On the 10th year anniversary of the Boston bombing, The New York Times has a long feature about the people who were close to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and their feelings of shock and betrayal when they saw his face on TV.
Ten years after the attack that killed three people and injured hundreds, Youssef Eddafali still wrestles with guilt and anger over the “monster” he thought he knew.
Mr. Eddafali, 29, still was not sure who he was writing to. Was it the friend he had once thought of as a brother, whose journey as a young Muslim immigrant had seemed to mirror his own? Or the calculating killer who revealed himself on April 15, 2013, when he murdered and maimed innocent people in the name of the faith they both shared?
In the end, Mr. Eddafali concluded it was both, so he split his missive into two parts. The first he wrote to “the old Jahar,” the boy he had known. The second letter was written to a stranger. He addressed it to “The Monster.”
A few things: you have to get halfway through the story to learn that Eddafali was subjected to illegal government surveillance and harassment that caused him to fail out of college, deepening his depression. Seems like that’s more important than lurid obsession over the “monster.”
How is this a useful piece of content? The reason everyone was shocked to see Tsaernev’s face on TV—friends, teachers, everyone—is that by all accounts he was a normal, dumb teenager who got high a lot. It also seems pretty clear that he was in the thrall of his older brother, almost a teenager himself.
We all pretend Tsaernev has to be killed by the state decades after a horrible act of violence he committed at 19. It’s allegedly out of respect for the victims. Yeah? How many of their names do you know off the top of your head? Why aren’t there dozens of features about them?
And what’s the NRA’s body count? Or that of the GOP politicians currently groveling at the NRA national conference in Indianapolis this weekend?
I’ve been to the NRA conference in Nashville (where the poor honky-tonk bartenders posted polite signs asking attendees to not get too drunk while armed) and Dallas.
It’s truly a fascinating event. The first thing you notice is that the conference hall is filled with giant posters depicting rugged American masculinity: Founding Fathers drawn as weirdly sexy and buff; cops; marines in action. A steely-jawed Wayne LaPierre, before all of the drama.
And the attendees? I mean, I don’t want to be mean, but let me tell a story. In Dallas, this idiot attending the conference was staying in the motel room across from mine. He was fucking around with his gun, and accidentally discharged it, executing his headboard. The cops who came to take a report could barely suppress their laughter, but for a while it was pretty scary, because the bullet did go into the adjacent room, and the Bangladeshi motel clerk had to frantically figure out if the room had had an occupant (it didn’t). (I was nowhere near the line of fire, I just emerged when I heard the motel clerk freaking out.)
So, they wish they were manly manly men who get to hook up with women who look like Melania or Dana Loesch. And man, do GOP hopefuls exploit this sad, fruitless urge to be manly and sexually virile.
Before attendees get to feel manly ogling executed big game animals, you have the IRC-Leadership conference, where every asshole who wrongly thinks they’ll be President goes to kiss up to the angry, scared white people who are the NRA’s main demographic.
You can always tell who wants to be there (Trump) and who has to be there (Jeb(!), DeSantis, probably, Pence. Nikki Haley. Of course Trump humiliated all of them, calling DeSantis DeSantcus (I’m sorry, why haven’t we arrived at DeSac yet?) and mocking Pence because the audience booed him. Pence did his best. This alleged Christian suggested we solve gun violence with a more swiftly administered death penalty.
“While the assailants in the most recent attacks were taken out by law enforcement on the scene, too many mass shooters languish in prison for years,” Pence said. “Justice delayed is justice denied. It’s inconceivable to me that the shooter who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 is languishing in a Florida prison.”
“I think the time has come for a federal death penalty statute with expedited appeal that would ensure that those who engage in mass shootings in this country face execution in months, not years,” he added.
He still got booed and mocked by Trump. How much humiliation can one person take?
A reader just posted this fascinating comment about the history of capital punishment in Jewish jurisprudence:
While in the history of Jewish law, the death penalty exists, the great rabbis and judges did everything in their power to make sure that the death penalty was never meted out. It was a horrific anti-Semitic attack [Tree of Life]. I am the daughter of a rabbi and the ex-wife of a rabbi. I have spent most Saturday mornings in synagogue, like the victims. But even in this case, killing in the states name…retribution is abhorrent.
Anyway, this is all to say that we should do gun control instead of state murder.
The only thing wrong with the NRA is that it isn't aggressive enough in defending the RIGHT of Americans to own weapons. Since most mass shooters are Democrats, maybe we should just prevent people from owning guns based on political affiliation?