Floyd: Rolling Stone magazine can’t make a killer cool

Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone says the picture, one that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev himself posted online, is part of an effort to make the cover story relevant to the magazine’s young-adult audience

Public attention is not necessarily an award conferred for goodness and virtue. Celebrity is not always a prize.

The not-infrequent complaint that “You should write about the victims, not the bad guys” can reasonably be answered: People who commit inhuman, reprehensible crimes are rare and notorious, and thus newsworthy.

So, despite the weevil of discomfort I experienced at seeing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s soulful cool-guy self-portrait on the cover of Rolling Stone, I can’t really slam the magazine for it.

Plenty of other media outlets used the same image of the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, including The New York Times and us (The Dallas Morning News ran it May 24 with an update about the case).

It has been out there for a good while, along with other photos plucked from the Internet and an FBI mug shot in which he looks more like a sullen kid and less like a teen dreamboat.

Rolling Stone’s explanation, in the face of unexpectedly severe criticism, has been that the photo is part of an effort to make the cover story relevant to the magazine’s young-adult demographic audience.

The other part was to explore “the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding for how a tragedy like this happens.”

It’s the story itself, an examination of the 19-year-old suspect’s background, that put me off a little.

Not that it isn’t well done. RS journalist Janet Reitman is thorough and serious. She wrote an excellent investigative book on the Church of Scientology, which I read with great interest.

But taken as a package, the rock-star cover shot and the article’s exhaustive “exploration of complexities” leave an unsettling impression that there’s a coherent explanation for Tsarnaev’s decision to collaborate with his brother in murdering and maiming innocent people.

He is portrayed as a “popular, promising student” and a “normal American kid” to whom something happened, like a brain fever or bad voodoo.

He was “failed by his family.” His immigrant experience left him searching for self-identity. His influential older brother introduced him to Islamic radicalism. America didn’t offer his family the “opportunities” they expected, and his parents moved back to Russia.

He couldn’t afford his dream colleges and ended up at a dreary middlebrow university in a working-class town. The students there weren’t as cool as his high school friends back in Cambridge, Mass. He didn’t make enough money as a pot dealer (!) to cover his student loans.

The central question here should be: Exactly how does any of that explain mass murder?

Instead, Rolling Stone’s central question is: How did this happen to somebody so cool?

Tsarnaev’s chill-kid friends from his high school days are quoted exhaustively about Jahar’s commendable hipsterness. (Throughout the article, he is referred to not as Tsarnaev but by his Americanized first name, “Jahar.”)

He was “that dude you could always just vibe with”; “one of the realest dudes I’ve ever met.”

Jahar didn’t talk much about religion, one friend said, but you could tell he took it seriously. He gave up smoking pot for Ramadan — “an immense act of self-control, his friends say.”

None of this comes close to the worshipful adoration expressed by an online community of silly teenage “Free Jahar” groupies.

Nor does it approach the repulsive, deliberate ignorance exhibited by a circle of rabid cranks who insist the marathon bombings were a government hoax.

The latter group includes a foil-hatted fruitcake from New Hampshire named Stella Tremblay. The state representative resigned last month to the relief of her colleagues from both parties.

Tremblay has not wavered in her insistence that Jeff Bauman, the man widely pictured in the chaos of the bombings with both legs blown off at the knee, is actually an actor, an amputee Army vet who faked the whole thing.

Rolling Stone certainly doesn’t rise — or descend — to that level of crazy.

What the story, with its superchill cover pic (and perhaps the mandate to “be edgy”), does do is hunt too hard for the secret heartache that poor Jahar must surely have suffered.

Austin writer Gary Lavergne addressed this phenomenon in his excellent 1997 book on mass killer Charles Whitman, A Sniper in the Tower.

Lavergne examined the many theories put forth to explain why Whitman, a handsome engineering student, killed 17 people and injured 32 others in his 1966 murder spree in and around the University of Texas campus: military training, access to guns, a stern upbringing, his parents’ divorce, the infamous brain tumor.

“The historical record has been complicated by emotional acquaintances and writers seeking to ‘discover’ a ‘cause’ for the Tower incident,” Lavergne wrote. “In the search for a reason for Charles Whitman’s actions … it has seldom been postulated that he just decided to do it.”

Like Whitman and everybody else, the Tsarnaev brothers had disappointments and frustrations. Like Whitman and a select few others, they used those frustrations as a what-the-hell excuse to slaughter innocents.

I don’t think the Rolling Stone cover, or its sympathetic coverage, enshrines Dzokhar Tsarnaev as a rock star. But I don’t think it explains him either.

Maybe the simplest answer is the one that’s hardest for normal people to understand: He just decided to do it.

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