We have a natural wish to make sense of the unfathomable, but the unfathomable isn’t anything we can understand.
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Consider all these phrases, repeated over and again since the FBI released the identities of the bombing suspects.
A good athlete
Popular in school
A well-liked student
An honors student
An intelligent young man
Playing for the volleyball team
Member of the wrestling team
A former boxer
Married to a Christian woman
Believe in one God
Identify as Americans
Muslim young men
Chechen young men
White Muslims
Muslim Russians
Grew up in in Kyrgyzstan
Spent time in Russia
Family in Russia
Family in Chechnya
Traveled to Russia
Identify as Russians
Chechens living in Dagestan
Radical Muslim
Radicalized by the Internet
Wearing a suicide vest
What do all these phrases have in common? If we’re to be accurate—if we view them from a sober distance, removed of any context—we see they have less in common than sewer caps have with lids of jars. But they continue to be used, in some cases rather irresponsibly, to provide a kind of delusion of comfort. They’re meant to help us manage chaos, make the marathon bombing something other than unfathomable. In my view they are doing the opposite. The worst delusion is the one we’re unaware of.
So what if we know they suspects are ethnically Chechen? Most Westerners have no idea where Chechnya is or anything about it. Some could offer a vague, foolish description: Chechnya is some sort of Muslim country or region somewhere around (or maybe inside?) Russia. Yeah, and some kind of wars took place over there. They also have crude oil, I think, and terrorists. Yeltsin and Putin, both bad men, did horrible things there, so anyone who comes from there, or was born to parents from there, is totally pissed off.
Great.
We might ask why any layman should be expected to have a sophisticated view of Chechnya. And we’d be on the right track: given our ignorance, why should virtually every media report be so concerned with the ethnic identity of these suspected bombers, especially when no motive is known? Some news outlets did a good job throughout Friday’s (4/19) broadcasts to give historical background about Chechnya. But so what? When we actually gain a better-than-layman’s view of Chechnya, as several of my Russian colleagues inform me, the suspects’ actions become only more difficult to understand. They are diaspora Chechens. If they have some problem against America or the world, they expressed it by attacking a marathon. Understand?
♦◊♦
We have similar levels of “knowledge” about intelligent boys, former boxers or honors students. Do the intelligent have a higher or lower capacity to commit atrocities? What are we supposed to assume about men if they were honors students or athletes? I was an honors student at a Catholic high school. Some of my honors classmates were perverts; others were hopeless, harmless nerds. One paranoid idiot carried thrusting blades and throwing stars in his pockets. Another asshole, graduating seventh or eighth in our class, was the middle linebacker of our football team; yet no one believed his football caused him to be an asshole, or vice versa, or that his book smarts were ironic. I knew him for four years but can’t explain why he mistreated virtually anyone he ever met. In fact, I doubt the guy’s father, an asshole I happened upon at some parent-teacher affair, could offer any explanation.
If either the son or the father, people generally hateful of most anyone, committed an atrocity, I’d be shocked and confused. The capacity to dehumanize is unfathomable. For me personally, there is no amount of information, no geo-political or historical argument, no analysis of a culture or demographic, no psychological profile, interrogation of a parent or dissection of a brain that could possibly expound how someone should decide to put bombs alongside a marathon. At the same time, no sociology lecture will help me understand how an entire culture, perhaps the most diverse in history—and now living under the threat of terrorism for decades, having suffered bombings and shootings of all varieties, perpetrated by all kinds of men, itself responsible for a military machine that consistently engages inexplicable conflicts—could take any of these hasty “explanations” seriously. Shouldn’t we be demanding greater sophistication from our media sources and ourselves?
At least one of these young men will not be brought to trial. Some people hope the second one dies. I don’t. I hope the surviving suspect—and we must remember that he is, at this point, a suspect—heals up to be interrogated, tried, cross-examined and, if he is proven to be guilty, punished alongside whatever accomplices might materialize. Even if his ethnicity turns out to be an important factor, I do not expect to feel a sense of understanding. There is nothing easy about this, and wishing for it to become simple, a matter of categorizing the suspect as some “type” or turning him into a comfortable “other”, is to seek false comfort. It’s also dangerous. For many people, these are the only Chechens they will have ever heard anything about.
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Photo by watchsmart.
Apologies for the double-post above: unlike the two earlier comments I had submitted to other threads my original one here seemed to disappear and I ferreted out the site’s comment policy and revised and resubmitted it.
Your response (I’m not sure to whom) was one of the most thoughtful I’ve read, Brian – thank you for it. For whatever it may be worth I’ll take a shot at reducing the ‘unfathomability’ of the Tsarnaev brothers’ acts: 1. America has engaged in massive evil (to use the word that’s floating around here) for at least the last decade (and arguably far longer), most of it directed at countries associated with Islam (though it’s not clear just how big a role religious fervor played in the bomb plot rather than, say, mere ethnic identification or possibly just a… Read more »
Your response (I’m not sure to whom) was one of the most thoughtful I’ve read, Brian – thank you for it. I’ll take a shot at reducing the ‘unfathomability’ of the Tsarnaev brothers’ acts, though it may fall on deaf ears (please forgive considerable repetition from a post which I made to another thread here): 1. America has engaged in massive evil (to use the word that’s floating around here) for at least the last decade (and arguably far longer), most of it directed at countries associated with Islam (though it’s not clear just how big a role religious fervor… Read more »
Let me know what you think of my response: http://realnospinzone.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/sympathy-for-the-devil/
I agree. Well said. I also wrote a post about the “unfathomable” events. I think words reveal and obscure. Sometimes they are inadequate in trying to understand such horror committed by fellow human beings…
http://jimmydumpssunnyjimmy.blogspot.com/2013/04/unfathomable-evil.html
I believe a good many people heard of Chechnya during and after the Beslan massacre.
And we know the motives: Islamic fundamentalist jihad, as expressed in their various emails and contacts.
Unless “we” insist that expressed motivations aren’t real motivations and it’s something else.