Explosions will fail to stop the Boston Marathon

No place in public’s consciousness, writes Simon Barber

BEYOND the lives and limbs shattered in Monday’s Boston Marathon bomb blasts it was far easier to see what did not happen than to know what did.

A boy’s life cut short because he was there to hug his father at the end of the race; his sister left an amputee; his mother’s brain damaged by flying debris or deliberate shrapnel. To think on these things is to stifle a sob.

That said, with just three dead, total casualties edging t owards 200 and the city’s physical fabric relatively unscathed, this was not what happened 300km to the south in New York on September 11 2001. That day Islamic jihadis left 3,000 dead and triggered what was as much of a turning point in American history as December 6 1941, Pearl Harbour.

Nor was this April 19 1995, in Oklahoma City, when Timothy McVeigh, a creature from America’s paranoid fringe, detonated 2,200kg of ammonium nitrate outside the Murrah Federal Building, killing 162, many of them children in a first-floor nursery.

Nor was this what happens almost daily on the streets of the cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Kabul, leaving shattered lives and mutilated bodies to be counted in double and triple digits.

If Monday found an echo anywhere, it was July 27 1996, the day another homegrown extremist, Eric Robert Rudolph, tried to disrupt the Atlanta Olympics with a pipe bomb that left one dead and 100 wounded.

Rudolph, when finally caught in the Appalachian mountains in 2003, said he had meant to bring the Olympics to a halt to protest the legalisation of abortion.

The games went on. So, next year, will the Boston Marathon, as much of an international institution in its own way as the Olympics — to which the flags that fluttered on the endlessly replayed blast footage bore eloquent testimony. The tragedy will be marked, the victims remembered, at least for a few years, but memories will fade as they did in the Atlanta case.

Which is as it should be, in many ways. The perpetrators of such acts do not deserve the satisfaction of thinking they have earned an indelible spot in the public’s consciousness.

In that respect, President Obama’s measured statement on Monday afternoon was apt. Presidents are expected to hold the nation’s hand at moments like this, to comfort the grieving and assure them that justice will be done, but this president clearly did not want whoever was responsible to get pay from interrupting his day.

The Boston bombs went off just as I was boarding Jet Blue flight 197 from New York to Chicago. The Embraer 190 came equipped with TV screens on the back of every seat. Throughout the flight, passengers were able to watch continuously looped blast footage and listen to the breathless commentary that accompanied it on the news channel of their choice.

You might have expected the sight of bombs going off and reports of heightened security in cities and airports to create a bit of a buzz aboard an packed aircraft. But no one seemed very exercised. Most found reruns of Friends and whatever on their Kindles more to their taste.

As of yesterday morning on the US east coast, the identity and purpose of whoever placed the bombs remained a matter of conjecture, but there was one intriguing coincidence to conjure with: April 15 was not only Patriot’s Day in Boston — the public holiday on which the marathon is always run — it is also the federal tax filing deadline, an infamous day for the paranoid American extremists who think the government is coming to take away their guns.