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Vancouver
VANOC bamboozled by taser video
How will John Furlong, still arranging security for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, deal with the fallout from the YVR tasering death of Dziekanski?
By Kevin Potvin
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While everyone from the RCMP to the person who shot the video to everyone who has viewed it has weighed in with an opinion on what it depicts, the one man with the most to worry about with the release of the YVR taser video has been invisible and silent. John Furlong, CEO of VANOC, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics organizing committee, is surely the one making the most frantic phone calls to public image damage control companies today.
Any number of branded slogans VANOC has created or appropriated for itself with heavy investment ahead of the expected big money shot in just 27 months are at risk of fatal tainting in the wake of the YVR taser video. “Vancouver welcomes the world” has been transformed overnight from a bland and safe corporate cliché into a wry smirk, for what, the phrase now begs the previously unasked question, do we welcome the world with? A 50,000 volt taser blast to the chest if you get lost in the airport, is the apparent answer the world—right now considering buying tickets to come here—is thinking.
Multicultural, so long as it's our culture
“Multicultural BC” is another long-standing phrase that has warmed the hearts of bureaucratic officials forever and has been latched onto by VANOC as a key selling feature for their big event. Yet no one could be found, or rather, no one bothered to find anyone, to speak to a lost and distressed arrival in his native Polish, a major European language prominent in Canada for well over a hundred years. There can be no doubt that it was this language barrier that played a key role in the death of Robert Dziekanski. Furlong can be sure that people considering coming to Vancouver in 2010 and who speak languages other than English—which of course is most of the world—will notice that rather prominent detail in the story.
Any of us who have ever traveled to non-English places know the frustrations and difficulties in ordering food in the streets there, let alone in navigating large, poorly laid-out and badly signed institutional buildings filled with stodgy officials and uptight security guys. If the taser video was from Beijing International Airport and it was Chinese police taking out a confused and lost Canadian with a no-questions-asked blast to the chest, there is no doubt the raging discussion across this country would be whether or not anyone at all is going to buy tickets to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. That’s the same discussion going on now all over the world among people just now making their decisions about what to do in 2010. Can’t speak English? It could cost you your life in Vancouver in 2010.
What will lodge these questions in the hearts and minds of the anticipated global market for VANOC is the chillingly ultramodern look of the video. It bears an uncanny resemblance to a scene in the conveniently just-now re-released definitive director’s cut of the 1982 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner. Director Ridley Scott, though using dark rainy chaotic street scenes for most of his backdrops, chose a clean, sharp, brightly-lit and glass-encased shopping mall backdrop for the shocking and revolting slow-motion take-down of a distressed android by ultra-cop Harrison Ford, known as a Blade Runner because he hunts and kills rebellious androids not allowed to come to Earth. The trick is identifying them because they blend in with the crowd: they look like everyone else, ordinary people.
The Harrison Ford character is cold and merciless. There are no questions, there is no hesitation and there is no doubt in his mind about what he is going to do when he identifies one. Through sheets of glass in an institutional setting, we watch the innocent and pitiable human-looking android helplessly get shot up and go down and then spasm in electrical short circuiting on the floor. In the next shot, Ford and a few other cops look down at his handiwork dispassionately and move on, unmoved.
Plagerism! To the charges looming against the RCMP officers at YVR we may add plagiarism. The distressed Robert Dziekanski is viewed through sheets of glass in the über-modern setting of an airport terminal, he is approached by cold and merciless cops who by all appearances seem to have already made the decision to take him down, which they do without hesitation or doubt. Dziekanski drops to the floor in a fit of spasms before being tasered again and again until he stops moving. The lack of sound from the scene itself (being behind glass) doesn’t take away but rather adds to the effect. When finished, the cops stand around looking dispassionately down at their handiwork. It’s a cold scene.
In the film Blade Runner, based on a book by Philip K Dick, the scene plants a seed of doubt in the mind of the Blade Runner character: caught up in a world where empathy has no place, he finds himself dehumanized to the point of dispatching to the netherworld possibly sentient beings whose only crime is to wish to live beyond their built-in four-year life-span, a period determined by the huge and wealthy corporation that manufactures the androids because a longer life risks them acquiring all the human capacities for emotion.
More human than humans
Indeed, it is another android who shows great empathy and emotion in saving the life of the very human deployed to kill him and who reveals to the Blade Runner who is more human than the other. What makes the YVR taser video so impactful is the backstory too: Dziekanski is everyman. Who hasn’t been lost in a foreign airport? But from the point of view of the cops, he is a threat, a foreigner who doesn’t belong there, a misplaced object to remove from the otherwise ordered world.
It is a cultural question: how far are we willing to go to restore a fantasy of law and order in the post-9/11, anti-terrorism world? At what point do the agents of human order dehumanize us all to a degree more alien than the aliens we ask them to remove from our society? Has the mandate to protect us from threat been taken so far by the authorities that they are now protecting us from our own humanity?
In the director’s cut of Blade Runner, it emerges that the Harrison Ford character might, in the end, have discovered that he is an android himself. In the YVR taser video, we are left likewise to wonder if the cops have become the alien threat and if we have become the image of disorder they are dispassionately programmed to remove.
The big remaining question for John Furlong and VANOC as they ready for 2010 is security. How much will it cost and what shape and form will it take? Was Furlong by any chance counting on cops with tasers at the airport and at 2010 venues? If he was, he’s now looking at a quiet airport and empty venues.
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