The shame of the bystanders

By Claude Adams

The Nathan Kotylaks of the world I can understand. It’s the bystanders I have trouble with.

Nathan is a 17-year-old Maple Ridge kid who tried to blow up a police car in Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riot, and blew up a promising life instead. Son of a prosperous family, a prospective future Olympian, he was caught on camera trying to set fire to the car in front of hundreds of witnesses.

It was a moment of epic stupidity. Was he intoxicated, stoned, momentarily unhinged? We don’t know. What we do know is that in the photo there are scores of eyewitnesses doing nothing. Many were egging him on. There’s also video of Nathan throwing fuel into the car, and shouting “Let’s do it! It’s gonna burn!” I listened hard, but I didn’t hear any admonishments from the mob. I heard cheering. Nobody took him aside, and warned him about the consequences of his actions. Instead, somebody snapped a picture, and went on his way.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Photographer Jonathan McMorran is convinced that Kotylak was trying to set the vehicle alight. “I was five feet away when this man was lighting a shirt on fire and putting it in the gas tank. But I don’t think the shirt was far enough inside,” he said. “When the car actually caught fire six minutes later at 8:32 p.m., the blaze was started from inside the vehicle." He can’t say for certain that Kotylak was the one who succeeded in starting the blaze, because three or four people were making attempts inside the car. Source: Kent Spencer, Postmedia News)

The next morning the photograph went viral, and that’s when the backlash started. On Facebook, someone posted his home phone number and his address. A self-styled social media vigilante who calls himself Captain Vancouver launched a one-man “public shaming” campaign against Nathan and several other young men and women who were caught on camera. Said Capt. Vancouver about the photographs and the whirlwind of reaction: “It shall be chiseled into the hard stone of the Internet and last eternally.” (Why didn’t this Moses-like voice of retribution identify himself?)

Much of the commentary, from anonymous posters, was ugly. There were expressions of glee that he might be sodomized in prison. There was gloating that a “rich kid” would be taken down.

Nathan’s family, including his surgeon father, convinced him to give himself up to police. And he has made a public apology. If he is charged with a crime, as is likely, we won’t be able to use his name anymore because he is a juvenile. By then, of course, the social ostracism of Nathan and his family will have taken its cruel course, and court-enforced anonymity will be meaningless. The Kotylaks, worried about vigilantism, have already been forced to flee the family home.

Meanwhile, the national water polo team dropped him. Presumably, the University of Calgary, where he was due to begin studies next year on a partial scholarship, will also quietly withdraw the welcome mat. (The Facebook bounty hunters were urged to write to the dean of the U of C, and make sure Nathan wasn’t accepted.)

All this is predictable and, if Nathan is found guilty, probably justified. What he did is reprehensible and merits punishment.

But at the same time, I feel for the kid because he was an extension of a mob that will escape all sanctions. His co-conspirators will go untouched.

I’m a product of the ‘60s and I remember my William Burroughs: “There are no innocent bystanders.” And my Edmund Burke. “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”

In that downtown Vancouver riot, there were a few good men and women trying to stop the vandalism . . . But they were very few indeed, and some of them were beaten up. Mostly people watched. According to my ethical code, if you are a bystander, doing nothing, you’re an enabler. Eldridge Cleaver said it best: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. There is no neutral ground in a riot (journalists perhaps excepted.)

Looking at the video shot on the night of June 15, my partner Magi Bowyer directed my attention to the expressions on the faces of the people on the sidelines. The most common look was elation: they were getting a buzz from the noise and the flames and the police smokebombs and the prospect of looting. I didn’t see a lot of outrage; instead, it was the expression you see when children are creating mayhem without the risk of getting caught.

