Moral panic flattens Flanagan

Spectacular flame-out triggered by fairly tame comments, as Tom Flanagan's comments go.
 

by John Baglow

There are hardly any bones left to pick over this morning, but l’affaire Flanagan calls for some sober reflection after a pretty spectacular flame-out and the virtual supernova of Schadenfreude that followed it.

So rapid was Tom Flanagan’s implosion that it reminded me of a similar one a few years ago: respected FN leader David Ahenakew spewed a few words of anti-Semitic hatred into a reporter’s mic and lost everything — his standing in his community, his Order of Canada. A lifetime of achievement was erased in a moment. In the same way, Flanagan lost his university post, his CBC gig, his wise counselor status for the Wildrose Party, a speaking engagement at the Manning Centre, and his reputation. In a matter of hours he became a creepy old has-been.

It takes only a few seconds of carelessness to become a pariah in this era of recurring moral panics. Whether it’s anti-Semitism, bullying or child pornography, an entirely justified negative social reaction seems to lead inevitably to the creation of categories that acquire some kind of objective ontological status. They are hypostasized: regardless of their contents, they become things in themselves. And they crush everything in their path.

As we order and sort our world of experience, we tend to enlarge those categories by stuffing all sorts of things into them. Sometimes — as in the case of anti-Semitism, particularly with reference to criticism of Israel — the category almost bursts at the seams. Similarly, when it comes to bullying, all sorts of behaviours under all sorts of circumstances are now reduced to that one notion. And child porn, which at first seems like a no-brainer, can claim its innocent casualties as well — apart, of course, from the children who are abused in the making of it.

Tom Flanagan, let me hastily add, is not one of those innocents. He demonstrates the fundamental flaw in libertarian thinking with his involuntary reductio ad absurdum. His private rights trump those of kids who are tortured for the pleasure of consumers. Let the marketplace decide, goes the mantra, but there are markets that simply should not be created, and child porn is obviously one of them.

“Obviously?” Not, it seems, to an ideologue like Flanagan. As Michael Harris asks, where does he think child porn comes from? The fact is, he doesn’t care (never mind his subsequent apology-under-pressure). It’s just pictures, right? The radical immorality at the heart of libertarianism is brutally revealed.

Flanagan has actually been beating this drum for quite a while. In 2009 he uttered similar sentiments; I blogged about it at the time. Why did this not cause a stir then? Is it the immediacy of video, as opposed to a report in a student newspaper? In any case, no journalist thought to seek him out for clarification, but I guess we have that now.

Of course we progressives have been revelling in our Schadenfreude. Flanagan is a repulsive, Rovian figure, Harper’s eminence grise, and a determined antagonist of First Nations’ hopes and dreams. It’s great to see that old bastard vanish into the sunset. But…

Journalist, author and inveterate Tweeter Dan Gardner makes an important observation: “Are we at the point where calling for a man’s murder on TV is less an offence than musing about the law in a seminar?” He’s referring, of course, to Flanagan’s on-air statement that Julian Assange should be assassinated.

I don’t agree that Flanagan’s statement is merely “musing about the law” — that’s rather too anodyne a description of what he actually said — but the comparative reaction is interesting, and we should interrogate this matter, I think. We do seem to pick and choose the social evils that we permit to inflame our collective consciousness. Set David Ahenakew’s few words against, for example, Ezra Levant’s televised eight-minute hate-rant against Roma, the immediate consequences for the former and the non-consequences for the latter.

If we are continually to succumb to waves of moral panic — if that is indeed to be our mode of confronting problems for the foreseeable future — it is really too bad that we can’t panic over the public advocacy of murder, or public expression of racism other than anti-Semitism, or our rape culture, or on-going police impunity across the country. Perhaps a serious examination of our collective selection criteria for the crise du jour would be the most positive thing to come out of this appalling, and yet fundamentally trivial, episode.

© Copyright 2013 John Baglow, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca