One-way battle in the spin wars
Posted by Dalton48 on 03 Sep 2009 at 06:06 pm | Tagged as: Current Events, Toronto
The Star lovingly recreates Bryant’s last night as a man not under suspicion, while in the meantime, Partisan Hobo notes:
…there’s no PR firm to save the deceased man’s image. I don’t even know him, but I know he came from a broken home, that he is a visible minority, that he has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, that he’s the unmarried father of several children, that he had no formal “career”, that he had more than one interaction with police in more than one city prior to his death. None of this is really relevant to the public interest. Mostly it’s just prejudicial detail that helps some people imagine a man who lived on the edge and was bound to experience violence of some kind at some point.
I don’t know where the line is, exactly. At some point you have to profile the victim, and once you do that at some point it has to come out that he had dozens of warrants out for his arrest in Alberta, had fathered four children by three women, and had never met his four-year-old son. You can’t exactly ignore this as biographical data, if you’re trying to get at who a person is as a person. The other side of Sheppard is that a lot of people who knew him well seemed to love him, as well as finding him frustrating, and that he made his living in a way that demands a serious work ethic.
On the other hand, the more compromising material ends up as bright red meat for a very ruthless spin machine which wants a clear acquittal in a case with a lot of dark ambiguities, and as Partisan Hobo points out, ends up as a mechanism for dismissing the victim. I’m very pessmistic about us ever finding out what happened. Bryant has now set a spin machine in motion, and you can see its various seeds in certain media reports – Blachford’s column is one, and the cbc.ca main story yesterday, which suggested that Sheppard had Bryant in a headlock and grabbed the steering wheel, is another. Neither quote real people with real names, but both float possibilities which would tend to exculpate Bryant. I can actually see a scenario in which he salvages his political career.
There’s such a total disparity of power, and so much at stake for a bright, ambitious, powerful person that I don’t trust the situation at all.
RE pessimism RE ever finding out what happened, it’s known for sure:
1. Bryant was driving a convertible with the top down and did not leave the driver’s seat until the event was over;
2. Sheppard was, shortly beforehand, judged by a Police officer able, although the Police officer had been flatly told he was intoxicated, to reach home on his bike. So, unless the event commenced by Sheppard passing out slumped into the driver’s seat over the driver’s-side door, he was the mobile member of this duo.
I am now 74 years old. I have always been a careful driver–my most dangerous practice always to drive at the posted speed limit. (It’s surprising how evidently irritating and even dangerous that can be, but I don’t see why anyone should force/induce me to break the law.) My first self-limit was to avoid busy 400 highways where speeding is endemic, and, now, I also self-limit driving in the dark, at rush hour, and in Toronto. Driving in Toronto is wild, I think because all the world’s driving practices are combined there. When we were travelling in a taxi to Patrick’s and Catharine’s wedding, a pedestrian stepped off the curb after the light changed in that pedestrian’s favour, and our taxi driver exclaimed in indignation, as he drove through the red light, just missing her, “Did you see her? She STEPPED OFF THE CURB!” To which I replied, “The light changed–that’s what I would have done.” In New Haven, CT, as a young married woman, I used to walk to work, back for lunch, and home at night with my nose buried in a book, paying attention only to the stop lights, thinking that if I got run over, it’d be the motorist’s fault. Drivers occasionally and obviously found this a surprising practice, but in Toronto these days I wouldn’t last five minutes; these days, after getting off the GO bus, while walking to the taxi stand opposite Union Station, I always ask someone walking my way to cross with me, and occasionally they’re surprised, but always accommodating.
Because I do not drive a Saab convertible with the top down, but rather, in urban areas, a Honda CR-V with the windows up and the doors locked, what happened to Bryant could not have happened to me. But suppose that some version did. I can readily imagine the eruption of demands that all drivers over blah-blah age be tested annually, and etc. etc., in other words, a smoke-screen of demands masking that someone with issues was spoiling for a fight.
Now, there’s security camera footage on line which shows that Bryant was stopped at a red light, and Sheppard was waiting on his bike in front of him, and when the light turned, Bryant drove into the bike. Great merciful heavens! He drove into the bike stopped in front of him, and knocked Sheppard off his bike. Isn’t the correct thing to do next, is to stop right there until the cops come?