Experts who study the behavior of crowds talk about a phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance”—the more bystanders there are, the less the likelihood of anyone intervening. We take our cues from those around us; if thousands are doing nothing, then passivity becomes the acceptable norm. It’s okay to blend into the mob and rationalize your indifference, because everybody is doing it. The mob crushes individualism. It’s like a fire that consumes all oxygen. Another term for this is “diffusion of responsibility”—if there are two witnesses to an outrage, they’ll probably step in. If there are two thousand, they’ll wait for somebody else to act. Altruism will diffuse into nothing. It’s also known as the Genovese syndrome, after the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York. Dozens heard her screams; no one even called the police

As someone has said, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. When all around you is indifference, it’s easy to flip a car or smash a plate glass window. You fall into the moral vacuum of the moment. The reptile brain takes over. Time is compressed into the black hole of the present. A present in which one's fecklessness carries no cost. (Plus it’s easy to forget that someone is taking your picture.)

The morning after the riot was warm and sunny. Hundreds of Vancouverites were out with brooms, cleaning up the mess and hauling off the trash. The mood for many, I suspect, was shame tinged with denial. This isn’t my city. This doesn’t happen in Vancouver. This must be the work of a small cabal of anarchists and crazies, troublemakers. Everybody pointed fingers; the social media “outed” the culprits like Nathan, vilified them, condemned them, published the pictures they’d taken with their iPhones. Thousands scribbled their pieties on the Wall of Forgiveness.

But then came the real shame of June 15: the ugly vigilantism that followed the rioting, the scapegoating. But the scapegoaters forget it was all of us out there. We, the vast majority, stood by. The intensity of the morning-after fury was, I believe, in direct proportion to the deep-seated guilt we all felt for doing nothing. Because if we were in downtown Vancouver on that evening, we knew, deep down, that our silence was our approbation; our turning away enabled the madness.

We shape the culture, and the culture shapes the character.

Postscript: There's some suggestion that the way we play hockey, and promote it, and indulge its essential violence, was a contributing factor to the violence on the street on June 15. See Jeffrey Dvorkin's excellent essay. I'm not sure about that. But I do have some reservations about the media coverage of the final series between the Canucks and the Bruins. At least locally, it pushed almost everything else off the news agenda. The series was the ONLY story that mattered. We took a straightforward sports event and turned it into something all-consuming. We made it a contest that would define us. We would be the best. We put up giant screens on the streets to concentrate the tribal emotions we whipped up. Politicians appeared on camera in team jerseys, and pandered to the public mood. Hey, this matters, was the message! Then, when the team "failed" and the emotion turned sour, we were shocked.

Make Them Pay, screamed the front page of the Vancouver Province. But it was too late. We have already paid. But have we learned?

War in the Mind: a film about trauma

By Claude Adams

Judy Jackson is a veteran documentary filmmaker on Salt Spring Island who knows as much about war-related trauma as anyone working in journalism. While she was making War in the Mind, her new film about combat trauma, she was also deeply engaged in the rehabilitation of a Somali photojournalist, Salah Abdulle. Abdulle was severely traumatized when the car he was driving in was blown up in Mogadishu. Abdulle and Jackson met in Canada, and became close friends. He credited her with saving his life.

All the more remarkable, then, that War in the Mind maintains such an emotional equilibrium. Considering Jackson’s own experience with post traumatic stress disorder while this film was taking shape, she would have been forgiven a little more stridency, maybe even an occasional Michael Moore-like shout of outrage against a military establishment that downplays the link between PSTD and suicide among its soldiers.

Instead, Jackson plays it straight, letting her protagonists lead the story. There is anger in the film, but it is subliminal and subdued. One hears it occasionally in the voice of Romeo Dallaire, as he talks about the refusal of the military brass to fully acknowledge how combat and trauma go hand in hand. But the narration itself (by actor Paul Gross) is even-handed in tone. Maybe a little too even-handed for such a raw subject.

The heart of Jackson’s documentary is the experience of a handful of Canadian soldiers returning from duty in Afghanistan. All came back with trauma issues. They agree to take part in a unusual nine-month program of therapy—much of it involving role-playing--at the University of British Columbia. The therapeutic program is called “Drop the Baggage.” Even more surprisingly, they agree to let Jackson’s camera team into the room while they explore their traumas. The result is, at times, electrifying.

