Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. "White Hat." Tamerlan Tsarnaev. "Black Hat." Chechens. Born of Kyrgyzstan and Russia. Muslim, yes, but not the Muslims of the first fever swamp freak-outs always politically opportunistic imaginiations. Not the darker-skinned, "middle eastern looking" central casting stereotype straight out of a bad action adventure movie script variety of "the Other". Not from Iraq. Or, even "better", from Iran. Not from Syria. No. Not the people who were imagined when this first waves of exploitative fear stoking was on tap as the first order of business. But they will do. I expect, in the days to come, that these same people who were quick to be wrong will be even quicker to be crowing about how they were '100%' vindicated. That they were right all along. In private, they will all likely sigh a sigh of relief that it wasn't another Tim McVie that they would have taken them to places in the national conversation that they would most like to avoid at all costs as the architects of the Bircher as the Common Man.
I know exactly who it was that they had in mind at these moments:
“Whenever we have an attack like this it’s difficult not to think that it’s somehow involved in Islamic extremism,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, until recently a top member of the Homeland Security committee and still a prime mover on security bills. “I don’t have evidence to back that up. That’s just based on previous attacks.”
Representative Steve King of Iowa, a prominent House conservative, says Congress should be cautious about rushing immigration reform, especially after Monday’s bombing in Boston, where three people were killed. “Some of the speculation that has come out is that yes, it was a foreign national and, speculating here, that it was potentially a person on a student visa,” King says. “If that’s the case, then we need to take a look at the big picture.”
On immigration, King says national security should be the focus now, and any talk about a path to legalization should be put on hold. “We need to be ever vigilant,” he says. “We need to go far deeper into our border crossings. . . .We need to take a look at the visa-waiver program and wonder what we’re doing. If we can’t background check people that are coming from Saudi Arabia, how do we think we are going to background check the 11 to 20 million people that are here from who knows where.”
Pressing Texas Representative Louis Gohmert, C-SPAN host Greta Wodele Brawner noted that Rep. Steve King (-R-IA) had speculated that the Boston bombings were perpetrated by a "foreign national" and that Congress should proceed with caution on immigration reform. The Congressman strongly agreed with his caucus peer.
"We know that al Qaeda has camps with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border," Gohmert agreed. "We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanics when they're radical Islamists. We know these things are happening, and it's just insane to not protect ourselves and make sure that people come in -- as most people do, they want the freedoms we have."
No American citizen blows up random people. That’s a Middle Eastern scene, that’s not an American scene — when our crazies go off, they target the government, not streets that are crowded with people. -Glenn Beck
Ancestrally, I'm Norwegian by blood and a Bostonian by suburban proximity of birth.
For the first twelve (or so) years of my life I would spend Patriots Day as many sons and daughters of Middlesex county did every year. As spectators. As popcorn and popsicle consuming souls standing by with their families and friends alongside the old horsepath turned two-laned country road close to the starting line watching the race. Staring out at the surging human sea of anonymous marathoners. Cups of water held loosely out to those men and women streaming, bobbing, or just barely walk-jogging by on their way to a then-faraway place called downtown Boston and, maybe, victory. Even if only just personal one. First, in the town of Hopkington where I was held up to face the road as a baby wrapped in my favorite blanket, and then later on as a kid semi-standing/shuffling around in place in the town of Ashland of my youth. The Red Sox would play. There would be a cook-out. It was a time to play, not pray. You would watch, and watch, and watch, and then go home and find out who won.
In a time when the idea that somebody would bomb the event was utterly unthinkable.
My father was born in Norway, in an often frozen island in the northern part of the Land of the Midnight Sun, and he became a US Citizen in the mid 1960's. When I remember the Boston Marathons of my childhood, I remember his beard. Before it was snow white, even before it was salt and pepper. When once it was black and his Norwegian skin, rather than stereotypically ghostly white, was so bronze from his years at sea and working as a carpenter in the sun that most people thought he was Cuban or from Spain. When the runners surged past in those days, he towered over me. The world towered over me. Everything seemed so damned big and vast. Children sometimes can be overwhelmed by the world, but sometimes they can blissfully lose themselves, uterly and completely, in the mountains of little moments. Like Patriots days with a grape or orange popsicle in one hand, and a styrofoam cup filled with cold water held out with earnestness to a haggard stranger that you will likely never ever see again quickly passing by.
I found myself going to uncomfortable places as the horror of the Marathon Bombing sunk in.
Back when we didn't know their names, when we didn't yet have the murderers faces.
When the usual suspects went straight to "middle eastern" as in so "exotically brown".
