Looking like a soulful troubadour about to drop his next acoustic album, Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will grace the cover of the next issue of Rolling Stone.
The cover story, by contributing editor Janet Reitman, promises to deliver a "deeply reported account of the life and times" of Tsarnaev, in a bid to explain "how a charming kid with a bright future became a monster". Of course, the cover blurb — 'The Bomber: How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam and Became a Monster' — makes it pretty clear how RS thinks Tsarnaev was led astray, and why it isn't really his fault that he killed three people and injured as many as 264 others.
Tsarnaev was deemed more cover-worthy than the musicians featured in this issue, including Willie Nelson, Jay-Z, Gary Clark Jr and Robin Thicke, who should probably throw some #TSARNAEV hashtags into his next video if he wants a shot at the cover.
The cover continues America's alarming trend of turning its worst monsters into celebrities — it's life imitating art imitating life, as we are now living with a media landscape every bit as grotesque as the one parodied by Oliver Stone in 1994's Natural Born Killers. That wasn't a particularly subtle film (you heard me say it was an Oliver Stone joint, right?), but if it seemed at all exaggerated or far-fetched then, it sure doesn't now.
The cover gets right to the heart of the most disturbing aspect of the Tsnarnaev story, which is honestly that he's a handsome guy. He doesn't 'look like' a terrorist or a troubled youth, and if anyone can make a generation of disaffected kids who don't think anything really matters want to take a crack at making their own bombs (that's not a stretch, by the way; it's already happening and it's happening here), it's this Aaron Taylor-Johnson-looking motherfucker. Plastering him on a cover usually reserved for 'cool' people (and Paul McCartney) doesn't help.
There's a good chance that the folks at Rolling Stone have thought of all of this already, that they're well aware of the American media's tendency to make saints out of sinners and are slyly parodying it. At a certain point, though, no matter how self-reflexive they are and regardless of their intentions, you have to ask yourself if you're okay with seeing Dzhokhar freaking Tsarnaev on the cover of Rolling Stone.
I guess we can just take solace in the fact that kids don't actually read Rolling Stone anymore.