One of the doctors in the film talked of a “spiritual” wounding. And that brought to mind something written by Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent and author. "In the beginning war looks and feels like love,” writes Hedges. “But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. . . . It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip . . . Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb."

Three of the characters in Jackson’s film—identified only by their first names: Tim, Wayne and Dan—also come home and find it hard to live outside war’s grip. In the film, they talk only fleetingly about what it is that they experienced on the battlefield. We hear about buddies wounded or killed while on patrol. For reasons not made clear, a lot of detail of their experience is omitted. We do, however, see remarkable video of Frederic Couture on the battlefield, as he steps on a landmine while on patrol. Realizing that he had lost a foot, the young Quebecer freaks out and tries to shoot himself. His buddies stop him, talk him down, and carry him to safety. A year later, at home, Couture throws himself off a fourth-floor balcony and dies.

Like Couture, Tim Laidler, Wayne Innis and Dan Patterson have their worst moments when they’re back home. PTSD has a long fuse. It can erupt months, even years later, in the most unlikely places. One of the soldiers in the film talks about an overpowering paranoia he felt when he visited a Tim Horton’s in his home town. “I had to sit with my back to the wall, facing the door,” he says. He was haunted by the possibility of being attacked. In a chilling monologue, Dallaire, driven almost mad by his experiences in Rwanda, tells about sitting naked at home, cutting himself with a knife and feeling comfort in the warmth of the blood flowing from his self-inflicted wounds. He said he had lost his mental “prosthesis.”

Considering how deeply PTSD wounds these soldiers, I had some reservations when Patterson rhapsodized about the benefits of the UBC therapy. In a discussion with the audience after a recent Vancouver screening of War in the Mind, he said the therapy left him “a man full of love, able to smell the flowers” and wanting to “spread the word” about how one can recover from severe trauma. In the same discussion, Laidler remembered coming home, and burying his psychic wounds deep inside him. He’d worried lest a future employer might find about it. Now, after the therapy, he brandishes his healing experience. “It’s part of my resume now,” he said confidently. He plans to screen the film for his buddies in the service—something of a risk, since many still believe that when it comes to trauma, a good soldier learns to “suck it up.”

These are very positive things. You really want to believe Patterson and Laidler have left the worst of the trauma behind them. You want to share in their joy of recovery. But then you hear the darkness that’s still in Romeo Dallaire’s voice a full 17 years after Rwanda. And you see the WW2 veterans in the film, who still can’t talk about their battlefield trauma after 60 years. You sense that parts of them have never fully recovered, and you wonder if those parts can ever be restored, no matter how innovative the therapy. (Jackson herself says it would be useful to revisit her protagonists again five years from now, to get a better sense of their recovery.)

War in the Mind is filled with bleak and sad moments, but for me the saddest comes when a Victoria, BC, couple visit the grave of their son Stuart Langridge. Langridge was an infantryman, not much more than a boy, who hanged himself in his Edmonton barracks in 2008—three years after a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan.

In the film, his mother, Sheila Fynes, has just returned from Ottawa, where she convinced the government to award Langridge with a posthumous “sacrifice” medal, an act that acknowledges her son as a casualty of war. The medal came with an apology.

And now she was bringing the medal to her son’s grave. The poignant scene in the film suggests that the medal and the apology afford Fynes and her husband some long-overdue relief. But I was left with a dull hollowed-out feeling: Is that all there is? “I’m sorry, and here’s a medal.” Is that our government’s best response to this recurring tragedy of soldier suicides? Writing about the oft-quoted maxim that it is “sweet and fitting” to die for one’s country, the WW1 poet Wilfred Owen called it “the big lie.” Is it not even a greater lie to pretend that the suicide of a broken soldier is somehow a patriotic sacrifice?

Even if the soldier is killed in conflict, is this really a “sacrifice?” Sacrifice implies virtue: it asks us to buy into the language of those who see military service as inevitable, honorable, and a duty. Once again, I turn to Chris Hedges: “What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd?”

