The Picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Rolling Stone Magazine

By Editor |

Saturday, July 20, 2013

I prefer not to write articles on minor controversies that swirl through the public domain, but I'll make an exception this time.

There is currently an uproar over the picture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the younger of the two brothers who bombed the Boston marathon) on the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine.  The controversy is due to the fact that the picture makes Tsarnaev look sweet and innocent.  They are comparing the picture to the one of Jim Morrison of the Doors, and they are saying that it makes Tsarnaev look like a rock star -- or perhaps like the revolutionary and martyr Che Guevara, who was also handsome.

Frankly, I think that people are getting upset over nothing.  First of all, it is normal practice in the magazine business to put a picture on the cover when they do their main story on a public figure.  The fact is, Tsarnaev does look angelic in many of his pictures.  I think that we have all been wondering how someone who looks so angelic could do such evil things.  By putting such a picture on their cover, Rolling Stone is pointing out this contradiction and raising an important question:  Why are we so easily fooled by appearances?  I doubt very much that it was Rolling Stone's intention to glorify Tsarnaev.

One of my brothers has always had a demeanor that made him seem wise beyond his years, but eventually I realized that it was just an appearance (at least, some of it was).  In the case of Tsarnaev, I think we'll find out that he has very little character, so little that he allowed his brother to dominate him and turn him into a radical.  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's crime is that he doesn't have a moral center that prevented him from doing those horrific things.  When I was his age, there was no person on Earth who could have influenced me to place a bomb amid a crowd of spectators.  But a lot of young people are characterless.  They are like blank canvasses that anyone can paint a picture on.  If they come under the influence of someone who is evil, they end up doing evil things.  There's nothing new about that.

In a way, I feel sorry for Tsarnaev.  He's headed toward sixty years of near solitary confinement.  They'll lock him up in a 9' x 7' cell, and they'll let him out for just an hour a day to exercise in a drab concrete yard.  If he is lucky and gets to mingle with other prisoners, his pretty looks will make him the victim of sexual assault, and he'll end up as some inmate's girlfriend.  I couldn't imagine a worse existence.

And this gets me to a new topic -- that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment -- but I'll leave that for another article.