The connection between the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver and an American political sex scandal have kept me thinking.
The connection between goons trashing Vancouver's downtown, and Anthony Weiner sending pictures of his nether regions to women he met online, may not be immediately obvious. But it's there, in the stories we tell afterwards.
In the immediate aftermath of the riots, Vancouver Police Department Chief Jim Chu claimed that "criminals and anarchists" were responsible for the fights, burning cars and looting.
I'd be very worried that the city's top cop could confidently identify culprits in a crime without actually, you know, seeing any evidence first. ("Criminals" is redundant; if you torch cars and steal, you're a criminal by definition, yes?)
Chu has already had to backpedal a bit, as it turns out that some of the first wave of folks arrested thanks to social media have been star athletes and other middle-class teenagers from the suburbs. Not so much as a Sex Pistols album to their names, it seems.
Only a few media outlets have actually bothered to, you know, ask anarchists if they actually rioted. They say they weren't, noting that there was nothing political about the event, and the hallmarks of the Black Bloc (the sub-set of anarchists who break stuff) were absent. (When they do smash things, the Black Bloc is notable for being sober, organized and better equipped than the hockey riot goons.)
So why did Chu blame anarchists?
Then there's Anthony Weiner, a former New York congressman, who apparently likes taking pictures of himself and sharing them. And Americans love a story about a politician's genitals.
Bloggers and pundits have been coming up with ever more elaborate theories to explain why an apparently intelligent, grown man would do something so stupid, so likely to result in scandal. This has resulted in a lot of stories involving pop psychology of the lowest kind. The more complex theories tend to rely on badly understood versions of evolutionary psychology. (Handy tip: if a story includes the phrase "back when people were chased by sabre-toothed tigers," it's an evolutionary psych fairy tale.)
And here's where Chu's anarchist claims and Weiner's... um... photos link up.
Both the pundits and Chu are telling Just So stories, in the Rudyard Kipling tradition. These are simple stories to explain complicated phenomena. How did the elephant get his long trunk? Because once upon a time, a crocodile grabbed a young elephant's nose and pulled and pulled and pulled... and ever since then, all elephants have long noses.
So why did a bunch of Vancouverites go nuts and break stuff? Was it a complicated relationship between booze, youth, sports, and human psychology? No! Anarchists!
Why do politicians expose themselves, often literally? Is it something that has numerous root causes, in our society and our brain chemistry? No! Men are just perverts!
Fortified with our Just So stories, we can then ignore the issue. Thanks, Jim Chu, and thanks, pundits. I can shut off my brain and stop worrying about human motivations for troubling behaviour. All is explained in a few simple sound bites.
