Rolling Stone has published a flattering picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on its cover. How could they!!!
Tedeschi Food Shops, which is based in Rockland, Mass., is refusing to sell the edition of the magazine at its nearly 200 outlets, saying on its Facebook page that it “cannot support actions that serve to glorify the evil actions of anyone.”
This reminds me of how acts of terrorism are universally described as “cowardly” by government officials even when some of them manifestly require quite a bit of bravery. It’s as if it were disreputably disloyal to acknowledge that evil can sometimes accompany intelligence, charisma, or bravery.
In Mr Tsarnaev’s case, one really would like to know what turned him toward such horrific violence. It seems to have surprised everyone anyone can interview. Rolling Stone’s picture is so shocking precisely because it is so puzzling. Wouldn’t solving that puzzle help prevent future violence?
Reading a book about the Iraq intervention, I’m reminded how, in 2001, trying to understand why the 9/11 terrorists did what they did was met howls of objections from the Right. Cheney, for example, suggested that liberals wanted to give them “therapy”. For conservatives, the only correct answer was that they were evil and should be eliminated. It was the beginning of a long run of willful ignorance that gave us the Iraq invasion. Willful ignorance continues to burden us with austerity in depressions and complacency regarding greenhouse gasses.
So it is not a benign self-indulgence.
After a while 8I’vecome around to similar thinking. A couple points I would add:
The terrorist issue called a monster on the cover. That doesn’t strike me as “glorifying” him. Are we at the point where nothing bad or confusing may go on magazine covers? No Aaron Hernandez on sports magazines, no Bashir Assad on foreign policy reviews and no Justin Bieber on music magazines? (Okay that last one may be a stretch.) Is it so easy to make people outraged and scared that we have to stick to photos of military folks surprising loved ones at home?
I don’t recall this outrage when bin Laden was on the cover and what he did was far worse than Marathon Monday. I get the feeling that many people found the OBL covers comforting, in that they confirmed that terrorists are men with facial hair, exotic headgear, and darker skin. Seems the real problem for many people issue the reminder that a terrorist can look like any college kid you would see at Amherst College and how dare any magazine imply that?
Some folks are clearly unaware that Rolling Stone does journalism (some of it rather good). They’re upset that Rolling Stone does not stick to music reviews and leave journalism to “news magazines” that show little interest in doing much more than condemning things and fawning over famous pregnant people.
Finally this local hysteria makes New England seem rather sheltered. Yes, Boston, there are bad people out there who may look different than you expect. A true world-class city doesn’t lose its collective cool when a magazine points that out.
I agree that we should look at how we (or, rather, he) got from A to B in order to understand and perhaps prevent future kids from falling into the same path. I don’t have much of a problem with the article and, yes, RS does solid investigative journalism quite often.
But the cover photo is where most people’s objections lie. And I agree with David’s point – it is too similar to their many teen idol covers and really does seem to glamourize him. The sense that the article goes too far in suggesting he bears little responsibility for his own acts doesn’t help matters. I understand the part about showing “that a terrorist can look like any college kid you would see at Amherst College,” but I suspect that the real goal was to create controversy and push a magazine that’s lost a quarter of its subscribers in the past five years.
I don’t buy at all the argument that the kerfuffle makes Boston look bush league. I lived in New York during 9/11 and for a number of years thereafter and saw absolute hysteria about not only magazine covers, but calls to stop suspending parking regulations on Islamic holy days (they’ve been suspended and schools have been closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur for decades), stop including Arabic in the 15-language Board of Elections pamplet, and (famously) not build a mosque – dedicated to all religions getting along – in the same neighborhood as the WTC, which has two Episcopal churches right across the street. I don’t recall anyone suggesting New York was “sheltered,” though I think all of those controversies were more ridiculous than this one.
alongside their coverage of music. Sort of like Time does real journalism alongside their coverage of suburban fare for the masses. And, on that note:
as I said in my promotion comment, Time’s cover traditionally features whoever is making news that week, for good or ill. Whereas Rolling Stone’s cover is – surely by design of Rolling Stone itself – sort of a barometer of who’s the hot celebrity right now. So the covers serve different functions, and Rolling Stone should have paid more attention to that.
Then again, perhaps Rolling Stones’ point is that young, hip, interesting cool cats may, in fact, have a substantial kink in their trajectory and end up perpetrating horrible crimes. Maybe the cover is an act of humility — that the folks on Rolling Stone’s cover may not be worth the hero worship we send them because, hey look, here’s a guy who fits that mold to some extent, and he’s a monster.
Newsmagazines covers are different than celebrity magazine covers, just ask Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show
Rolling Stone has had legitimate journalism for a long time. It’s not People, for God’s sake.
is usually regulated to celebrating celebrity.
