Warning. This is
LONG. And it has very little sleuthing content. And it's opinion only. Skip it if you like.
Now that we are at a point where we can draw breath and reflect a bit, I have one or two phenomena (I'll call them "memes" for want of a better term) that have been thrown up by what we have seen and heard and written (and seen written) over the past few days.
In some cases they overlap to the point where one meme is hard to distinguish from another, but the vague outlines hold true, in my view.
Basically, what we've had, for starters (you can think of more if you like), are:
1. The "Build 'em up, Knock 'em down" Meme
2. The Cynicism "They're all cheats anyway" Meme
3. The Vengeance First and Foremost Meme
4. The Canonisation of the Victim Meme
5. The TV Miniseries Version of Justice Meme
6. The Permanent Leakage Meme
1.
Starting from the top, Oscar Pistorius fits perfectly into the mould formed by the likes of Tiger, Lance, countless footballers from Maradona and George Best onwards, plenty of heavyweight boxers, entertainment figures suddenly and - whoops! - "shockingly" exposed as serial rapists or kiddie-fiddlers, pop idols with a penchant for too much Colombian marching powder, and on and on...
These people are often encouraged in their nasty habits for a long time before they suffer their fall from grace, surrounded by sycophants and also often heavily involved in "charitable" matters that blind people to their real malevolence or their human frailties. The media accommodates and enables them until it decides that they are ripe to be brought down - at which point their (and our) feeding-frenzy is only surpassed by their (and our) refusal to acknowledge just how much they (and we) have "groomed" these individuals in the first place.
In some cases, for example the recent Jimmy Savile scandal in the UK, the icon is deemed - rather like a financial institution - to be "too big to fail" for a while before he is brought down (in Savile's case only after his death).
Oscar is a runner. He is elevated to iconic status by being a handicapped athlete and a global icon of disabled sports. Other aspects of his character, good or bad, are ignored and sublimated by the obsession with his metal legs, just as Tiger Woods' wayward off-course behaviour was seen to be irrelevant as long as he was banging in 30-foot putts and lacing 300-yard drives down the fairway.
Lance Armstrong is a more complex case, of course, but here, too, the media and the public are complicit in elevating him way beyond his real worth (you will infer - correctly - that the writer feels we generically lift sporting & entertainment figures and "celebrities" in general to a podium way above what they deserve), and in ensuring that Lance's fall will be all the more catastrophic.
Those who accommodated singer Amy Winehouse's crack habit on her way up are as revolting as those who stamped on her body on the way down. They were making money out of her both ways around.
The same will go for Pistorius in his own personal rise and fall, and - if you look carefully - it has already started in our own readiness to assume "he must have dunnit" (because he's now in freefall mode and we can believe absolutely anything about him), and he
MUST be a calculating narcissistic pyschopath because...well, he must be, mustn't he? Stands to reason, doesn't it?
2.
This first "assisted rise and fall" phenomenon has played its part in creating a second meme, that of the jaded and cynical viewpoint that "
nothing whatsoever is what it seems" and it's all theatre anyway, from sportsmen flagrantly cheating (athletics, cycling, etc.) and diving (football) in order to gain advantage to politicians who are only in it for their own benefit and Hollywood stars who are "naturally" unpleasant bastards just as soon as the camera is off them.
Pistorius gets some of this, as it is somehow assumed he MUST be a nasty piece of work because he's probably barked at a few pushy people who got too close to his personal space (he's famous - it goes with the territory) and he throws his money and his weight around in the manner of most privileged young sportsmen and women, for all that he's been set up as an icon and paragon.
To some extent this, too, accentuates people's feelings about his inevitable guilt, even to the point where they bluntly refuse to accept that he might just have
had a loving relationship with his girlfriend Reeva, might
not have been possessed of a personality disorder, and might actually be feeling
real remorse rather than crying what we assume are "just crocodile tears".
"After all, they all cheat, don't they?" "He's just a good actor is all". The fact that as yet we have not had scads of people "close to the case" coming out of the woodwork to suggest the Pistorius-Steenkamp relationship was on the rocks is actually a huge disappointment to some onlookers. This may of course simply be that they cannot bear the idea that it was all a ghastly cosmic misfortune: deliberate, premeditated murder would somehow be easier to swallow. Go figure...
3.
Moving right on, we have the
Vengeance Meme. A life has been taken, in circumstances that have yet to be fully determined. Regardless of whether this WAS all a terrible accident that will leave the perpetrator scarred for life, there is an urge to scourge and punish him in equal measure, even to the point where he MUST be incarcerated pending trial.
