A Shakespearean tragic hero is often described as a good person who disturbs the moral order through a bad choice of action that he perceives as necessary at the time of its execution, but who is then subjected to a punishment disproportionate to his crime. It is this disproportion that arouses “pity and terror” in the audience: pity for the too-severe punishment of the hero, and terror at the realization that such a fate could perhaps be theirs one day.
This definition would doubtless resonate strongly with Camille Cacnio, the young Vancouver woman caught grinning on camera as she partook in the looting that accompanied the June 15 post-hockey game riot in Vancouver. Up until that moment, Cacnio had led a typical middle-class life with no criminal record, with a string of honorable relationships and responsible life choices to her credit.
Then, in the words of her rambling written apology, “intoxicated, full of adrenaline, disappointed in the loss [of the Canucks], [and] filled with young rage,” and witnessing terrible acts of vandalism that made a minor theft seem benign (to her), Cacnio took a “souvenir” from a clothing shop: two pair of men’s pants neither she nor anyone she knew had any use for.
Had she not been captured on camera, her life would have gone on as before. Instead, for millions of people she is now the poster child for the mindless mob mentality that can strip the magnetism from a normally civic-minded person’s moral compass.
What Cacnio did was wrong, and she claims to have realized that even before the photo was posted. However, her spontaneously written, rambling 3,000-word letter of apology (later emended to 400 words) did little to restore her good name. It was a curiously defensive push-pull of regret and self-exoneration (“I take full responsibility for my actions and am sincerely apologetic for what I did” but “all I saw was that the riot was happening, and would continue happening with or without me, so I might as well get my adrenaline fix”).
That many other rioters committed far more serious crimes is no excuse for Cacnio’s actions, for many other young people present had the good sense to resist the mob’s fevered appeals to anarchical impulse.
But her punishment was disproportionate to her crime. The photo had already shamed her before her family, teachers and employers. Then she was subjected to “electronic justice”; she and other recognized rioters were “mobbed” in the social media by angry anonymous critics, some of whom, not content merely to shame the delinquent participants, tried to recruit members of their families, schoolteachers and employers into the mobbing.
Cacnio’s experience should indeed fill us with both pity and terror.
Pity, because in spite of her bad behaviour, she was very unlucky to have been singled out for such a savaging. And terror because in this era of ubiquitous random surveillance, none of can be absolutely sure that one day we might not find ourselves electronically outed in perpetuity for some peccadillo or other.
What might King Lear have made of all this, if he were alive to witness it? Why, he might say, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the social media; they kill us for their sport.”
National Post
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