Covers in the last year featured Black Keys, Justin Beiber, Taylor Swift,Travor Noah, Jon Hamm, Rhianna, Louis CK, Bruno Mars, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev???
The uproar has not been about the journalism, but the uncomfortable feeling seeing his mug in a place usually reserved for rock stars. Many “legitimate journalists” have voiced concerns about coverage that may glorify and encourage copycats. You know – unbalanced kooks that may see violence as a way to fame and glory. Its happened before.
… and cultural trendsetter Charles Manson
on going back 33 years to find a cover to prove me wrong, you will force me to to make up imaginary future covers in an all out effort to win at any cost including:
Psy
The New Village People
The Carmelite Sisters
Stomv’s Stylized Jazz
Sponge Bob Square Pants
Anonymous
The Amazing Come Back of Billy Ray Cyrus
Blue Mass Group
you very correctly and appropriately used words like “usually” — and are spot on. Rolling Stone usually does do just that. But, not always.
I just don’t put much stock in wailing and whining because of a magazine cover. I think that they made a very important point, and most folks are too faint-hearted and easily… well… get the vapors… to see the point.
Terrorists, once caught, are typically seen bloody, tired, dirty, and beaten down. We know that, we expect that. But life isn’t a Marvel comic book. The bad guys don’t usually have some eccentric limp or scar or evil laugh. Sometimes they’re the neighbor who is a “bit odd” and “who keeps to himself”. Sometimes, though, they look like the best of America — young, attractive, popular, friendly, and active in the community. Maybe we don’t want to acknowledge that because gee, it makes the world feel a whole lot scarier. So instead we shout down the Rolling Stone for reminding us that the people who perpetrate even the most heinous acts aren’t like the bad guys in the movies; they’re not old and far away or at the very least from a different part of town. Sometimes, we live right alongside them — right with them.
We do not live in Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town.
This comment summarizes very well my own reaction to the entire hyper-ventilated Rolling Stone “controversy”.
I’d like to remind folks that our drone attacks kill and wound just as many innocent bystanders as the greatly-hyped “Marathon Bombing”. In the pantheon of terrorist attacks, this one ranks — well, perhaps the world will remember it five years from now, but I doubt it.
The Marathon Bombings are, in my view, memorable primarily for our greatly-exaggerated police response, public hysteria, and prolonged wallowing — not to mention the shamefully embarrassing foolishness about burying the body of the dead perpetrator. This kerfuffle over a magazine cover is just more of the same.
Vapors, indeed.
The list of previous covers provides useful context. On the other hand, in this day I am reluctant to stifle efforts toward reak journalism from one of the few remaining practitioners of it.
I think this is exactly right.
Yes, Rolling Stone has done traditional journalism. But the cover has always been devoted to pop culture icons, with rare exceptions. That makes the cover of Rolling Stone to be different than Time managzine, and the New York Times for that matter. The cover of Rolling Stone is a lot more like the cover of Vogue than it is the cover of Time.
The Rolling Stone “news” covers– of which this issue I suppose is one– tend to be a bit on the cartoony side, or highlight coverage of an “issue” with an anonymous photo.
There are other arguably “news” covers with the portrait of the President, but these seem to belong in a category unto themselves. There are more cartoony ones, and flattering covers of Clinton and Obama. The latter two seem less like “news” and more like cooperation with a deliberate political strategy by Clinton, and then Obama– at least with respect to the cover.
The only three “villain” news covers that I could see (other than covers for someone who was famous before being infamous)
are the cover with Charles Manson posted below, a “cartoony” picture relating to Patty Hearst, and another with Roman Polanski.
That’s four covers in 46 years and well over 1,000 covers. And, honestly, the Manson and Polanski covers leave me with the same queasy feeling as this latest one. Manson gave an interview to the magazine in an effort to plug his album and the cover he got looks like an album cover. And I have always felt that Manson has an element of “cool” that has held Hollywood in its thrall for decades, and that cover plays right into it. Hollywood’s willingness to blind itself to Polanski is likewise a bit nauseating. Both of these seem to me to glamorize a criminal because of his criminality– because glamorizing is what the cover of Rolling Stone, unlike Time, does– in a way that transgresses the boundary of good taste and common decency.
The Hearst cover is a closer call because it is far more abstract, and because her degree of guilt was always open to question.
So, in summary, I find this cover to be in extremely poor taste. and will therefore not change my long habit of not buying the magazine.
of those photos look anything like the one on Rolling Stone this week.
Whatever your take on Time (and I share it), it was founded as a serious news magazine. Rolling Stone has to take its own heritage as a publication into account. Of course it’s always done serious journalism, but it’s best known as the magazine that confirms a pop star’s “arrival” by putting that person on the cover.
