Same mindset that refers to the September 11th attacks as a tragedy.
We need professional help
Monday, 4 April 2005
Mark Steyn
One of the striking features of the soft, seductive, remorseless, nanny-state totalitarianism-lite of Trudeaupia is the media’s coverage of bad news. When things go wrong, you can’t help noticing how reflexively our reporters lapse into their preferred portrayal of Canadians as victims. The four RCMP officers murdered by James Roszko were merely the latest example: “Tragedy Latest Setback for Struggling Town” (Calgary Herald); “Investigators Scour Farm for Clues to Tragedy” (Regina Leader-Post); “Worst Force Tragedy since Riel Rebellion” (The Daily Miner). A “tragedy” would have been their car going off a bridge en route to the Roszko place. Even the historic comparisons with the Northwest Rebellion only emphasized the outrageousness of what had happened: when one guy--known to everyone in the neighbourhood as the ne plus ultra of “angry white loners”--manages to kill four Mounties, that’s not a “tragedy” but an operational fiasco. Or, as my colleague Colby Cosh put it on his website, “Canadian policing’s greatest tactical clusterf--.”
Oh, to be sure, not all folks adopted the heavily sedated Remembrance Day tone of the CBC’s coverage. Some Canadians were angry. They called the talk shows demanding new laws--laws to decriminalize drugs, laws to recriminalize drugs, laws to set up an even bigger and better multibillion- dollar gun registry, laws for this, laws for that. Hey, why not? The unlovely Mr. Roszko had already broken scores of laws; if only we’d given him a few dozen more to disregard. Assault with a weapon? Unlawful confinement? Sex attacks on underage boys? Property crimes against state officials? Been there, done that, over and over.
By demanding that “the government”--any government, feds, provincial, municipal, preferably all of them--carry on frantically legislating into the wind, the angry talk-show callers were, in effect, being just as victimologically inclined as the somnolent correspondents of big media. Fuming and furious, they were tonally different but philosophically indistinguishable, both parties subscribing to the view that Canadian citizens are the passive charges of the nanny state and that nanny needs to put more safety bars round the nursery.
The same day as the killings, I saw a picture in the Montreal Gazette--a fireman bearing a sooty blackened baby from the wreckage of a home in Saskatoon. It--the home and the baby--belonged to Jennifer Bowron and her common-law husband Mike. Newspaper reports seemed unable to establish Mike’s last name, and indeed seemed remarkably uncurious about his role in the proceedings. The fire started just before nine on a Thursday morning, and Jennifer and Mike immediately leapt out of a second-storey window. Jennifer went next door to call 911, and her neighbour asked, where were the three kids--aged three, two and six months? “I don’t know,” said Jennifer. “They’re in the house.”
Technically, in fleeing for their lives, Jennifer and Mike had followed the handbook. If you take a fire safety course, they tell you don’t try to save the kids or the cats; scram outta there and wait till the professionals turn up. Never having taken the course, Jennifer and Mike didn’t know that, but, even if they had, I wonder how many other mothers and fathers could put the parental instinct to protect on hold so thoroughly as to abandon three young children to roam around a blazing house. And, even if one accepts the logic of the safety course, couldn’t one of the parents have leapt out the window and called 911, while the other attempted to locate the children and, if he couldn’t rescue them, at least prevent them wandering deeper into the fire?
In the end, the home was gutted but the firefighters rescued the children and took them to Royal University Hospital in critical condition, suffering from smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning and third-degree burns. Mike, on the other hand, walked away all but unblemished. Perhaps none of us can know what we would do in that situation until we confront it, but the reality is that his children will carry on their bodies for the rest of their lives the consequences of his decision that morning. No press reports were boorish enough to dwell on this aspect of the situation: the common-law husband all but vanished from the story, and even from the name of the fund set up to help (“Jennifer Bowron and Family”).
There’s a reason mature societies promote principles like “women and children first,” and recite poems that ring slightly nutty to contemporary ears:
“The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled.”
“The boy leapt off the burning deck in compliance with a Health Canada safety course he’d taken” doesn’t play quite the same, does it? The point is that, even in the most extreme circumstances, we remain at some level masters of our fate. In the last year, no individual has made a greater impression on me than Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14, 2004. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it. But he understood, even in the final seconds of his life, that he could act and that his actions would make a difference.
In nanny-state Canada, the dominant culture tells us don’t act, don’t think, don’t make adult judgments. Leave it to the government, they’ll show up any minute, they’ll pass a new law. Not every story has a hero, but every story needs human impulses, and in the Canadian press most of our “human interest” stories are, in human terms, less and less interesting. If the benign theory of state power is that it obliges us to subordinate our selfish interest to the greater good of society as a whole, the reality on the ground seems to be precisely the opposite: a state in which the citizen’s response to everything is “the government oughta do somethin’ about it” is one in which he’s less and less inclined to do anything other than look out for Number One. But what’s clear about the coverage of the RCMP slaughter--as with the deaths of four Princess Pats from friendly fire in Afghanistan--is that our victim culture is now so advanced and universal that we prefer even our soldiers and police officers in that mould.
When the Patricias were killed three years ago, Svend Robinson, the Palestinian suicide bombers’ favourite gay infidel, huffed indignantly: “If Canadian troops cannot be certain that they’re not going to be fired on by Americans, we have no business being there.” Sorry: nothing is 100 per cent risk free; ask Canadian jewellers. Not even colossi like Lloyd Axworthy or Bill Graham can extend the fluffy cocoon of the Trudeaupian bassinet all the way to the Hindu Kush.
That week there were two stories involving the PPCLI: the four men killed in Afghanistan, whose deaths prompted an orgy of coast-to-coast mawkish ersatz grief-mongering that was a disgrace to a grown-up nation; and the five of their comrades who’d proved such lethal snipers that the Pentagon wished to accord them the rare honour, for foreign troops, of the Bronze Star. That story was reported nowhere except in the National Post. The Canadian government had nixed the award, officially on some nitpicky procedural ground, but unofficially because they were a bit queasy about letting it be known that our “forces” (we don’t say “armed forces” any more) still occasionally--what’s the phrase?--kill the enemy. In the spirit of that unarmed “peacekeeper” on the $5 bill, we’d rather see our soldiers as victims than warriors. That’s why the most famous living Canadian “hero” is Roméo Dallaire, even though some of the decisions he made on the ground in Rwanda were as weedy and self-serving as Mike in Saskatoon.
As for the protagonist bestriding the heroic narrative of our refusal to have any truck with missile defence, it’s hard to improve on this quote: “Martin said he would expect to be consulted on what to do about any missile passing over Canada.”
By the time it’s incoming, I don’t think calling Ottawa will be a priority. Still, in the event that it falls short and lands north of the border, Canada can metaphorically leap out the window and wait for the professionals to show up.