April 25, 2013
Longfellow Bridge, Boston
Coincidence. If I were in charge of the universe, nobody at all would have their legs blown off by terrorist bombs. Unfortunately things are arranged otherwise.
A sense of proportion is never out of place, though. It subtracts nothing from our proper sympathies for the three murdered and dozens maimed in Boston to remember that similar horrors are woven into daily reality.
To jog our memories, a fertilizer plant in Texas blew up just two days after the Boston explosions, killing 14 and sending 160 to the hospital.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 4,609 “fatal occupational injuries“ from 2011, with a corresponding number of workers maimed or disfigured. Thirty to forty thousand Americans die in motor vehicle accidents every year, again with untold thousands more crippled, blinded, etc.
Irony. Name of the boat in which Suspect 2, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, was found hiding: Slipaway II.
Coincidence. In the 2010 British comedy movie about terrorism, Four Lions, the main target of the terrorists is the London Marathon.
It’s possible that the Tsarnaev brothers were inspired by Four Lions. If so, they must have watched a version with subtitles. Even I, born and raised an English prole, had trouble understanding the Paki-chav accents. Five minutes in, my wife, a fluent though non-native English speaker, turned to me and asked: “What language is this?”
Irony. The prole-hating white Tutsi classes were of course on their knees praying to saints Abraham, Martin, and John that the Boston bombers would turn out to be white clingers.
Well, they were at any rate Caucasian.
“I presume your Loved One was Caucasian.””¨”No, why do you think that? He was purely English.”
“Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One
Echoes. “George Orwell“ said it took him thirty years to recover from having been named Eric. The effect of one’s name on one’s personality development has been much mused on, to no conclusions that I know of.
This comes to mind because the elder Tsarnaev brother was named after Tamerlane, one of the baddest badasses in all of history.
Jason Goodwin tells us that after beating and capturing the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit in 1402:
Tamerlane used his captive magnanimously until Bayezit’s prickly hauteur proved too much for him, and he was placed in a cage, too small for standing upright, and dragged in the wake of Tamerlane’s retinue. His wife Despina was made to serve naked at the victor’s table….Perhaps no-one was sorry when Bayezit eventually dashed out his brains on the bars of his cage.
They don”t make conquerors like that anymore.
Image of Boston courtesy of Shutterstock
