So much about American democracy needs fixing. The planet’s burning up, and we can’t fix it
because we dance to the tune of Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron and
BP. 90% of Americans are in favor of
greater gun control and 60% of the Senate votes against. The media are full of evidence that American
democracy is in shambles, and everybody I know has victim fatigue. Many of my friends tell me they don’t read my
downer diatribes anymore. If you’re
going to write, send more music and doggie pictures, they tell me.
Solutions are elusive because the issues are complex. We don’t want to give up our cars, and
Republicans get a lot of mileage out of scaring people about rising gas
prices. The people of Wyoming get the
same representation in the Senate as the people of California do, even though
we outnumber them 66 to 1. So while it
makes sense for Dick Cheney to go hunting in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, Dianne
Feinstein normally doesn’t carry a gun when she goes to Oakland,
California. He speaks of “the rights of
law-abiding citizens” to carry guns. She knows how many kids die on the streets
of Oakland. We see things differently,
depending on where we come from.
I tried all week to avoid the misery that came out of Boston,
but there was no escaping it. It was top
news around the world for a while. My
first encounter with the story came following the Huffington Post coverage,
when I found myself getting terribly frustrated by one of the first sources I
normally turn to. They were going on and
on about “the suspect’s whereabouts.” I
had tuned in on the chase, so this is perhaps excusable, but I wanted to know
why these two young brothers were suspects.
It took me forever to get the story, and in the meantime I was listening
to interviews with their mother and father who claimed they were set up. Considering how common it is to hear of
overzealous police and prosecutors, one has to wonder.
I am satisfied, now that it has come out these guys shot and
killed some of their pursuers and that they hijacked a car and apparently
confessed to its driver that they were indeed the Marathon killers, that “suspects”
did in fact mean “killers” in this case.
But it still bothers me that the two words are now apparently used interchangeably
by so many people so much of the time.
The whole story went on that way, mixing good news with ugly
suspicions. I was happy to see people
burst into applause as the cops drove through Watertown in a kind of victory
lap after the capture. They put their
lives at risk and deserved such happy recognition. But what ruined the scene was the thuggish
people shouting U-S-A! U-S-A! and
pumping their fists, suggesting we had just gone to war and won against enemies
who had threatened us.
It’s the whole thing about war. Some Saudi Islamicists bomb the Twin
Towers and we manufacture lies to justify an invasion of Iraq. Most Americans still today accept that as
perhaps a mistake, in retrospect, but no big deal. A political error. Out of our hands.
Excesses from the liberation movements of the sixties leave us with a serious drug problem. Nixon
has the opportunity to declare a medical emergency and to identify the addicts
as victims. Instead, he creates "pushers" and "users" as enemies in a “War on Drugs.” For a history of that folly, see Dan Baum’s Smoke and Mirrors.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev is now dead. His little brother, Dzhokhar, is in the
hospital in critical condition. After
killing four people at the Boston Marathon and injuring 170, they ran into the
great American war machine – a thousand FBI agents, many thousands of SWAT
officers, all aided by the fact that everybody and everything is filmed these
days, and they were tracked down in very short order. They contributed to their own demise, by
admitting they were the Marathon killers to that guy whose car they hijacked,
but mostly it was modern-day sleuthing that got them. A story with a happy ending. Really.
I know there’s probably no way to keep this from being
defined as a terrorist act. It was
exactly that. The problem is, once it is
so labeled it gets to be part of the “war” on terrorism. That war on an abstract notion, as opposed to
a tracking down and punishing of individuals with brains fried with hatred at
real and perceived wrongs done to their religion.
Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Kelly Ayotte and Peter King, the
Muslim-hater, Republicans all, are all over this, wanting to make sure young Dzhokhar
doesn’t get any legal protection. No
Miranda rights, say our fearless leaders.
Enemy combatant. Guantanamo for
this guy. Oops, can’t do that, he’s an
American citizen. No matter. Enemy.
Enemy. Enemy. No rights.
We’re at war, you see.
We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.
No stinkin’ rights. We can
withhold Miranda. Alan Dershowitz, by
the way, is suggesting that decision may bite them in the ass if they want to
apply the death penalty. Dzokhar’s defense lawyer can argue you can withhold Miranda only if there is a
clear and present danger and an urgent need to get more information out of the
prisoner. The police had announced they
got the guys and the danger was over.
Careless, this is. All because we
need to act like gang busters all the time.
Start with the Big Berthas, bypass the normal procedures. Go to red alert. Go to war.
Look at this story.
Two boys from Central Asia, from the Caucasus. Chechens running from the War in Chechnya
with their mother and father. They come
make a home in Boston, where most of America’s Chechens live, I
understand. They grow up here. Speak English natively. They are Americans. Immigrants, like so many of us, but
Americans.
Something goes wrong.
They get caught up in religious fanaticism. Tamarlan does, at any rate. We don’t know how much independent thinking
went on on Dzhokhar’s part. He seems to
have been following the tribal value of following his big brother, not the more
common American value of being your own man.
We will have to wait and see if he speaks and if he can tell his
story. At the moment, the injuries to
his throat suggest this may be a long way off.
He’s been charged with use of a “weapon of mass destruction” – you know,
like the weapons the Americans used in Iraq – for which he could get the death
penalty.
Bottom line here, for me, is that with our clumsy American
ways, our bull in the China shop tendency to panic, to shut down the city –
effective as it was – to call every conflict a war, thereby laying the ground
for military solutions – we’re always going to be destructive instead of smart.
The French sociologist, Olivier Roy, has made the case
several times over that France’s problems (and this would apply elsewhere in
Europe, as well) with politicized Islamic movements are as much home-grown as
they are rooted in terrorism generated abroad.
Young people of Muslim heritage get caught between the religion and
ethnic identities of their parents on the one hand, and the outsider label in France,
the only home they’ve ever known. While
women in Muslim countries fight to take off the hijab, many French Muslim girls
go against their mothers’ wishes and put it on.
I suspect something like this is going on in the case of the Tsarnaev
boys. Just a guess, of course, since my
knowledge is limited to my attempts to read between the lines in all the news
reports.
But one thing seems clear.
The information-challenged right wingers who want to blame immigrants,
or Islam, or some other “other” are wrong.
There may be reason to fear terrorist groups in Pakistan or Yemen or
wherever we drop bombs from drones. But
that’s not the whole story, by any means.
You can call this 19-year old Muslim boy named Dzokhar, lying
in critical condition in a Jewish hospital, a terrorist if you want. You’d be technically correct. But don’t miss the fact that he’s also a
boy. That his horizons up till now have
been limited. That he grew up mostly in
Boston and formed his view of the world in large part by what he was exposed to
in the United States. It will be
relatively easy to try him, find him guilty, and execute him. But if you want to understand him, don’t lay
the blame on Islam. Look for answers in
the struggle young people go through looking for identity and getting caught in
the cracks, being too much exposed to America’s killer side and not enough
exposed to its idealism. Overwhelmed by
the challenge to make sense of the fight between tradition and modernity.
I used to say I was little more than the last book I
read. Susceptibility to fads and to any
given zeitgeist is part of the rapids kids have to swim in their teens and
twenties. Dzokhar, I’m convinced, got
caught on the rocks.
We could take any number of paths from here on. We could try to understand him and educate
ourselves about what thousands of young people all over the world are facing in
this struggle with modernity. Or we
could do what we are far more likely to do.
Listen to politicians who will whip us up and make us cry for blood,
because it will get them votes.
I wish things were otherwise.
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