Yet it’s an absurdity that we instill in Tim and Dan and Wayne and Frederic and Stuart and the other soldiers we send out to fight our wars—conflicts in distant place that may have nothing to do with Canada’s security. And when they come home confused and damaged, we wonder how we can put them together again. Perhaps one in six is psychically scarred.

PTSD hadn’t even entered our lexicon when a little-known German poet, Franz Werfel, wrote these words about combat-addled WW1 veterans: “On a storm of false words, the head wreathed by empty thunder, sleepless from lies . . . “

Sleepless from lies. Empty thunder. War as virtue. Maybe it’s in these untruths and patriotic sound effects that the trauma of the foot-soldier really begins, even before he is crippled by an IED, watches his buddies die, or inadvertently kills a civilian. Maybe it begins in basic training, when we put a gun in a young man’s hands and teach him to kill without thinking. (Clearly, the military is sensitive to this subject. Watch the TV recruiting commercials for the Canadian Forces: there’s no killing there, only dramatic Arctic rescues and sea patrols.)

These are the kinds of emotions that Judy Jackson’s film evokes, and why War in the Mind deserves a place in the canon of anti-war filmology. It may not have been her intention, but we leave the theatre disturbed and angry, and asking questions that go beyond the treatment of trauma.

(War in the Mind will premiere on TVO on Wednesday, July 6, at 9pm, and will be repeated in subsequent broadcasts. It will also be shown on the Knowledge Network in the fall.)

Why Overheated Journalism Works

By Claude Adams

Early in the pages of The End of Iceland’s Innocence, Daniel Chartier fires a familiar rocket at the print media; that journalists often hype, spin, magnify and sensationalize “the facts . . . creating an ethos to make the news more appealing to readers.”

He’s about to tell us that the banking crisis in Iceland in 2008 was a media narrative. Yes, the banks failed, and yes, there was a loss of faith in the island’s economy, and yes, Iceland’s moneymen and politicians made some terrible mistakes that reverberated throughout the European economies.

But it was the Greek chorus of international commentators, wielding the language of hyperbole, who did the real damage. “The foreign media,” Chartier says, “worsened the situation and made Iceland a pathetic example of the financial failure the world was experiencing.”

It’s a compelling argument if you look only at the tone and the language of the coverage. Chartier, a literature prof at the University of Quebec in Montreal, based his study on the reporting of nine reputable newspapers in the fall and winter of 2008, including The New York Times, Le Monde, the Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, and Montreal’s Le Devoir. There’s no denying that the reporting often lurches into the apocalyptic: Iceland’s international reputation “ruined” (Financial Times), Iceland is “about to sink” (Le Monde), Iceland “crashing down to earth” (The Australian); Iceland “like Chernobyl” (Bloomberg); and my personal favorite, Iceland “the Nordic Zimbabwe” (The Huffington Post)

Of course, Iceland is still there in the North Atlantic. It hasn’t sunk, crashed, melted, imploded or drifted into the heart of darkness. Icelanders haven’t descended into cannibalism or thrown themselves lemming-like into the icy sea. Indeed, we’ve seen very little about Iceland in the newspapers since those grim days in 2008/09, but a quick search through the 2011 CIA World Factbook tells us that Icelanders are slowly putting their economy back together again. They haven’t gone Zimbabwean.

So yes, we can agree with Chartier that the ethos of catastrophe created by the print media muddied our perception of this tiny nation, with a population—320,000—equivalent to that of a mid-sized Canadian city. But the author goes too far when he argues that “this foreign discourse . . . has constructed for millions of people abroad the only image of Iceland they will ever get.” Most of us already had an image of Iceland before 2008, and it was a pretty Tolkienesque one: a land of hardy Nordic seafarers and fishermen, the world’s most peaceful country (a 2008 global index), occupied by the happiest, the healthiest, the best-read, the friendliest, and the greenest of people. Before 2008, we thought Iceland and what came to mind were Bjork and Bobby Fischer’s hideaway and halibut and volcanoes and a capital city that was impossible to spell. But that perception has been smashed. Today, thanks to the coverage of 2008, we know that Icelanders are Europeans living on a small island who survived a terrible economic collapse. Cut their credit and they bleed. Just like the rest of us.

