From Grief Police To Tragedy Hipsters: The Seven Most Unhelpful Arguments That Took Over The Media After The Paris Attacks
Friends, we are dealing with an invasion of unprecedented scale: that of the straw men.
They’ve been here for a while, of course. Living among us. Popping up uninvited whenever dinner table discussions or Facebook comment threads turn to any subject remotely contentious. But the Paris attacks have brought them out into the limelight, innumerable and unashamed.
Friends, we are dealing with an invasion of unprecedented scale: that of the straw men.
You’ve fought a straw man argument before, even if you didn’t know it. The feminists who want to enslave men? Straw. The straight male friends who will, if legally allowed, get married to rort benefits? Straw. Women who will have child after child, just for welfare payments? More stuffed than The Scarecrow.
Because this is the function of the straw man: to ward people off. The straw man represents the most radical, most extreme position along the spectrum of any argument, and thus is easily set ablaze. It’s not that people holding these opinions don’t exist; there’s probably a few out there, much in the way that this person is real. But they’re rare, stupid, and thus easy to pull down.
Still, just because it’s low-hanging fruit, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pick it. As an industry, we the media have risen as one to fight a noble battle against our straw man enemies.
Here are our main targets.
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STRAW MAN #1: THE FACEBOOK FREEDOM FIGHTER
As with the rainbow flag filter which was immediately (and perhaps somewhat cynically) deployed when the US Supreme Court declared it was unconstitutional to ban same sex marriage, the French flag flooded Facebook as people woke up to the news. (Interestingly, for the first time one was given the option to nominate when it would be removed, avoiding users the uneasy task of deciding when exactly one had shown enough solidarity.)
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, The Onion ran the headline, ‘Not knowing what else to do, woman bakes cake of American flag‘. Too bad Facebook wasn’t around then, because if it was she would have known exactly what to do: stars and stripes superimposed over a profile pic, forever melding together one’s political allegiances with that rare moment where good lighting and a bad flu created perfect cheekbones.
“Phew”, these straw people presumably say, after admiring their new avatar. “Red, white, and blue. Take THAT, ISIL!”
Thankfully, their naïveté does not go unchallenged! Thankfully there are writers with the political and social media nous to reveal, with shocking perspicacity, that terrorism will not crumble under the weight of a translucent tricolour.
“The gesture was presumably well-intentioned, and many clicked mindlessly without considering whether the move really offered any tangible support for France,” wrote Jackie Salo over at the International Business Times. [Italics mine].
“Je suis Paris and Beirut – but does a Facebook photo help?” asked an SBS op-ed.
Salon’s Paula Young Lee wrote, “it is an empty signifier of sympathy that rings hollow in the face of ongoing and very real threats of violence.”
Well done, professional thinkers. You’ve blown minds. Or at least the tiny, tiny minds who can’t or won’t distinguish between miniscule displays of emotion and multilateral geopolitical solutions.
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STRAW MAN #2: THE GRIEF EXHIBITIONIST
As people are wont to do at these times, they tweeted, facebooked, and instagrammed shock, solidarity, and sadness.
Social media often facilitates our most frequent interaction with friends, sure, but it is also inherently a performative space. Those who happily hold court at every social gathering – and I’ll hazard a guess that such types are overrepresented among opinion writers – will rightly deride any action that takes place online as essentially being a cynical attempt to present oneself in a particular light.
“From suffering arises another trendy social media gimmick, another way for us to show the world how “clued in” and “with it” we are,” wrote Jamie Khoo on Elephant Journal.
“My classmates were using the bombings to lay claim to a stake in tragedy — to seem altruistic and deep,” said Andrea Vale, on USA Today.
David Weigel at the Washington Post called it “performative signaling purely for their own selfish benefit.”
All I can say to that is; well pegged, guys. If these people *really* cared about Paris, they wouldn’t be pouring out their heart on the internet. They’d be expressing their feelings in some other way. None of you specified how exactly, but that’s cool! Probably because then the fakers will jump on it. But once you care properly, I’ve no doubt it’s obvious.
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STRAW MAN #3: THE WHITE SUPREMICIST
Seconds after an expression of grief had been posted, it appeared to warrant a prolific response: that the person in question had failed to mark bombings in Beirut, or Kenya, or Nigeria in the same way, let alone the mass executions that are reported to occur daily in IS-controlled territory.
“How do we explain our indifference to the suffering of people we perceive as different, Lebanese, African, Hazara, Muslim…. Brown people,” wrote Chris Graham over at New Matilda.
“Be honest,” implored Nesrine Malik at The Guardian. “Do you care about all tragedies in the world equally?”
And here’s Jack Jones on the matter — unfortunately using a picture from 2006 and failing to ask himself the question, if the media didn’t cover it, how does this photo exist?
No media has covered this, but R.I.P to all the people that lost their lives in Lebanon yesterday from Isis attacks pic.twitter.com/mZXUEcxDmR
— Jackjonestv (@jackjonestv) November 14, 2015
This is not to say that there are not excellent and pressing points to make about the way Westerners respond to lost lives around the world. But it might be worth assuming that someone reading about or commenting on the issue is interested in interrogating such ideas, rather than being adamant that French deaths are more sad than Muslim ones.