To "the Other" of first choice, not "the Other" they got and that they'll need to massage a bit.
When mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik struck, when he murdered 77 people in cold blood, and wounded scores of others in the summer of 2011, my eldery father took it particularly hard. I didn't. I always marveled that one of these freaks didn't bubble up sooner. Fathers and sons tend to part their own seperate ways as they age. Sometimes, as with me and my father, bitterly and acrimoniously. The man of my youth dealt with the pressures of fatherhood by becoming a bully of the moment who would romanticize the past to his greatest, and at his earliest, convenience in the future. He parented through fear and intimidation and paid a terrible price for it in hindsight. Sometimes I forget he was once that towering figure of a man who I would watch the runners with as a boy. As a part of growing apart, I questioned what he accepted as gospel, and embraced what he rejected out of hand. Usually to my detriment, yes, but sometimes to my gain as with not clinging to the fairy tale verisons of us so desperately.
Fascism, White Powerism, and evil is something that my father's people, my people, have done a wonderful PR job of papering over. If you google 'White Power' and 'Norway' or 'Norwegian Death Metal' and 'Church Burnings' or 'Beheadings' you will see just how good a PR job. My ancestors not only raped murdered and maimed their way across the continent they came from, but they also invented something called 'The Blood Eagle'. You take your victim, expose his back to the air, then take your sword or ax and hack the ribs close to the spinal column until you have two slit-line channels down the victims back. Then, you reach in, scoop out the victim's lungs, and, as the spasms set into your victim, his lungs expand and flap around wildly like bloody eagles wings until he expires in agony. I am proud to be a Norwegian. I am. I'm just not in denial about who it is my people are and have been. We are a calm smiling face of a people that have a really dark and fucked up cultural closet beneath the surface. Even today.
Anders Behring Breivik. Norwegian Mass Murderer. His crimes flashed all over the world by our 24 hour news media. But he didn't just do it because he was evil or insane. He did it for a cause. For his politics. He was not just a mass murderer, but a terrorist with a manifesto and a cause. There might be more of him. More aligned with him, waiting to follow up his crimes with their own. There was not a single moment during the hysteria where I had to look around nervously about what he did. I'm not now, nor was I ever then, going to get stopped at the airport for an extra goings over by the Homeland Security personel. I'm not looked at, as a kind of cultural default, as a savage by the sort of stupid buffoons who are constantly looking to take advantage of any horror for their campaign against the Other. No matter how monsterous or vile the monster may be, if he is a White monster, he is not the Other. I will never ever have to live down, or bear the burden of, being from the same tribe or land as a Anders Behring Breivik.
Some shades of White Privilege are more obvious than others, and some more obscure.
I will never own a monster who looks like me. I will never live in fear because of one's monsterous act bleeding over onto me a world away or in my backyard. I should know that. Understand why that is. Say uncomfortable things out lound and write them down. If I want to help others reach a place where it all ends.
When I see a cute little cartoon Viking, a part of me marvels that raping and murdering your way across the world to the point of being legendary for it has odd and inappropriate payoffs if your culture lives long enough. You get cute little mass murdering rapists with toy swords and shields and smiling dragon long boats in tourist shops. When you get together with your friends of Irish and English ancestry, if you are close enough, you can make cutting remarks to them about the likelihood of your being related. The reason why is well-known to the point of not ever needing to be said. If we weren't white, and thought of as Christian as a people, we'd be so easily Othered like nobodies business for the underbelly of our culture's past and the hidden underbelly of our present. I thought about that, after the capitol city of my childhood home was assaulted by a sick mind or minds on Patriots days. I also wondered about the Muslims, both American and foreign born, of all creeds, in or out of Boston, who feared.
Who worried about the next shoe to drop, and worried about going outside or to work.
The New York Post, or Compost as I've known it as, was the first outlet I heard jump the gun. Saudi. Central casting. I imagined being Muslim. Dreading the idea that the investigation might reveal that it was someone who looked like me who did the deed. Who put their heads down at the news that a Saudi national was being questioned as a person of interest or a suspect and grimaced. As I said before, no matter how monsterous or vile the monster may be, if he is a White monster, he is not the Other. People who look like he does, who pray like he does, will not live in fear of owning his or her crime like their skin-color or their robes and garments or the sounds of their native land and religion is like a bloody scarlet letter. I will never ever have to live down, or bear the burden of, being from the same tribe or land as a Anders Behring Breivik. Even if he has a thousand followers just as vile and evil as he is. Even if those followers go on to commit their own heinous crimes in his and their causes. A darker shade of White Privilege.
