People love to gawp at life’s car crashes
and we currently have enough to chose from. Good news is in short supply. Without watching a news broadcast of any kind (presentations which all too often make your teeth ache), or reading a serious newspaper (fewer and fewer of those), you open the door to the unknowable provenance of social media.
What you read might be true, but then again … At least in the past when somebody violently disagreed with you in public, you had a face on them. Anonymity frees thugs, bullies and fantasists.
And the written word and replayed image makes them real.
To celebrate the death of privacy is to ignore that, often, animals mate alone, give birth alone, die alone. We are animals too and like every other word in the language, privacy can be interpreted positively as well as negatively. A good example of the abuse of privacy is Grenfell.
None of those who did wrong thought they would ever be discovered and I am immensely grateful to Martina Lees In The Times (7.9.24) for her article on the police investigation which makes plain the enormity of two tasks – running down the offenders and nailing them in law.
But how useful is it if the response to the death of 72 loved ones is to talk about prison ?
More important is that a criminal record follows those responsible and that they are NEVER allowed to do the same kind of work again. Let’s not wait to build another jail and then find we can’t staff it. Let’s haunt them all forever, as we are haunted by the blaze and the loss.
And perish the thought of a memorial. The world is full of things that mankind built to last forever. And they didn’t.
Memory lasts with people, that’s why dementia is so cruel. If Anita Lasker Wallfisch who survived Auschwitz because she could play the cello in the prison orchestra can dismiss another Holocaust memorial (“In favour of it ? No. Plant flowers !”), wouldn’t it be better for the Grenfell survivors to underwrite their own trust for legal advice, English classes, any kind of support – which may just mean half a hour with somebody who doesn’t look for a label for you – that would make it less possible for the abuse of the modest earning multiracial group, the donkeys of our flying horse society sidelined into the deathtrap of a tower block, to be dismissed ever again ?
Or to make
Steve McQueen’s short silent film (Grenfell), shot looking into the tower from a helicopter immediately afterwards, widely available ?
Upskirting so called (as soon as something questionable gets a trendy name, you know it is about to be dismissed)
is the stolen image of what is between a woman’s legs for the double thrill of theft and sex for the person with the camera. Often dismissed because there is no direct contact between abused and abuser, upskirting has led to the trial in France of a woman many years married whose husband drugged her so he could watch other men sexually abuse her. I don’t know the details of what sexual abuse constitutes in this case, French law differing from ours. But from the cheap thrill of sneaking up the skirts of strangers , this pathetic excuse for a person graduated to years of drugging and hiring out his wife as an inert body to be abused. Forget “sexual” – think about abuse. Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power and he disempowered his wife into complicity. And I bet money changed hands.
So why isn’t France outraged about this ? Well, you know,
little people – plain people, elderly people. Unglamorous. Small town, tourist industry. So we are left to infer that as long as the female has the vital aperture, who cares what she is or what she looks like ? Like every other Western country I know of, France likes its vaginas with pretty faces if they are going to receive press attention.
The mobile phone has made this possible, the taking of the pictures upskirts without physical contact, the spread of those images and the keeping of them, so there is a record which led the French police to the rest of this revolting story. And this unfortunate woman in the midst of the wreckage
of her domestic life.
And if I resist a positive end to this dark writing it is because you can’t applique sunshine and flowers on top of this destruction and pain – alongside the blood products scandal and the sub postmasters. Less a question of “what have we come to ?” than how did we get there ? Or maybe we always were.
It isn’t just the sky that’s dark.
Annalog 