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STRAW MAN #4: THE GRIEF HIPSTER
Some of us go to bars that have no signs to listen to bands you haven’t heard of. And according to this stream, some are obsessed with grieving more obscure deaths. And they were doing it before it was cool.
Some commentators today honestly sound like tragedy hipsters, “Bro- I care about suffering and death that you’ve never even heard of”
— Jamiles Lartey (@JamilesLartey) November 14, 2015
The grief hipster apparently doesn’t care about disparities of power, of allegiance, or even of separation; according to their critics, the only possible reason to either engage in or critique public mourning is as a, as the French would say, poseur. Thankfully, the grief hipster can be smacked down.
“It’s similar to people turning on a musical act when they get too popular. ‘I knew them before they were big,’ they say, rolling their eyes,” writes David Farrier.
Point well made. Grief hipsters would absolutely expect you to care as much about someone you’ve never met, interacted with, or were aware existed. Zing. Hipsters reading this, go and troll some funerals now.
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STRAW MAN #5: THE GRIEF POLICE OFFICER
Now, it can be difficult to smack down a grief hipster without becoming another kind of straw enemy altogether – the grief police officer.
GPOs work overtime at times like these, deterred from their usual job of moderating the tributes to departed mid-tier celebrities.
The grief police maintain strict yet unspecified standards of exactly who should be sad, and when, and how much. Step outside the boundaries, and they’ll be there to scare you back to the safe zone.
But wait! Here come the cavalry!
“People are allowed to grieve the way they want to grieve,” Mayer Cesiano bravely declared at the Washington Post.
“Our empathy and our grief is individual. There is no wrong way to love, or to grieve, or to pray,” proclaimed Sheila Hamilton at Huffpo.
What unimaginable bravery to suggest that feelings are subjective, emotional responses often disproportionate, and expressions of such are one’s right, lest we are at risk of being subpoenaed for a sniffle. The people out there who believe that there is a Goldilocks-approved level of grief will be thinking pretty hard about themselves right now! Job well done.
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STRAW MAN #6: THE OPPORTUNIST
You know what politicians and the actors who play them are like: night after night they sit in their darkened offices, waiting for disaster to strike, and then working out which of their policies they can shoehorn into it.
Oh, NOW France closes its borders. #Hollande
— Rob Lowe (@RobLowe) November 13, 2015
“Must we instantly bootstrap obliquely related agendas and utterly unconnected grievances to the carnage in Paris, responding to it with an unsavory opportunism instead of a respectful grief?” asked Frank Brunei in the NY Times.
“It’s funny how people will very distastefully use this kind of situation to express their own particular political views,” said Mark Owen on France’s 24 network, in reference to Newt Gingrich’s tweet regarding gun permits.
Imagine a theater with 10 or 15 citizens with concealed carry permits. We live in an age when evil men have to be killed by good people
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) November 13, 2015
How crass! Apparently, now is not the time for thinking things about guns, or border control, or terrorism, or anything at all. Now is a time for sadness. Opportunists, you see, do not have policies and ideas grounded in respect for life or the preservation of sacred values — they just wanna win. Or get heaps of retweets. Either way.
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STRAW MAN #7: THE BARBARIAN
This is the scariest, strawiest monster of them all, one so threatening that writers of all stripes have scribbled in one ink against it.
This is an apparently prevalent enemy that does not believe in considering, or in strategy, or in unity, or possibly in anything at all other than Doing Something, Anything, Immediately.
Nearly every writer weighing in on this issue has fought the barbarian within to suggest we take the radical step of pausing, for a moment, to think — whether we invade, or cease air strikes, whether we accept more refugees, or close borders entirely, whether we denounce ISIL or… well of course we will, that last one is silly.
This is one of the most pernicious straw men to fight; every suggestion that we must think hard about the conundrum that is before us suggests that those who have come to a different conclusion have not done so.
To those opining about Facebook freedom fighters, tragedy hipsters, or opportunists, I’d offer the same challenge I would to anyone proposing another straw man argument with which we have become sadly familiar: that the burqa should be banned because people it could be used to smuggle explosives. “Show me where in the world that has ever happened,” I would retort.
So show me the person who genuinely believes that a Facebook profile picture will be the act that brings this fight to an end. Prove to me that someone weighing in on this tragedy is doing so thinking, ‘Oooh, great! SO MANY LIKES’. If there’s someone in my group of Facebook friends who genuinely believes that Muslims and people of colour are less important than French people, point them out to me and I’ll unfriend them. Ditto for anybody who has stopped reading about Paris because it’s just, like, totally over.
Who are the official grief police, who believe that every post should be legally required to state a list of everything an individual cares about, in order, and proportion? If you’re going to claim that somebody is exploiting a tragedy to push their agenda rather than their political ideals being formed in response to such events, show your work. And if anybody wants to declare that they believe we should act, or not act, in response to such violence immediately and with absolutely no thought whatsoever, come on down.
Until then, don’t fight these people. They represent a miniscule minority of people of any one ideology (hey, who does that remind you of?), but not the whole. Taking them down doesn’t win you an argument. It’s storming out disguised as a mic drop.
And for fuck’s sake, if you can’t mention Facebook without some zinger about your best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend, get better friends.
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Maddie Palmer is a writer, broadcaster, TV and digital producer. She tweets from @msmaddiep