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Police officer at Glasgow airport: half-hero, half-Inspector Clousseau
For the first time the two off-duty police officers, Stewart Ferguson and Torquil Campbell, who subdued the Glasgow airport terrorists and extinguished the fire on one of them, tell their story. We learn more details, but they are still fragmented and not told in a coherent sequence. Indeed, the very idea of describing an event chronologically does not exist in the minds of today’s reporters and editors. That would require bringing a bunch of separate facts together into a meaningful pattern, which would be phallocentric and oppressive, and in any case would take too much mental effort. The article does have one arresting detail, however. Officer Campbell says that in the midst of confronting one of the terrorists, “I pulled out my CS spray and sprayed, which lasted about a half second. Because of the wind direction it blew back in my face as well and put me out of commission for a minute or two.”
Uh, excuse me, the officer was fighting a terrorist, and he used a spray can on him? Which the wind blew back in the officer’s face and put him out of commission? Why does this sound like a metaphor for Britain? Email entry |