Ryanair scandal: how social media feeds our politics of outrage
If you tuned into the Twittersphere over the past few days, you will have probably stumbled across the story of the elderly Ryanair passenger who was racially abused by another elderly Ryanair passenger. It was the kind of anger that travels around the world inside a single Tweet and the story has already escalated somewhat here at home.
Newspapers have posted pictures of the male abuser on their pages. The victim and her family have appeared on This Morning. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, has tracked down the man. According to a former colleague, he “worked in Essex and lived with his elderly mother until her death. He has never married. [He] would often attend musical concerts in London and was an avid collector of classical music.” They go on. “His next-door neighbour told how [he] lives alone in the self-contained flat, was ‘a weirdo and a real nuisance'”.
And therein we have the perennial problem faced by all angry racist weirdoes: nobody ever has a good word to say about them when the tabloids come a-knocking.
Yet there is also no reason to disbelieve the papers. Their anger is righteous. Watch the video yourself and witness what was said. The language is appalling, the man’s behaviour inexcusable, and that is true of so many of these outrage videos that involve candid footage shot in a public place — usually from somewhere like a grocery aisle or the top deck of a bus — where some white middle-aged man or woman is engaged in an ugly racial tirade against a person of colour.
But anger strips everything of context. We are, after all, in the age of the Twitter retort: “Screw you, dude! No excuse. That old **** is racist!” And everybody agrees. And why shouldn’t we? It’s the kind of story that doesn’t demand a reply. The media can turn it into blood sport, chase their prey across the country, make them into a pariah, and generally shame them to the point where one wonders if “shame” is really the right word. The intention is to completely eviscerate them; to break them over the knee of public outrage. And nobody says a word because… Well, the guy is racist, a “weirdo, and a real nuisance”, and never wed and enjoys classical music…
There’s no point at which we dial that anger back and attempt to evolve. Nobody wants to understand where we are as a culture. In these days of elevated sensitivities to all forms of bigotry, it would be spectacularly foolish to wonder what kind of a precedent we establish with these trials by Twitter and the tabloids. It would be unwise to question whether these incidents shouldn’t be examined by the police, judicial officers and, perhaps (I know it’s a crazy idea!), trained medical experts before they are fed to the public and become front page news.
Except, of course, we only really care about the racist element or the sexist element or that element which makes us angry as liberals, conservatives, or simply as human beings. The rest is just too inconvenient. We haven’t the time for that. So the man is just a man who the media can treat as the embodiment of an ugly trait that the rest of society believes it can expunge by making an example of him. He is the oddball who doesn’t quite fit in. He certainly doesn’t deserve our sympathy because bigotry is different from all the other forms of ugliness that humans are capable of producing in our very worst moments. It is clearly different to just foul-mouthed language. It is different to those moments when a person becomes “not the person you know” because of illness, stress, or physical or mental decline.
Why? Because we’re taught that anger is the only justifiable response when “they” are wrong and “we” are right. No time to debate and we certainly don’t want to understand why they are wrong because that would mean asking difficult questions. It would mean defending, in some measured way, people who are difficult to defend. It would mean withholding a judgment that any right-thinking person will feel morally obliged to hand out in the immediacy of the anger. It would mean defending somebody like Brenda Leyland, the 63-year old woman who, four Octobers ago, in 2014, killed herself after being exposed on national TV as the “troll” who sent over 400 tweets to the McCanns. And why would anybody wish to defend a person who for some complex and hard-to-understand reasons would do something like that?
No. We’re just meant to be angry. Anger is better than sympathy, compassion, or even understanding. Anger is easy. Anger helps us up the slope in our race for the moral high ground. And boy oh boy! Doesn’t it feel safe up there?