had a glimpse of how this might be a tragedy of assimilation and its discontents. A well-liked student at a good public school, a Golden Gloves boxer—somehow they had transformed their souls in ways that made it possible for them to casually drop devices meant to rip human flesh apart next to an eight-year-old boy and his family. Of course, the pseudo-expertise of the official experts was more than matched by the pseudo-expertise of the amateurs. The night before, the attempt to hang this thing on a poor—and still missing—Indian-American student at Brown, had been crazy, not to mention libelous, not to mention heartbreaking to his family.
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.