Rolling Stone, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the Selfie

There’s a lot that’s misunderstood about the August 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

The problem isn’t that Rolling Stone ran a portrait of an accused terrorist on its cover. 

The problem isn’t that Rolling Stone is only supposed to document popular culture, or that it should not concern itself with politics.

The problem isn’t that Rolling Stone is an aging tastemaker seeking relevance; or that it is an institution of any kind; or that such authority is descended from any print periodical these days. 

The problem isn’t that Rolling Stone is trying to sell magazines by giving them provocative covers, or that it has dedicated one of its covers to an individual especially reviled by a major metropolitan area.

The problem isn’t even that the image on that cover blurs the lines distinguishing celebrity and martyrdom and effigy.

The problem is that it’s a selfie.

It’s the same kind of picture that appears on your phone when your friend calls. It’s the same kind of picture you take after three beers. Or for which you groom to impress a stranger.

It’s the same kind of picture that we use to capture a joke, a mood, a moment, millions of times a day.

We do this to communicate. We do this to do this. We are meta-journalers in an age of infinite storage.

Our stream of consciousness can now be measured like some biofeedback written in long-hand, all of it occupying a microscopic physical space.

In a twist, the technology that endlessly records, stores and shares these experiences is owned by companies that collect, analyze and resell the information that we so freely, willingly, and routinely provide. Our shopping habits, our favorite foods, our bands and our brands.

And our selfies.

Google “controversial magazine covers.” You’ll see O.J. Simpson’s mugshot, a naked and pregnant Demi Moore, John Lennon in bed with Yoko Ono. 

But each of these images was created by a photographer; i.e., someone other than the subject.

None of them is a selfie.

Our cameras and our phones and our social networks have become seamlessly enmeshed so that we are both subject and observer at the same time, experiencing and reacting and documenting simultaneously.

With front and rear-facing cameras, our cell phones support selfies that have even eliminated the hindrance of the dimly lit bathrooms in which we created them. 

For all that, however, they offer no less of a mirror—and if nothing else, the Tsarnaev selfie is surely that.

It is an unsettling picture for any number of reasons. 

It is just as unsettling to think that any of those uncomfortable feelings is more legitimate than the right of Rolling Stone to publish it.

Because we are all publishers today, endlessly offering, validating, sharing, and defending our opinions. Occasionally, we even experience first-hand the things about which we opine. And we cry about censorship when our ability to express these impulses is stifled in any way.

Most of the time, however, our emotional reflexes have been so hyperactively conditioned that they override our ability to understand what it is to which we’re even reacting.

We live in an era of industrially manufactured outrage; because of that, we have developed an allergy to self-examination.

When an irritant is introduced into a system ill-equipped to process it, the only thing to do is flush the pipes. And to the vast emotional mechanism that is America, terrorism is a toxin it has no idea how to filter.

The sheer surprise of violence is traumatic. The vigilance required to prevent it can be, too. The city of Boston faced both in the chaos of the marathon bombings and the region-wide manhunt/lockdown that followed.

What’s the timeline for recovery from grief of that magnitude? It hasn’t even been six months since it happened.

Jeffrey Bauman, the Oaklyn native whose legs were severely injured in one of the explosions, has only just taken his first steps since that day. Krystle Campbell, Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, and Sean Collier will never be heard from again.

Who would have done this to those people, to their friends and loved ones, to the 260 others injured in the bombings? 

Who could have placed an explosive device on the ground near an unsuspecting child and walked away, knowing what was to follow?

And why, when on the cover of Rolling Stone, does Dzhokhar Tsarnaev look so much like he could have been an actor; an athlete; an artist on the verge of a breakout, instead of the person accused of doing such unspeakable things?

Well, what if that’s the point?

We who celebrate ourselves so deeply, and daily, have not engineered the formula for fame nor for infamy. 

But we have become so fascinated by our own reflection that we don’t like to be reminded of what we’re looking at.

If we recognize it at all.