Image by Tak Toyoshima 

 

Sorry to remind you about the asshole charged with bombing the Boston Marathon, and of the cockroaches covering the carnival at the federal courthouse. Also apologies for dredging up all of the media dung stuck to our Timberlands, that endless barrage of meaningless think pieces and Dickensian descriptions of Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s wardrobe. We know the mainstream is religious about objectivity, but some coverage last week rang more like an L.L. Bean Catalog description than notes on a federal bombing trial:

 

Tsarnaev, 21, stood before them, lanky, fidgeting, and with flowing curly hair, wearing a dark collared sweater in the morning, and later a crewneck.

 

We’re sure everyone will get more serious when the jury is selected, but for now the mush amounts to so much generic garbage. That said, while there’s been far too much rhetorical arm wrestling over whether Tsarnaev can get a fair trial in Boston—even in the wake of it being decided that he will face a jury here—the news has also spurred important conversations. For a clever dart on press suppression in this trial and in general, for one, check Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy’s latest for WGBH News. For not-so-clever analysis, you’re already in the right place …

 

THIS IS SIGNIFICANT

We’re just getting the hang of this Tsarnaev Media Farm thing, but every now and then we’ll probably just aggregate (!!!) some important info. Now is one of those times (this particular wording from Yahoo! News):

 

The disclosure was made by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense team in a federal court filing late Friday, as part of a larger push by his attorneys to gain access to “discovery” evidence compiled by the federal government in its case against Tsarnaev for the April 2013 bombings that killed three and injured several hundred near the marathon’s finish line.

 

The Sept. 11, 2011, murders—which occurred in Waltham, Mass., a suburb of Boston—remain officially unsolved. But the murders, which were initially written off by local police as a drug deal gone bad, have become a plot point in the Boston bombings case amid evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was involved. This is the first time there’s been a suggestion that his younger brother might have been aware of his alleged participation in the murders—which some have said, if solved, might have prevented the marathon attacks.

 

STONER POETRY

We smoked a joint while reading a piece written by forensic psychiatrist Judith G. Edersheim, JD, MD, titled “Could Tsarnaev Argue, ‘My Immature, Pot-Impaired Brain Made Me Do It’?” We barely got through the part about her title. She’s co-director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Law, Brain & Behavior and an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School—and not, clearly, a writer. But we did manage to spin some verse out of the raddest parts …

 

Mitigating factors

death sentence

impaired capacity

demonstrable duress

family dynamics

dominant older brother

relative independence

Then comes the brain

death penalty litigators

neuroscientific evidence

adolescent brains

differential treatment under our criminal laws

relative immaturity

ill-considered decisions

thrill seeking

sex, drugs and friends

Here’s the rub

adolescents are incapable of making well-considered choices

Quite the contrary

it’s the brain in context

Brains are not created equal

In the end, behavior trumps brain scans

well-known campus marijuana dealer

smoked pot frequently

 

KEEP ON SUCKIN’

On a slightly different but obviously related note, kudos to Celia Farber of the New York Observer for thinking to contact legendary alt cartoonist Robert Crumb about the massacre of Charlie Hebdo staffers in Paris. In the midst of so many superficial tributes to the brave satirists killed, Crumb offers a dose of reality worthy of their memory. You should read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt from the part where the writer asks how it is even possible that she’s the only reporter who thought to call America’s most celebrated satirical comic strip artist, who happens to live in France, after an office full of political artists was targeted by extremists:

 

No, you’re the only one. You don’t have journalists over there anymore, what they have is public relations people. That’s what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations. And a dwindling number of actual reporters and journalists …

 

Amen.

 

 

THE MAIN EVENT

Looking for some real talk about the trial? Look no further. Noam Chomsky is joining Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts’ Technology for Liberty Project and John Summers of The Baffler for a chat in Cambridge next week. Get your free tixx here …