The magazine always justifies their picks as the person with the greatest impact on the news for that year – for good or ill.
All of this makes me sad that people can’t project their outrage at issues that truly mattered.
We’re big rock singers, we’ve got golden fingers
And we’re loved everywhere we go.
We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show.
We take all kinds of pills to give us all kinds of thrills
But the thrill we’ve never known
Is the thrill that’ll getcha when you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone
(Rolling Stone) Wanna see my picture on the cover
(Rolling Stone) Wanna buy five copies for my mother
(Rolling Stone) Wanna see my smilin’ face
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.
Rolling Stone had to know by putting that image on their cover they would make news. Just like the Boston Herald tries to make news with their covers, the whole “bleeds it leads” mentality, trying to shock us into buying their paper, RS did the same. That bothers me that they couldn’t let the story stand on their own, and had to sensationalize. And it bothers me that it has been so soon after the bombings that they went this road.
But I think there’s another side here. There’s a real story to tell. A real young man who was popular, hip, “glamorous” even. I don’t think Rolling Stone is trying to glamorize him. This photo shows he thought of himself that way. It’s the fact that he saw himself in that light which makes the transformation to terrorism so shocking, such a fascinating and horrible story, and at least one important and so-far unexplored lesson in this horrifying act. While Rolling Stone had to know they’d catch hell for the cover, they also used that photo to tell the story they were trying to tell, and that has to be a part of the conversation.
… one way or the other. But some people indeed have that visceral reaction to it, and I have to respect that.
My sense is that this kind of mini-controversy distracts from the real work that needs to be done helping the people who have been hurt. Being angry at Rolling Stone — or Tsarnaev himself, actually — doesn’t bring anyone back from the dead; doesn’t re-attach limbs or help people get through life without them; doesn’t heal brain injuries, broken bodies or broken hearts. That is a hard, long-term slog, and it’s not flashy or romantic.
I understand the anger. But it can become an indulgence by itself. If the story is not about him, but the first responders and victims, then we shouldn’t overreact to a magazine cover or other such provocation (if indeed it was intended that way).
of a young person that they can use to immortalize and use to recruit. I wonder how that image plays with our young terrorist friends. Would that inspire them? Getting an iconic image of them on a magazine for their acts?
The brothers were not al qaeda. The act was not very al qaeda-like.
The story of a smart, suave, talented, athletic, pot-smoking, bored, good looking and popular kid who ended up turning to horror does not seem one that appeals to al Qaeda. In fact I’d say that a grainy mug shot-like image of a scary bomber showing how scared we are of terrorists would be much more likely to be used as a recruiting device than a young man taking a self-photo trying to look suave and handsome.
I definitely feel the pain for the victims and their families on this. I know I can’t experience it, but I can understand that. I don’t know if that’s the journalist’s first job however.
That picture tells a story. It’s compelling. Our visceral reactions to it are all the more reason to see it.
Rolling Stone cover has nothing to do with journalism.
Plus, if you don’t think people in groups like Al Qaeda are going to use this like an iconic image then you’re crazy.
He was going to have the author of the RS article on, but RS nixed that at the last minute. Instead he offered this commentary mostly about the content of the article rather than the picture.
There’s a marked irony to the sensationalist response to the Rolling Stone cover because it includes accusations that Rolling Stone is being sensationalist. I’m told the local TV stations have milked this for all its worth.
NT
or, at least, the police photographer in the “spirit” of the LEOs.
proves how stupid a nation of readers we are. There’s an almost fundamentalist bent to the reaction to the cover. It reminds me of the fundamentalist reaction to the Danish cartoons depicting of Mohammad.Instead of thinking about what the picture might mean, people use the opportunity to stupidly pass judgment.
As a piece of art, the cover is very, very good. It shows the picture of a person, not a monster. There is Tsarnaev, the kid who had potential. There is Tsarnaev, the terrorist. There is Tsarnaev, the kid who threw his life away. There is Tsarnaev, who killed people. There is Tsarnaev, the real person. The cover forces us not to dismiss Tsarnaev as a monster.
It’s interesting that a quintessentially ‘American’ publication like Rolling Stone so prominently displays Dhzokar Tsarnaev alone and, seeming in a vacuum, tries to move towards understanding what “turned him. There are things to figure out, to be sure, but it’s not a puzzle that, once unlocks, grants a prize or outcome…
I have read the article and it skirts around the idea of family and identity in a truly American way: as though it is merely the question of a more or less stable individual afloat and shifting from context to context, with some contexts being ‘good’ and others being ‘dysfunctional’ without examining the contexts all that closely nor the issues inherent to context switching. The picture that emerges between the lines is that of Dzhorkars’ life constantly in motion, even turmoil, continuously uprooted on one hand and a fierce familial pride in self and identity on the other.