What benefit this will have for society at large and for the relatives of the victim is of secondary significance. It is a very visceral and personal lashing-out for revenge and recompense, as though
WE have some personal investment in Reeva's lost life (not dissimilar to the late 20th century, post-Diana sense we have of being a part of the lives and deaths of celebrities whom we don't know - all those *advertiser censored**ing teddy-bears).
I noticed a good many posters wanting Oscar to be banged up, not based on any concrete knowledge that "he did it and he meant to do it" (besides, we don't
HAVE that knowledge) so much as based on "
somebody must be punished, and NOW". I suspect this is only loosely related to the wider debate about violence against women - I'm horribly afraid it's more about "violence against someone I've read about in the paper". Shrug.
4.
Then from the reference above to the fragrant St. Diana, Queen of Hearts we naturally segue into the very popular "
Canonisation" meme, in which the victim is exalted, particularly if young and attractive, and is imbued with all manner of good qualities that may or may not bear any resemblance to the truth.
Reeva was a model, and very pretty, but she was hardly a figure worthy of the pedestal she will be put on in death. Her Twitter pages showed a rather typical and, dare I say it, slightly vacuous young woman who partied, often at others' expense, who allowed herself to be used for product placement, and regularly put up glossy pictures of the cars and other toys she had been lent through her exposure as a minor-league South African celebrity.
Ultimately she was a nice kid, she was somebody's daughter and sister, and it's utterly rotten and crappy and bloody unfair that someone's killed her and her family have to bury her, but people like Reeva and people more valuable to society than her die every day in mindless road accidents and as a result of painful illnesses, and nobody puts them on the front page.
As a murder victim, it is important that the deceased is perfect in every detail. Even if she was just human.
It helps us to demonise the killer. Which we do quite readily.
5.
The
TV MiniSeries Justice Meme is present throughout the long (and now closed) thread, as people struggle to come to terms with the fact that this ain't over yet, and it isn't all neatly wrapped up in four or five pithy one-hour episodes, with forensics and ballistics and clever police breakthroughs and what-have-you.
Many seemed blissfully unaware that what went down in Pretoria was
NOT a trial, but a rather bloated bail hearing, that the prosecution were hamstrung by not being able to present evidence, or by not WISHING to show their hand completely as yet. The posters felt actively frustrated, as if they were a TV viewer who knew more than the characters in the drama (although they did not), and they felt the prosecution had not done enough to present their case. The prosecution certainly did bungle things in their own cloddish way, but this was not a trial as such, and should not have been understood as one. For a start, it's real, not fiction.
We'll have to wait for Season Two, and wait and see if the prosecution can exploit the very considerable opportunities that have been opened up by the defence's detailed affadavit. Just one significant bit of conflicting forensic evidence and we have ourselves a serious ball-game. We will also have to accept reluctantly that not EVERYTHING will be told to us exactly when we expect it - according to the script. And we'll have to accept that social media and the Twitosphere or whatever it's called doesn't always know the answers just because it is quickest to the keyboard.
6.
And that takes me to the last meme on the list. This (
Leakage) might seem rather irrelevant by comparison, but it's been an integral part of the past week. With 24-hour rolling news desperate to break the story, social media trying to best the press, and with police authorities and others too often closely in bed with the journalists, nothing remains under wraps for more than ten minutes any longer. This case was littered with vague rumours and leaks floating into view - some possibly deliberately engineered by the defence as "false flag" exercises - that were ultimately shown to be bogus or at least greatly exaggerated.
I say "engineered by the defence" because arguably it was the defence that benefited most from the very colourful statements that were being put about as fact earlier this week. When it was possible to completely demolish the "bloodied cricket bat story", it was also possible to throw into question a good many other possibly incriminating facts and claims around the case. The common feature of the rumours was that they were all surreptitiously leaked to an eager world.
Now just so's you don't get the wrong idea, I willingly put my hand up and say
I'm guilty on all counts for the above prejudices.
It's EXTREMELY easy to be sucked in to thinking along these lines, and doubly so when one is coming from a relatively "safe" living environment where the idea of blowing holes in the toilet door "just in case" there is an armed intruder in there is completely alien.
There have been times this week when I've been 110% convinced OP is a conniving *advertiser censored* and a premeditated murderer, but right now... well.. the jury is out. I've no idea
WHAT to think anymore. I'm just interested in what forces have been brought to bear on my mind (and yours) to make us think the way we have...
Sorry about the length. Now back to your normal programming.
