BRAZIL IS HARDLY A WAR ZONE FOR THE VISITING MEDIA
Some perspective, please, on bus attack; no evidence journalists being targeted
To borrow from an ancient song Jackie DeShannon made popular lifetimes ago, what the world needs now is not love, but proportion, sweet proportion.
I refer to the unwarranted, unmitigated, unspeakable attack — an attack, I tell you — on a media bus in Rio de Janeiro the other night in which no one was seriously hurt, least of all killed.
Of all the things to be outraged about — as a start, Donald Trump’s seeming effort to sic the dogs of the gun-nut lobby on Hillary Clinton, or, if you want to stick to matters Olympian, say, the already forgotten refusal of the Lebanese team to share a bus to the opening ceremony with Israeli athletes — this would not appear to rate so highly.
Yet the subject that dominated the daily news briefing of the Rio organizing committee Wednesday was none other than the bus attack.
As the briefing was happening, I was arriving in Sao Paulo, where the undefeated Canadian soccer women will play their quarterfinal match against France on Friday, but Postmedia team leader Bev Wake was there.
The topic ate up at least a third of the conference, she reports, and likely would have been more if organizers hadn’t brought along Rafaela Silva, the Brazilian gold medallist in judo who was born and raised in the notorious City of God favela, to whom journalists managed to direct at least some questions before moving onto the meat of the moment.
Let me make a couple of things clear.
Of course, attacks upon civilians of any kind are a bad and troubling thing. And in some parts of the world, such as war zones and oppressed countries where journalists functioning as the people’s eyes and ears are deliberately targeted, an attack upon the press fairly can be understood as something much broader and more sinister.
Similarly, when dozens of lawyers were killed in the emergency room of a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, this week as they gathered to mourn a murdered colleague, that reasonably was taken as an assault upon the rule of law, already on life-support in that city, capital of Balochistan province.
But Rio and Brazil are not those places, violent and unruly and dangerous and riven with disease as we might long to portray them, if only to cloak ourselves in the noble cloth of the conflict reporter.
It is quite true that security at these Games is, to put it kindly, erratic. Depending on the venue, it veers from painstakingly bureaucratic (wherein one person searches one bag while another volunteer peeks politely in another and a third conducts a bit of a pat-down search) to pedantic (at the Mane Garrincha National Stadium in Brasilia, you’re required to give the serial number of your laptop, but are otherwise merrily waved through a gate without even a latch, let alone a lock). I’ve been to venues in Sao Paulo, Rio and Brasilia without seeing the equivalent of even lackadaisical airport security measures.
Reporters are usually spared the worst of a Games’ excesses, which are reserved for the public, and that’s as true in Rio as anywhere else.
The most egregious security measure against the press that I’ve seen is that we, like the public, are forbidden to keep the caps on our water bottles at the Garrincha stadium, lest we, like the great unwashed, hurl them onto the pitch.
And much as Rio is a hotbed of violent street crime, as are many big cities in the world, it isn’t Quetta or Baghdad or Kabul.
And not all Brazilian cities are the same. Brasilia, that paean to modernism in that it was purpose-built as a sort of utopian capital by the late Brazilian architects Lucio Costa (who planned the city from scratch) and Oscar Niemeyer (who designed many of its major civic buildings), is everything that Rio and Sao Paulo are not.
Featuring wide, tree-lined boulevards, the city is irritatingly clean and orderly. So constrained a place is it that despite being ensconced in a three-room, two-balcony suite, I longed for the grimy, suicideinducing bedspread of my Rio hotel room.
Finally, there is this: Though there are sharply differing accounts of what the bus attack was — the damage caused by either rocks or bullets, with the IOC preferring the former and the journalists on board the latter — and though there was an earlier bullet that flew into a media workroom, there’s no evidence anyone was or is deliberately targeting the press.
I know that, because there are so many freaking different numbers and codes on every given media bus and at every given media bus stop — each must have three separate identifiers — that some of us who are meant to know which bus is for the press can’t figure it out. The cleverest young rounder in the favelas will make no sense of it.
And oh yes, despite the oft-used shot of the person on the bus looking mournfully at the flesh wound on his arm caused by shattering glass, no one was hurt. We may be a band of brothers, but we ain’t exactly shedding blood with each other here.