Good grief.
Via Salon:
Before any of us knew who they were or why they had done it or what they might do next, one thing seemed certain: The Boston Marathon bombers were cowards. Overlooking the expressway leading into the city, an electronic billboard flashed the message the day after the bombing, complete with a hashtag.
It felt good to see and say this, a bitter and righteous rebuke to those who would terrorize us. The billboard was courtesy of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 103, and everyone from President Obama to Gov. Deval Patrick to Boston Red Sox management echoed the sentiment. Something similar had happened a dozen years earlier, when President George W. Bush and many others called the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks cowardly. Our habit of using “coward” in this way is understandable, but it comes at a cost.
Calling terrorists cowards felt good for a few reasons. First, the word satisfied the need to lay offenders low with the nastiest possible term of abuse. There is nothing worse than a terrorist, goes the logic, and, as long and enduring tradition has it, there is nothing worse than a coward. The cowardly begin the Book of Revelation’s list of those damned to burn forever in a lake of fire, and they are the most despicable souls in Dante’s “Inferno.” Urbandictionary.com defines coward as “the most insulting word known to man.”
Calling the terrorists “cowards” also felt good for the perhaps childish reason that the terrorists had used the term first. The idea of American cowardice runs through the rhetoric of violent jihad. In his 1996 fatwa, for example, Osama bin Laden wrote that its cowardly withdrawals from Vietnam, Beirut and Somalia (“your most disgraceful case”) had shown that, if attacked, the U.S. would abandon its commitments.
Calling the terrorists “cowards” was also strangely comforting. Three days after the marathon bombing, when the suspects were identified and came out of hiding, armed and murderous, my family heard the sirens and helicopters. That night they allegedly killed an MIT police officer just down the road from us, then hijacked a car and engaged in a deadly firefight with the police. It was a scary time, but as we followed the orders to “shelter in place” — a phrase we’d never heard before — it was reassuring to think of the suspects as cowardly. If they were cowards, then they were scared too — vulnerable, weak. And thinking them weak made another new phrase — “Boston Strong” — more convincingly true.