I think my father, pushing 90, has a lot of fantasies about Norway and Breivik shook them to their foundations. Our people can be evil. Our people can do great harm for vile and malignant reasons and causes. No people is free of dark minds and souls. Evil is everywhere. It doesn't respect borders. And yet. And yet I found that when we touched base after the Boston Marathon bombing, I bristled when he nonchalantly wondered aloud if it was a Jihadi or a muslim who did it and if and when they would be caught. And he bristled when I brought up Anders Behring Breivik in the context of how we both would feel if we had, or were expected to, own him and his crimes because of the color of our skins and what God we prayed to and where we were from on Earth. It is not something you can isolate or end with a counter-Jihad. By the time our conversation was over, there was one thing we both agreed on. Although I wish it hadn't taken touching on Breivik, Norwegian Fascism, Edvard Quisling, and Viking slaughter.
"The Other" is a lie. A lazy and absurd construct that hateful petty little people cling to or sell for their own ideological or political gain. The fantasy that you can be made safer and stronger by living in a noxious soup of hate and fear. There are bad people in this world, and they come in every color of the rainbow and belong to every religion and creed devised by the human mind to explain the unexplainable, humanize the inhumane, and to justify the unjustifiable.
Karl Rove is Norwegian. (Which embarassess me to no end, especially when the Sons of Norway tongue-bathes him for an accident of birth like he slipped out of Valhallah with his flesh-colored hair a blowin'.) So. The odds of turning on Fox News and seeing a sea of rich white faces seethe about anything other than the social safety net being too generous over there is a joke. I think about that when other monsters strike and white conservatives get their echochamber ramped up. I will never have to worry about turning on Fox News and seeing wall-to-wall coverage of Norwegians as savage subhuman filth who needed to be rounded up and penned like animals. Or have to fear being murdered by some yahoo, like the cretin who killed that Sikh man after 9/11 because he though he "looked like a A-Rab". But millions of innocent people of color do. Countless people, no doubt, spent the hours after the Boston Marathon bombing wondering if and when more information came, if they were going to have to live in fear.
I think about being someone else and finding out that they had to watch their backs and think twice about their movements for something they had nothing to do with and would never ever support. There was no news implicating any person of any origin in the crime immediately afterwards. But that didn't stop the Othering Engine from ginning up anyway. It makes me sick. Trying to turn a horror into a political opportunity is a shameful act by people free of the burden of shame. Assuming so you can jump the gun and get some ideologically beneficial freak-out to result in some coin flowing your movement's way. At the expense of innocent people having to live in fear because they are the Others being tarred by the latest Othering. I'm a white male living in the United States of America, and so many just like me spend their entire lives never thinking about these things that so many others have to concern themselves with because of who they are and who I am.
You can't unpackage an unshared burden that you don't ever recognize or acknowledge.
Anders Behring Breivik isn't somebody I have to own, and as it turns out that the bombers are not persons of middle eastern origins, but Chenchens, neither should the vast majority of the innocent people who are to be caught up in the next great Othering for political profit and fearmongering for political gain at their expense. Already powerful people and trolling yahoos alike are filling in the blanks in the most convenient, and socially devisive ways they can. I think about how innocent lives can spiral out of control over events somebody like me doesn't have to ever imagine having to deal with. Or how, when a Pam Gellar sees a Muslim, and shakes in her boots, she gravitates towards the white familiar face. Say, the blond-haired blue eyed white Norwegian mass murderer behind her who makes her feel safe when he looks down and smiles at her for stupid reasons. A Breivik would be somebody these race-and-fear baiting opportunists might rush towards if struck with Muslim Derangement Syndrome in a crisis.
When he could be the shooter, or the bomber, because you don't know until you know.
Evil is everywhere. It lives in every color of the rainbow and every inch of Earth and it doesn't exclusively know and dwell inside a border or within a culture or a creed or come with any shade of skin tone. Because of this, it is a fact of life. You can choose to live in fear of hypothetical and abstract 'this might happen, so...' or you can choose not to be afraid. You can also choose not to fall into the lazy and useless trap of thinking that you can be safe, or safer, if only you live in fear and hate and ignorance and wall out the different from you or passively turn a blind eye or actively enable those exploiters who do. What happened psychologically to America after 9/11 was one of this great land's greatest moral and intellectual failures. We were attacked, and far too many of us let the worst of us do our thinking and acting for us in the days and months and years that followed that vile act of mass murder. Those who were the most right, and morally righteous, about how we should go forward were often marginalized if not outright smeared and attacked.
