Like a Complete Unknown: Rolling Stone, Tsarnaev, and the Face of Evil

by Sebastian Faust 

Wanna see my picture on the cover
Wanna buy five copies for my mother
Wanna see my smiling face
On the cover of the Rolling Stone
– Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, "The Cover of the Rolling Stone"

Rolling Stone is facing blowback for their latest issue’s cover – a self shot of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers alleged to have committed the Boston Marathon bombing. Tsarnaev addresses the camera, looking out at us as a young indie-rock singer/songwriter might; he’s got long, tousled hair, scruffy whiskers, a graphitied white shirt, and dark, piercing eyes. He looks hip. He looks cute. He looks nice. And that’s the problem. 

The outcry was swift. The mayor of Boston issued an open letter decrying Rolling Stone’s “celebrity treatment” of Tsarnaev, arguing that the survivors of the Boston bombing deserve their own cover stories, but that he no longer feels that “Rolling Stone deserves them” (emphasis mine). Twitter blew up with responses to the cover. Boycotts have been announced by CVS, Walgreens, Rite-Aid, Kmart.

Every post on Rolling Stone’s Facebook page, from a poll about the best Ramones song to a rundown of Louis C.K.’s performances, is plastered with obscenity-laden replies about the soon-to-be-released cover. Most of them simply spew invective at the magazine, but some cut to what, I think, is the actual issue underlying the anger people feel. These say, essentially, “This picture of the suspect is too flattering; if you were going to place him on the cover at all, you should have used his mug shot.”

Tsarnaev looks good. And that’s the problem.
 
It’s not as if magazines haven’t featured other “monsters” on their covers before. In 1970, Rolling Stone itself ran with a picture of mass murderer Charles Manson; in 2001, TIME devoted their cover to Osama bin Laden.  But the difference is in the aesthetics of the pictures. Manson’s photo was shaded by a yellow circle overlapping his face, save the whites of his eyes, which gave him a manic look. Bin Laden wore a turban and a Middle-Eastern beard; he looked unusual to Americans. He looked foreign, alien, other.

But Tsarnaev looks like us. And that’s the problem. 

We have decided that Tsarnaev is evil (the posts I referenced earlier on Rolling Stone’s Facebook page are filled with sadistic descriptions of his hoped-for demise), and so we want him to look the part. Evil is ugly. It is disfigured, or alien, or just a little bit off. Our villains need to wear capes, or turbans, or pencil mustaches, or terrorist beards. They need to be crazed, or mad, or so full of hate that we can never hope to understand them.

They need to have defining characteristics, so we can pick them out of a crowd. Then we won’t have to worry. We know the man with shifty eyes isn’t to be trusted. But above all (and we must be adamant about this) they need to most definitely not look like us, like people we know, or like a “rock star.”

We know what evil looks like. And it doesn’t look like us.

My guess is that most of those who are outraged didn’t take the time to read the article. My guess is many didn’t even take the time to read its title, right there on the cover: “The Bomber: How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam, and Became a Monster.”

Or maybe they did; maybe that’s the problem. The point of the picture paired with the article was to question how someone who looks like “us” could become one of “them,” to show that it isn’t such a great leap. But that isn’t a narrative we want to hear.

We want to hear that terrorists are born in far-flung countries and bred in desert camps. We want to hear that they have an ideology that makes no sense, that is incomprehensible to us, that we can never wrap our heads around and understand. That they hate us for our freedom, or for being powerful, or for being “special.” But in the case of Tsarnaev, that narrative proves untenable. Though foreign-born, he was a product of our schools, of our culture, of our society. He not only looks like one of us in that picture, he was one of us. He is one of us.

Evil is always a monster. It’s always outside of us, stalking the night, clawing our windows, rattling our doors. It haunts us in dreams. It can only be frightened away, or warded off. Or killed.

Evil is always a monster. It can’t be reasoned with, or listened to, or understood. It can’t be touched. It is something with which we can never bridge the gap, with which we can never become familiar.

Because the moment we recognize it as familiar, it is something with which we can empathize. And if we can empathize with something, we can forgive it. And if we can forgive something, we can love it.

But we can’t love a monster. We can’t forgive one either. 

Sebastian Faust is an avowed heretic, armchair theologian, and a self-styled canary in the coal mine of pop culture. He takes life by the reins, bulls by the horns, and tigers by the tail, all while living in Nashville. You can't follow Sebastian on Twitter because he doesn't understand technology.

You can, however, follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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Sharing Secrets

by Josh Kiel

In the course of life we accumulate a set of experiences that shape the way we interpret our lives. When interacting with each other we use these experiences to relate.  We build understanding through our shared relationships. At the same time, there are some things that we keep entirely to ourselves. Secrets, those experiences which we’d rather not share and that we’d rather not have others know we’ve experienced at all. 

I’m of the opinion that we can’t ever fully understand another human being. Since we’re all unique individuals it is absurdly hard to come close to a full understanding of each other. This often leads to a sense of loneliness stemming from the knowledge that we neither can understand another or be fully understood. If that statement depresses you, I’ve included a picture of a puppy.

Part of my weekly routine includes a visit to the PostSecret website which offers the opportunity to momentarily, but profoundly bridge that gap of understanding between myself and individuals I have never and will never meet. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar with PostSecret, it’s essentially a community art project where people decorate and mail a postcard containing one of their secrets to organizer Frank Warren of Maryland who puts them up on his site for the entire world to see and consume. Suffice to say, I'm a fan. 

On this one site I can view other peoples interpretations of life events they have not been comfortable sharing with those closest to them and it gives me a slight approximation to the emotional experience that they must have felt. The most powerful moments come when I read secrets that I identify with so strongly that I might as well have written them. In essence, they are my secrets experienced in some form or manner by another human being. Whether the subject matter is funny or sad, shallow or profound, there is something powerful in seeing someones innermost thoughts put on display after being hidden from all others.

For many people, myself included, there is a hazy line in differentiating whether we hide our secrets or whether our secrets hide us. Often in order for me to share a secret, a real secret, I need to have a half dozen beers in my system and even then the sharing is very calculated. 

To so many of us our secrets are sacred. They are the parts of our lives that we'd rather not have define us, but do anyways. From my own experience they are laden with regret and embarrassment that I expect would elicit a negative reaction from the people that I know. Basically secrets create a prison made out of the expected reactions of others, we bind ourselves in based on our expectation of their judgment.

When a secret is finally shared it can be liberating. From my own experience what I seek in sharing secrets is two-fold: first, to no longer carry that secret by myself and second, validation that I am not alone as a flawed human being. PostSecret allows me the second half of that experience with no risk to myself. 

In viewing a few dozen secrets of strangers each week I inevitably find a few secrets to which I fundamentally identify. In that moment there is an understanding and connection with another human being that I cannot deny. I know that I am not only validated, but so are they and if that particular secret is validated then there's the probability that my other secrets are too. 

At the end of the day it serves to quell my angst that in experience as a human being trying to find my way through this world I have not made myself irredeemably flawed to the point that another person could not understand me.


When I'm done looking through the secrets on the site for a given week I often feel relief. It serves as an exercise in empathy both towards myself and towards others which reminds me that while we don't always understand each other completely, there are still people out there who can understand and identify with my specific emotions and experiences that we process. 

This helps me feel more connected not only to anonymous people on the internet, but also to the people in my own life who probably have the same secrets as me, but try and hide them as much as I hide mine. It also makes me wonder how well we could understand each other if we'd just be honest with each other. Now if only I were artistic enough to create a handmade postcard...