The national trauma inflicted as we watched the World Trade Towers crumble, knowing that thousands of innocents had just died, continues to color how we view the world. That’s understandable. None of us wants to live through that again. However, just as combat veterans can overreact to a firecracker, and just as someone involved in a car wreck can develop an irrational fear of auto travel, traumas such as 9/11 can sometimes skew our perspective.
I think that’s happening in our reaction to the Boston bombing. The fact that it was an act of terror perpetrated by two young men who claim allegiance to Islam makes it easy to place within the 9/11, War on Terror context. As a result, we’re hearing demands that the surviving suspect be treated as an enemy combatant, that our borders be tightened in the name of national security and that the intelligence community be forced to explain why they failed to ferret out the threat.
That may be the wrong way to look at it. It has already become clear that the elder Tsarnaev brother, the leader of the pair, had long simmered in personal resentment, failure and alienation. He didn’t “fit in” here in the United States, and he apparently fit no better during his six-month visit to Russia. And unfortunately, we have a lot of experience in alienated, deeply resentful young men using ideologies to give their resentment a focus and their violence a glorious pretext.
Timothy McVeigh found it in the militia movement; Eric Rudolph found it in Christian Identity theology; Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan found it in Islamic extremism. For Wade Michael Page, anti-Islamic extremism led him to attack a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012, killing six. For “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, it was a bizarre neo-Luddism. John Patrick Bedell, who attacked and shot two Pentagon police officers in 2010, used libertarianism to to justify his violence.
In the end, the Boston bombing may be better understood as the latest in that list of violent “lone-wolf” attacks, rather than as an anti-American plot hatched by foreign enemies. And there will be more to come. We live in a world in which those predisposed to paranoia can find any number of “designer pathologies” to suit their addled mindset. They can also find instructions on how to express those pathologies violently.
Take the semi-comic tale involving ricin, an ersatz Elvis from Mississippi and his small-town rival, a Tupelo taekwondo teacher. FBI agents raiding the home of the Elvis impersonator, Kevin Curtis, went straight to his computer this week, expecting to find that he had researched ricin manufacturing online. They found nothing of the sort, which helped convince them that they had the wrong man. They now suspect that Curtis had been framed by another local with a grudge against him.
The Mayberry-on-acid aspects of the story shouldn’t disguise the fact that letters laced with deadly ricin had been mailed to elected officials ranging from a local judge to President Obama. In any other context, that would be viewed as a major act of terrorism. But in this case, the motivation wasn’t Islamist extremism, it was just a two-bit personal rivalry.
In other words, welcome to amateur hour.
After Sept. 11, analysts pointed out how technology had decentralized violence, turning “non-state actors” such as al Qaida into threats even to the greatest of traditional nation states. But as we’ve learned since, the process didn’t stop there. Non-state individuals with a grudge or personal resentment have now been empowered as well, and defending against that kind of threat makes bin Laden seem easy.