That's where I am right now, after the Boston Marathon Bombing and its now also tryingly horrific conclusion in my old home. No matter what else happens, or is revealed, never again. On any form of the Great Othering. On not seeing the things I get to dodge because I am white, and my ancestors Christian, in America. The great exploitation of fear for personal, political, or financial gain of those who exploit for power and profit. Or not seeing the uncomfortable sides of how its possible for these voices and forces to get into my head, my friends and families heads, and even start flirting with allowing the ear whigs of hatred and fear to taint my thinking and my thoughts as a middle class white man in America going forward. Because it keeps happening, and I need to short-circuit the cycle even if its only in me and my life. I don't care if I get scorned by idiots for not playing ball, because they depend on being enabled as much as they depend on shared hatred and fear to gain and maintain power.
When Charles Stewart murdered his wife in cold blood when I was a teenager living on the South Shore, and then blamed it on mythical maurading black people, monsters who were just looking for a white victim to terrorize or kill, it chilled the lives of many innocent people of color. Black Bostonians had to live in fear of the Police and of the possibility of mindless counter-violence to a lie being done to them by raging vengeful mobs. In those ugly days, everybody who looked like me who lost sleep at night might have lost sleep over the horror, or the simmering tension the truth only made bubble even hotter to the cities surface, but not out of THAT fear. Not over having to live down some collective ethnic or racial ownership of the horrible nature of both his crime and his gambit to avoid responsibility for it. It blots your view of how others live. Because monsters come in all sizes, races, religions, and creeds... but. But to some fetid souls, some monsters are more monsterous, and collectively tainting, than others.
The Saudi national questioned in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror blasts that killed three is considered a witness rather than a suspect, sources told the Daily News on Tuesday. Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, 22, remained hospitalized in Boston as investigators searched every inch of his Revere, Mass., apartment and grilled his roommate. But it turns out the student was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time when two bombs exploded Monday afternoon near the finish line of the event that draws runners from around the globe.
And, as if by magic, right on cue:
Howard Fineman Editorial director, Huffington Post Media Group
Did you know where Chechnya was? You probably do now. Do you know who Tamerlane was? Maybe you should look him up; the now-dead "Man in the Black Hat" was named after the 14th century Mongol conqueror.
Sigh. Not dark skinned, or "obviously" Muslim, so 14th Century Mongols!
"The Othering" will find a way.
And, any minute now, Chechens will be baby eaters whose blood is acid and tears flow directly from the Devil's own tearducts. The cynic in me expects photos of Chenchens to... OJ all of a sudden. For the subjects to mysteriously darken in appearance whenever they appear in the press. Expecially to panic the masses about the Chechnyan hoards painted with desriptive terms of long dead Mongol ones. As I said, nobody is kicking my ass about my Viking blood to scare up a modern meme about a monster that looks like me. I don't wonder why. I think I have a pretty good idea. The same sort of people who used 9/11 to pass a capital gains tax cut for freedom, to gin up a permanent war footing, to torture people in secret prison, and who get a thousand miles to the gallon out of their useful fuel of ignorance, hate, and fear. And their useful idiot stenographers. When a horrible thing is done to you, when you are the most vulnerable to rash and irrational appeals to your pain and your frustration, that is when you need to stop and think the most. When you need to be most aware of how easy it is to hate and fear and be used.
Terrorists win when you allow them to make you scared and put your brain in the pickle jar, but terrorism also wins if you let the people whose natural instinct is to exploit the worst parts of you for their own craven selfish gain let you forget who you are, and who you should strive to be. Better than you were before. Wiser. More wary and aware, but not because of easy stupidity, ignorance, and fear. Because you won't be exploited. Because we have been here before. Making American less safe for the non-White and/or non-Christian, after a horror like the Boston Marathon Bombing, when nothing of substance is known, if it cynically serves the cause, is a particularly vile act. Just shifting gears to a new script when you do have more fats at hands is just as vile. A form and flavor of both racism and terrorism itself. It compounds the evil with more evil. Especially when it is the easiest to do, and to ignore, and to rationalize and apologise for, when it is something, because of your own skin tone and your membership by accident of birth and genetics in the racial majority, that can likely never, ever happen to you.
Enabled by a shitty Village news media staffed by a lot of rich white people who, also, never have to worry about this sort of shit ever happening to them and hobbling their lives. Now, I think. I think about the burdens of others that I don't bear. I think about the reality that safety is an illusion and living in fear is a choice. I think I will not be conned, bamboozled, or used because of this event and its aftermath. I think that I can't let, I must not let, these things get lost because an ugly and vicious chapter of our collective story, the crime that brought me to the place to be musing about all of these things has seemingly closed on the surface in the 24 hour news cycle part of our national Id.