Emile Durkheim brought the term ‘anomie’ to sociology and described it as ‘normlessness’: the state of not knowing what is expected in others or through ones acts in society. This is the one thing most Americans I have met do not ever understand about immigrants. Americans don’t often fall prey to a crippling anomie because our norms are simpleminded and individualistic: “get on with it” or “just do it.” Failure, in America, is often an inability to live up to some cowboy mythos, that is to say, some bare-bones pre-defined norm. Nobody cares what my father taught me: That wouldn’t matter if I became President or if I detonated a large bomb, It would be all about me. Nobody in America cares if the family was once rich and powerful and is now poor and downtrodden, it would be an individual act. What made him turn? But America is not the world and the world is often very different. Failure, in other parts of the world, is exile and disconnectedness. The very fact that America celebrates so brazenly some false individualism that looks so very much like this disconnectedness also cannot help.
The article glosses over several pertinent fact:
1) The article treats Dzhokars drug habit as purely recreational. The reporter doesn’t once question the underlying assumption of ‘Dzhokar the partier.’ This is not only an American point of view, but a particularly white American point of view. But it’s not a leap to think of it as a form of self-medication for the extreme pain and anguish felt by a child who has never in his life felt stable. Also, the possibility of withdrawal during efforts, in the name of Islam, to wean oneself off of the reefer might play a part here also.
2) The younger Tsarnaev was named after Dzhokar Dudeyev, a Soviet Air Force general and the first president of the so-called “breakaway republic” of Chechnaya when Dzhokar Tsarnaev was born, and who was killed by the Russians several years later. Dzhokar Tsarnaev commited this act with his brother, Tamerlan. That name, it appears, was given in homage to the Tamerlan, a 14th century warlord, who co-opted Islam, who’s armies took on the Ottoman empire and cut a wide swath through Asia, Africa and Europe in an attempt to recreate the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan. Anzor Tsarnaev, it seems, was quite the hero worshiping father.
3) Dzhokar does not appear to have been in control. All his friends and acquaintances spin this as ‘rolling with it,’ or ‘being so chill.’ and the article writer more or less takes this at face. It’s possible this is just another symptom, perhaps even a protective one, of great internal chaos. Acceptance is one thing, but learned helplessness is quite another…. especially when you’ve been named after one of your fathers great heroes. It gives me chills, actually, to think about someone whom everyone describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘kind’ internally roiled by expectations of warlike behavior from his father, mother and older brother. Dzhokar really might be, at heart and in his deepest self, truly a loving and kind person: which makes the pain and disassociation he may have felt absolutely unbearable.
4) The father and mother were both strong-willed people who could not get their lives together, divorced, moved back to the ever shifting countries from which they came, reconciled and remarried. The hero-worshipping father who cannot overcome circumstances and the steam-rolling mother who would not hear bad things about her children… It’s a recipe for neuroses, at the very least.
And so, two men, children really (in maturity if not actual age…), named after warlords, abandoned by feckless parents, trying to kick the reefer habit, adrift in the wealthiest, most diverse society in the world, each one a failed athlete clinging to norms often attributed to ‘Radical Islam’ decide to bomb one of the most visible athletic events in the world.
That’s what I think about the bombings. I don’t think that Dzhokar Tsarnaev could or would have done it alone. Nothing ‘turned’ him. He was constantly turning, probably from birth, and stopped where his fathers expectations slammed into him and his older brothers anomie turned to radical Islam. Nor do I think that Tamerlan Tsarnaev could have done this on his own. This is not an ‘American’ crime: this was not the work of an individual, acting from individual motives. This was a corporate act: two brothers, acting from some normless co-dependence, re-inforcing the worst of each other, playing out a nameless and urgent rage and a bottomless sorrow bequeathed upon them by their father and mother who more or less abandoned them to America. I think that’s the ‘puzzle’ to unravel. I don’t think we can find other Dzhokar Tsarnaevs out there because they’ll not do anything without Tamerlan. And we won’t be able to find individual Tamerlans because they’ll need their own Dzhokar to act with them… >Rolling Stone ought to put the whole family on the cover.
Another pertinent fact that the RS article misses completely: According to reports of the shootout in Waltham, it was Dzhokar who killed Tamerlan with the car.
Thank you for writing this. The anomie concept is quite intriguing as is your suggestion that we’re too tempted to try to squeeze our understanding of the Tsarnaevs into a more typical American narrative. This could make a very interesting diary.
I did choose the word “turn” at the last minute after revising that sentence way too many times.
we finally found something WalMart will not sell!
BTW: handgun sales continue to climb.