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August 14, 2003

This is what democracy looks like

I re-read the four Batman/Dark Knight books recently in the form of a hard-cover anthology. This was by way of Batman vs. Superman research but ended as a disturbing reminder of how things have changed since 9/11. The books feature a terrorist threat to blow up Gotham's "twin towers", a passenger airliner falling from the sky into a skyrise building and a space shuttle burning up. It is difficult to remember the world I lived in when I read these Batman comics as they were being published. It was all fiction.

This lead me to think of an experimental Flea-week. Starting Monday, I had planned to write a fictional account of a large-scale terrorist attack on a major North American city taking into account some of the things people persist in relegating to fiction despite what any thinking person should have noticed in the last couple years. Today's black-out pre-empted anything I could have come up with. So here are a few thoughts:

the first conspiracy theory will be available at indymedia even as I type these words;
they blame Israel;
and "oil";
all those elevators were full of people wishing they had a squeegee to dig their way out;
thank God I was with my family when this happened;
the Canadian government will blow this off and do nothing;
many people will at least buy candles and matches and think about it a bit;
the candles will not help much when this happens because a city has been destroyed by a nuclear-armed terrorist attack;
we had telephones (land-lines anyway) and water through this and we cannot expect to next time;
Canadians will congratulate themselves on our civility in a crisis;
almost everything today supports this view;
except for the looting reportedly underway in the east-end of Ottawa.

And then... InstaPundit reports an MSNBC claim serious looting is underway in Ottawa. CTV makes a similar report. This may repeat the same CBC Newsworld claim I passed on above. CBC specified Orleans, a community about twenty-five miles from downtown Ottawa. (J Specht corrects me in the comments to this post. This should have read twenty-five kilometers and not miles. Twenty km is probably a better estimate depending on where you start your drive from downtown. I grew up in the west end of Ottawa so my view is proabably skewed by that.)

And then... Reuters quotes Ottawa's police chief:

The power outage, which happened minutes after 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT), also hit the Canadian capital, Ottawa and police reported break-ins and theft after dark

"There is serious looting going on" said Ottawa police chief Vince Bevan.

Posted by the Flea at August 14, 2003 11:14 PM
Comments

Orleans is more like 20 Km. from downtown Ottawa, not miles. At most a 10 or 15 minute drive in light traffic.

Posted by: J Specht at August 15, 2003 09:19 AM

Quite right! My brain said "kilometers" and my fingers typed "miles".

Posted by: Nicholas Packwood at August 15, 2003 12:42 PM

"Massive impoliteness busts out in Ottawa !!!"

Posted by: Oh, My at August 15, 2003 07:11 PM

Serious looting in Canada? Come on, the best we could manage in NYC was a bunch of sneakers getting stolen! If you can't have looting there, then you can't have it anywhere!

FPK3

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at August 16, 2003 08:37 PM

CBC Ottawa said the looting was in South Keys. Though there may have been other looting in Orleans. But bear in mind, serious looting may mean something different to Chief Bevan than to, say, whoever the NYPD Police Chief is....

Posted by: Dr_Funk at August 17, 2003 01:49 AM

Thanks, Dr. Funk. I was thinking the same thing. "Impoliteness busting out" in Ottawa may seem more news-worthy than the same behaviour elsewhere due to the (insert value-judgement from growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa) character of the city.

Posted by: Nicholas Packwood at August 17, 2003 02:07 AM
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