Race to the Cellar

It’s astonishing to me how two men with a couple of sharp instruments and a twisted interpretation of Islam could throw a nation of millions into alert mode, but that’s exactly what happened in the U.K. this week.

The two murdered an innocent British soldier in the London district of Woolwich in especially unpleasant fashion. Some officials called them cowards, but they weren’t at all. They remained at the scene of the crime and welcomed documentation of what they had done by people in the area with smartphone cameras, finding a willing audience for their insane ideas.

As if this weren’t enough, the footage (funny how we persist in using antiquated terms for digital information) made its way not only onto the Internet, but onto respected news outlets like the BBC. Pictures of one of the suspects holding a bloody meat cleaver were on the front pages of many newspapers.

We often hear the argument these days that information is now democratized, that we’re all reporters, and that we don’t need the traditional “big brother” media outlets to get out the news. In desperate search of ears and eyeballs, the media succumb to this intense pressure to share every single detail of a crime perpetrated by those seeking maximum distribution of it, partly on the grounds that such distribution will happen anyway.

Just to mix metaphors – and I’ve used this one before – we are like 12-year-olds sitting around a campfire in the dark, trying to one-up each other with a more shocking ghost story – and there’s nothing more effective than a ghost story that’s true. The result is, we get desensitized to normal levels of horror, and the bar is raised – or lowered, depending on your point of view.

I hope that some day, as we all get used to playing with our new electronic toys, that editors will be appreciated again. Freedom of speech is precious – but so is the freedom not to speak – or to deny full voice to an infinitesimal minority of individuals whose only goal is to scare us to death.

When Will We Ever Learn?

What’s wrong with me? What chip did I not come with?

Yesterday, London witnessed a horrible crime. Two crazies, armed with a machete and a knife, murdered a 25-year-old British soldier outside the Woolwich barracks of an artillery unit.  Seeing passersby with smart phone cameras, one of the suspects mouthed threats, held up the bloody machete and shouted something about Allah before armed police shot and wounded the two.

A grisly and shocking incident by anyone’s standards, to be sure. But some in the UK are calling it the worst incident of terrorism in the city since the bombings of 2005. The graphic footage is all over TV and the Internet; Downing Street went into crisis mode, with Prime Minister David Cameron cutting short his trip to France to meet with a security committee. Reporters are asking folks if they feel safe walking the streets. Has the new era of “lone wolf attacks” begun? the columns ask.

I don’t mean to minimize this whole thing, but these guys didn’t crash a plane into a building, release a lethal chemical agent, or even blow up a bomb full of ball bearings. They used a machete -- can’t get much lower-tech than that. And one person died – not 10, not hundreds, not thousands -- one.

Is there a chance that this has been overblown in some way? What exactly is wrong with this picture?

For one thing, the crazies got exactly what they wanted: PUBLICITY.  Some media – even respected outlets -- have been showing this graphic footage repeatedly. There was little regard for the victim of this crime, whose family could as easily have seen the whole thing on TV or the Internet before being formally notified of the death of their loved one. There used to be conventions about self-censorship. Not anymore. Some have called what was put on-screen to be just short of a live execution. I bet that day isn’t very far off.

Overnight, there were attacks on mosques. Today there are reports that the perpetrators were “known to security services,” so there’s sure to be am investigation into who dropped the ball. Two additional people have been arrested for alleged conspiracy.

I can’t help thinking there’s a rodeo we should have been to already, and a movie we should have seen before. Is there something that can be done differently the next time? We’d all better figure out what that is, and soon.