On April 22, Judge Marianne Bowler convened a hearing of the United States District Court at Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center in Boston.
A doctor turned to defendant Dzhokar Tsarnaev, lying in a bed, and asked: “How are you feeling? Are you able to answer some questions?”
Tsarnaev nodded affirmatively and we were another step closer to discovering just what had motivated the Boston marathon bombing.
What we know for sure: there will be many questions and, unfortunately, not as many answers as we may want to what exactly pushed the Tsarnaev brothers to the point where detonating bombs and shooting police seemed like a good idea.
Yet one strong theme has developed throughout the whole sorry and frightening and often horrific episode -- identity. What it is that makes someone something and what it is that makes someone something else.
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We can see identity in Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his failed and flawed boxing career. The elder of the two brothers held not unreasonable ambition to box for the United States at the Olympics -- preferring that path to representing Russia. He was partly thwarted in that quest by the Golden Gloves competition, a pathway to Olympic selection, being open only to citizens.
We can see identity in “Misha”, the supposed Armenian Islamist (itself an almost impossible identity) accused of radicalizing Tamerlan. “Misha” turned out to be Mikhail Allakhverdov, of Ukrainian-Armenian descent, cleared by the FBI in inspiring or directing the bombings.
Identity also features strongly in the connection some public figures (OK, right-wing media 'celebrity', Ann Coulter) have tried to make between U.S. immigration and murder.
Then on the other side of that argument, you have the immigrant from China, a student-turned-start-up-hopeful, carjacked by the Tsarnaevs, and who maybe saved countless other lives in steering the brothers in another direction that last night on the run.
Yet among all that is the strange transition one media outlet concocted in turning Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from white men -- their race is ascertained from all known photographs and the FBI's own racial codification -- into dark-skinned Arab-looking terrorists for a cover sketch.
There's no irony in the accompanying cover line being “A Radical Change”. The dangerous implication -- on many levels -- is that white men don't bomb things. Only dark Arabs do.
