Top Stories Boston

Archive for the ‘right wing’ Category

Death’s confluence: Amy Winehouse and the Norwegian terror victims
Of all the details to emerge from the Norway atrocities last Friday, one of the most harrowing was the thought of those frightened, bewildered youngsters leaping from the shores of Utøya, dragging their limbs through the gloppy water as if in some kind of terrible dream, gunfire crackling at their backs.

Of all the details to emerge from the Norway atrocities last Friday, one of the most harrowing was the thought of those frightened, bewildered youngsters leaping from the shores of Utøya, dragging their limbs through the gloppy water as if in some kind of terrible dream, gunfire crackling at their backs.

It's a bad thought, but there is worse. The mind recoils at the way things played out elsewhere on that tiny island, the final moments of those who didn't make it to the lake, those who confronted a blue-eyed monster, and with him an impossible truth: The absolute certainty of death.

The following day, Saturday, the 27-year-old singer Amy Winehouse was found dead in her London flat, most likely as a result of too much drink or too many drugs or a combination of these things. You wondered if her final moments would have felt like laboring through thick water, if that impossible certainty had occurred to her, too.

Reports of the singer's death and the monster's rampage danced around each other in the media. There was, as always, an incessant drive to accrete relevant facts: the murky political affiliations, the calamitous final performance. Swirling above it all was a kaleidoscopic representation of death—the urge to inflict it, the impulse to avoid it, the apparent desire to bring it on.

There's an old story, about a guy who interviewed people who had attempted suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Many of these survivors, the story goes, told the interviewer that they'd changed their minds mid-air. Faced with the reality of their decision, they finally understood that they didn't want to die.

Read more