So the over-hyped media attention, while traumatizing, may have been a useful wakeup call, for us and for Icelanders.

That’s not to excuse hyper-ventilative reporting. Matthew Arnold called journalism “literature in a hurry” and in the profession’s galloping urgency, a sense of proportion (not to mention the literary sense) is often lost. Major events become history-altering, medical advances become breakthroughs, every revolt is a democratic upheaval, and heroes are a dime a dozen. Editors have taken Pauline Kael’s admonition to filmmakers—“Astonish us!”—and directed it at their reporters. No surprise, then, that journalists will gild the grammar and torque the story.

Chartier does it himself, with the title of his book. Iceland was never “innocent” and 2008 wasn’t the end of anything. But as you follow his story chapter by chapter, you begin to see that while the newspapers may have amped the story, all those unhappy things did happen: Icelanders did over-indulge, the country’s three big commercial banks did collapse, and, relative to the country’s size, this was the biggest banking meltdown suffered by any country in economic history. And yes, the UK government did then apply anti-terrorism legislation against Iceland to recoup money owed to British depositors. And many Icelanders have turned their attention to fishing again.

All these things happened. And likely would have happened, even if Iceland had been a media-free zone. The journalists simply added the over-rich adjectives, and in their inimitable circus-barker way, drew us into the tent to tell us about a place we knew very little about. They came, they saw, they inflated. Thus it ever was. And will be.

Does he really need to be here?

Also published March 18, 2010, in J-Source magazine.

By Claude Adams

Trauma wasn’t a big issue for journalists 32 years ago when Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania suffered a partial core meltdown. As I remember it, we were “spooked” by the fact that if we were accidentally radiated, we’d never know it until our hair started to fall out weeks later.

That produced its share of gallows humor at the time. As did my anxiety when my flight out of Harrisburg back to Washington took me over a TMI cooling tower just as it belched a huge cloud of steam. Was it a radioactive cloud? What was the pilot thinking? Was I doomed?

I remember worrying what effect this flyover might have on my ability to produce children, but the subsequent arrival of Patrick (1981) and Ariel (1987) put those fears to rest.

They were heady, stupid days. Most of the journalists who converged on Dauphin County to cover that iconic nuclear accident knew almost nothing about reactors, relief valves, or radiation. We were ignoramuses eager to produce some disaster porn. Science was not our strong point. The most common question in the media scrums was “What’s a millirem?” (Answer: It’s one-hundredth of a Sievert.) We’d all seen The China Syndrome, so we were all waiting for the molten uranium to burn its way through the earth’s crust and initiate the Countdown to Armageddon. Meanwhile, we listened to the lies and evasions of the plant operators, and wrote the obfuscatory stories that created more confusion than clarity for our readers.

I remember one day, desperate for fresh copy, a few us drove out to farm country to see the cows. We’d been told that cows react to unnatural events by turning away from the source of trouble. So we found a farmer’s field where most (but not all) of the cows were facing away from the TMI cooling towers. That was enough for a provocative photograph and a few chilling paragraphs with a catchy headline: “What do the cows know that we don’t?”

Of course none of this is funny today, as we watch the unfolding of the Japanese triple-threat: quake followed by tsunami followed by reactor crises. Reporters are better versed today in science and technology, as well as how to act in dangerous places. But still, some serious questions remain.

The Pack Moves In

Like, what are all those journalists doing there in the first place? Are they really necessary, or do they just get in the way? What are they telling us that we don’t already know? The stampede of foreign journalists into Japan in the days after the tsunami baffled some correspondents already there.

Dan Chung, a video-journalist for The Guardian, was in Japan’s disaster zone 36 hours after the 8.9 earthquake struck. He left during the first radiation scare. “We were the first wave in and we were getting the hell out of Dodge. And the second wave (of foreign media) were just coming in. It was strange. I guess they were there to cover the meltdown.” (A podcast of Chung’s experiences can be found here.)

