Accused and accusers
THE HASHTAG HURRICANE OF METOO IS INDISCRIMINATE IN ITS LANDING
There is no cheaper or easier way to earn counterfeit moral credentials than to leap on the white horse of the moment, say all the right and familiar phrases — virtue speak — and heavily denounce the most obvious and repulsive miscreants. Play Dr. Jekyll in public and let loose all the malice and cruelty of Mr. Hyde in private.
New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has been accused of being a vicious sexual pit bull. He allegedly used his position to threaten a whole series of sexual partners, while visiting mental and physical violence upon them. If true, it was great he got caught, but he had a vile run.
Not so great was the cover he received for a long while by posing, artfully and with near insane hypocrisy, as one of the champions of women’s rights, as a #MeToo comrade-in-arms, and a Democrat anti-Trumper — the good side — to boot. Unbelievably, some of one alleged victim’s friends urged her not to report him, “arguing (he) was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose.”
You can’t fault the #MeToo phenomenon if some adopt its mottos while practicing the very behaviours it condemns. But the example of the wretched Schneiderman should cue some people that not everyone on that train is the passenger he (or she) claims and poses to be. Further, it should serve as a deep caution that when any movement or cause receives feverish support, the eager and near unanimous applause of Hollywood, the press and the political world, it is all the more time to be scrupulously vigilant that it neither proceeds to excess, nor is being manipulated with obnoxious or malicious intent.
The case of Erin Weir, the NDP MP for Regina-Lewvan, currently “convicted” of harassment, based on (originally) anonymous complaints to his leader, Jagmeet Singh, is instructive. As is the norm in such matters, Weir was named from the very beginning. Right away he was out in the storm. And in the atmospherics of #MeToo, at least in the public as opposed to the legal domain, to be accused is to be (almost always) deemed at fault.
I do not see why, when an accusation is levelled against a peer, especially within an institution such as a political party where rivalries are endemic, a name or names shouldn’t be attached to accusers as well. After the accusations were lodged, Mr. Singh quickly went public with an egregiously sanctimonious declaration that “he believe(d) the survivor.” On another occasion, it was “important to always believe the survivors.”
Now a healthy respect for what a woman or women may have experienced, and an open sympathy for the general idea of supporting women in such a context, is reasonable. But to be so emphatic, to bypass — even outside a courtroom — some tincture of the presumption of innocence, is to wildly set the scales against the person accused.
As statements that were a preface to an investigation, they were absurdly incongruous. But such is the current force of the #MeToo movement, and considering the always rapacious eagerness of politicians to align themselves with the cause of the moment, we can easily understand Mr. Singh’s reverence toward ultra-politically-correct sentiments. Understand, but deplore. Why investigate, when you already believe?
The next step was to send out an email to 250 members of the NDP’s parliamentary wing to ask if any of them had had “harassment” encounters with Mr. Weir. This action, whatever else if might be, was an open invitation for anyone with political or personal hostility towards Mr. Weir to further wound him by amplifying the harassment charges against him.
Meantime, Mr. Weir was to be left in the dark about who complained, what they complained about, when — whatever “it” was — was to have happened, and to sit stoically mute while headlines screamed and panels dissected his “inappropriate” (this ever-so-elastic, cloudy, trendy and prudish term) behaviours.
In the end, the crime was “not responding to non-verbal cues.” Oh why did the world close Devil’s Island?
The atmospherics of #MeToo makes these imbalances, if I may use a term familiar to this scene, structural, and its dynamics play out in consequences both unintended and grave.
In the case of the wolfish Schneiderman, it gave an allegedly wicked man, for a long time, cover. In the case of Weir, it brought into play deeply unfair procedures and played havoc with his career, over not reacting to some unspecified non-verbal cues in a non-sexual context. Dragons and mosquitoes.
Of course, the real turn in the Weir saga, is that NDP MP Christine Moore — who had (only recently revealed by the formidable Christie Blatchford on these pages) been one of the instruments of two other MPs’ ejection from a different caucus — was also an “informant” against Mr. Weir. And now the imps of irony have her standing in the same box he, thanks partly to her, found himself in.
I don’t think, the news being so fresh, that I need to recapitulate that drama. But I will note that the hashtag hurricane of MeToo is very indiscriminate in its landings, and further note that with great righteousness comes great irresponsibility. Even worse, great carelessness in matters touching reputation, determination of facts, imbalance between accused and accusers, and a readiness to swarm at a moment’s notice.
The great 19th-century sage Thomas Babington Macaulay once observed: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
Change the public, change the century, and insert dangerous for ridiculous, and the observation stands ready to apply.