Peninsula Peace and Justice Center
HEATHER MALLICK
CBC News Canada
The sight and sound of someone screaming in pain as a cop shoots
50,000 volts into him, well, it Tasers my soul.
Now I have a new trauma: the sight and silence of hundreds of students
at the University of Florida sitting quietly and obediently last week
as a young man was wrestled to the floor by a gang of cops, handcuffed
and then repeatedly given agonizing zaps that made eerie clicking
sounds. The student had no gun, only a loud voice. For this, he was
tortured with a hand-held cattle prod?
Only one young woman approached the lynching and screamed at the
police to stop. I don't know who she is, but I salute her. In fact,
I'll adopt her if it turns out she's orphaned and having trouble
paying her tuition fees.
I can cope with the speaker, John Kerry, not racing down from the
podium to rescue the young man. That's Kerry. But he released a
statement in which he expressed hope "that neither the student nor any
of the police were injured." What a coward. As anyone watching on
YouTube could see, the police didn't even scuff their jackboots.
Uniformed thugs
If you're a senator and married to fantastic Heinz ketchup wealth, you
don't have to grovel to uniformed thugs. So why does he volunteer?
But the sedentary, nay inert, group that watched the student
screaming, oh my. For all that liberals like me deplore human
aggression, it's worse to watch human passivity and cowardice. One of
the things I like about Americans in general is their loudness in
expressing their wants. They don't sneer like the French or apologize
like Canadians. They're honest about it. So what has happened?
In 1963, Mary McCarthy wrote a novel called The Group about eight
Vassar graduates. So acute was McCarthy in her painting of collective
female cruelty that I have deplored single-sex gatherings ever since.
Groups behave worse than individuals do. In the Tasering video, they
egged each other into inertia.
There is something truly terrible about a group watching an individual
being seized, harmed and dragged away. It's very Lord of the Flies.
It's very Nineteen Eighty-Four with Winston Smith's ultimate
humiliation, finally telling his torturers, "Do it to Julia! Not me!"
It doesn't help that the student, Andrew Meyer, is Jewish. For those
who wonder how Germans stood by watching, some curious, some laughing,
while Jews were stripped and humiliated in the street on
Kristallnacht, while Jews were forced to eat grass, while their shop
windows were broken and their goods stolen — this is how it goes. As
long as it's happening to someone else, there will always be citizens,
safe and secure at that moment, watching calmly from the sidelines.
Blame the victim
After the incident became public, there was a wave of blaming the
victim. Meyer was loud and obnoxious, and deserved what he got. (In
fact, Meyer is a good writer. His blog is quite intelligent, as these
things go.) The lovely Bill O'Reilly called Meyer a wimp, although my
understanding is that all humans, including O'Reilly, react
identically to electric shock. Their muscles contract instantaneously
and they collapse in pain.
That O'Reilly, always so blasé about the pain of others, so sensitive
when it comes to his multiple humiliations. But many of us are like
that.
Next month, Dr. Jack Kevorkian will be speaking at the University of
Florida. One shudders to think what campus police will do to anyone
who interrupts him.
As anyone who gives and attends public lectures knows, there are
always audience members at Question Time who hog the microphone, who
don't ask a question but deliver a statement of their own beliefs at
great length, who mumble and miss the point. This is a given at public
events. When it happens, I remain polite and answer as best I can.
I don't have the man electrically shocked, mainly because this is the
type of person most likely to buy my book at the end of the reading.
But also, it's just not done, in the same way that one does not use
the same toothpick to repeatedly dip one's shrimp in communal sauce;
it's not hygienic. It may be thrifty, it may even be harmless, but it
is beyond the pale.
These are the rules of socializing en masse.
Wrong message
Two years ago, Britain's New Labour Party manhandled one of their own
delegates, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, out of a meeting for
heckling. In the U.S., people are barred from political meetings for
printing the wrong message on their T-shirt, or having the wrong
bumper sticker on their car. In Canada, your fellow demonstrators with
rocks in their hands may well be undercover cops who didn't think to
change their damning jackboots when they went into disguise.
Surely it is time to remember that free speech is free speech; that
people are allowed to behave badly, even grotesquely, in public as
long as they obey the law. But then I was born snarky, always poised
to disagree with groupthink. Indeed, I spend a good deal of time
disagreeing with myself and deploring my bad attitude.
Would people race to help me if I were in Meyer's situation? I think
not. Perhaps the University of Florida should offer a class in The
Mechanics of the Group, with reference to Kitty Genovese and Emmett
Till. If you don't know these names, Google them and be harrowed.
Which makes me wonder, what is YouTube for? Now that I can no longer
watch Steve Carell in Produce Pete skits from The Daily Show, YouTube
is good for horror and shame
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