Of course, if there were a meltdown, nobody would get within 100 km of the nuclear plant at Fukushima. Even as it was, there was little or no access to the main disaster area, so most of the second wave of visiting journos never even left Tokyo, with its 24-hour communication, abundant food and accommodation, and best of all, no threat of radiation.

Even for those intrepid one-man crews like Chung who got into the disaster zones early, news-gathering was nightmarishly difficult and ultimately without much point. Almost all of Chung’s 20-hour working day was consumed by logistics—fuel, food, power and finding Internet connections—which left barely two or three hours for real work.

And then, most of the still pictures and video he shot were superfluous. Chung says he “couldn’t compete” with Japanese crews on the ground and in helicopters, or with the incredible Japanese amateur video that was already being transmitted around the world.

Finally, there was the simple problem of communication. Chung couldn’t speak Japanese, and even with a translator, survivors didn’t want to talk to him.

“I kept asking myself, what the hell are you doing, and how do you do it differently?”

Planting the Flag

Those questions are mostly rhetorical. They answer themselves. In his heart, Chung knows very well why he was there, spending thousands of dollars of his boss’ money on a noble but unrewarding exercise. He was in Japan because The Guardian wanted him to be there so they could say they had somebody on the ground. (Radio France were notable for their decision to put safety ahead of ego, and pull most of their journalists out of Japan when the reactors started leaking.)

Disaster coverage on this scale is all ego for large news organizations. It’s ego on steroids. Stories like Japan offer almost no opportunity for original, enterprise reporting. They’re a showcase for your marquee correspondents, who are parachuted in and whose job it is to put a face (or a byline) on an already-familiar story. It’s a practice called “establishing presence”--like planting one's flag at the North Pole: Today we are here (and tomorrow we’ll be gone.) The pictures these correspondents are fronting from Tokyo are the same pictures, and the same information, that have been spinning through the CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera news cycle for hours.

Just as Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait, 1990, was covered out of Washington, so too Japan, 2011, could have been covered perfectly well out of Vancouver or Toronto. All the images and human drama and analysis and graphics and voice clips are flowing down the pipeline, 24 hours a day, and all of them can be perfectly packaged at home. (Disclosure: I tried to cover Desert Storm for the CBC from a hotel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, but ended up spending much of my time in a bomb shelter with a gas mask on.)

“We owned the story yesterday,” was how the senior executive of one Canadian network greeted the first-day coverage of the disaster. In fact, nobody on this side of the Pacific “owned” it. It wasn’t owned. At best, it was creatively appropriated, re-packaged and disseminated. The real owners of the story are the people who lived and died through the disaster, who used the social media to deliver the images, and who continue to risk their lives in the rubble and the reactors to mitigate its effects. Plus those brave Japanese journalists who got the first pictures out on March 12.

Who Owns What?

Maybe the time has come for new, lean, fast-reaction kind of disaster journalism. Small, highly-mobile, self-contained units of intrepid people like Dan Chung who are able to access a disaster area within hours, and send back information, pictures and audio to a data pool that everyone can access. We have to accept the ego-deflating fact that there are few scoops in catastrophes. We have to give up the idea that we can “own” stories of chaos.

This kind of mindset is not likely to be embraced soon by our corporatised, celebretised media, so I guess we will continue sending journalists into trouble areas, and hope they muddle their way through with the minimum of risk and trauma.

If so, they should all read a guide prepared by Yoichi Shimatsu, a former editor with the Japan Times Weekly. His guide was commissioned by the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, and it has some good crisp ideas on how to gird yourself for life in a nuclear disaster zone. He also tells you what to pack: Things like small units of currency, the right camera phone, travel insurance (for that emergency helicopter ride to the hospital) and plenty of throwaway raincoats and face masks.

My favorite piece of advice is: Don’t be afraid to act like a “horse’s arse” at official press conferences. “The press handlers play dirty, and never forget it,” Shimatsu advises. So ask the tough questions and expose the denials and excuses.

In other words, if you absolutely have to be there, then at least find a way to make a difference.