Naturally I wanted to write about the capture of Whitey Bulger, and yet all week, I found the words were not flowing for me.
For one thing, what's left to say? Every single voice in our city, and in most of the state, and among a whole lot of people who ever lived here, left here, or in any way thought they knew Boston, has weighed in and will be weighing in, for ever and a day, amen.
It's like our local version of Al Capone, Bigfoot, and Watergate all blended into one big corn-beef hash of scary corruption, seductive mystery, corrosive suspicion, sour disillusionment, satisfaction at justice long-delayed, with the garish ketchup blood of tabloid excitement to top it off.
The ending of the Whitey story is about the passing away of one way of Boston seeing itself, the end of some powerful illusions about the role of the outsider and the righteous indignation of resentment. Ever since he went on the run in '95, and the bodies began being dug up, and the long tale of his sordid partnership with the FBI, this shift has been happening, bit by bit, but it's only become fully visible now that he's visible once more.
What was he doing all these years? He's carved out a nice little retirement, with his apartment in a nice town by the sea, his girlfriend and his comfortable stack of cash. Not much different, come to think of it, then he might have had coming, had he ever done an honest day's work in his life instead of landing dozens of rotting bodies that he's shot or strangled in a wide array of beaches, quarries, and car trunks. Like the fictional Sopranos, part of the horror is that he conducted all that brutality to secure himself nothing but some selfish suburban comfort.
