Notes from the carnival

Well, I went to Ann Coulter’s speech at the University of Ottawa.  That is, I tried to.  As you may have discovered from other media organs, the event never actually took place.  The reasons for that will shortly become apparent.

The Arrival

I arrived at Marion Hall – or, more accurately, sort of near it – at about 6:30PM.  The line was already at least several hundred people long, and more were arriving every minute.  Police estimates (yes, the police were eventually involved; read on) put the final crowd size at about 2,000, but at that early stage there were still enough people to create a line that snaked the equivalent of several city blocks around another university building.  The front of the line – and the people in charge of everything – could not be seen.  This surely contributed to what ended up happening.

I fell into conversation with those in front of and behind me in the line, and, though feelings were generally upbeat – pretty much everyone I talked to said they were there to see what all the fuss was about – there were ominous rumours circulating that attendees had to sign up for the event in advance, even if it was free for U of O students.  Most of the people in the line (one event organizer with whom I briefly spoke but it at about 70%) had not registered, and indeed had no idea that they were supposed to.  Had the event organizers been permitted to advertise the event properly in the area most frequented by students this immediate and unresolvable problem may never have occurred.  As it was, the line continued to grow anyway, though now under a cloud of anxious uncertainty.

At around 6:45 the press began to arrive.  The first I saw was a snazzy yellow car dispatched by the Ottawa Citizen, but this was quickly followed by correspondents from CBC News and the Global television network, at the very least.  There were other people circulating throughout the evening with cameras on their shoulders, but I never got a good look at who they were meant to represent.  There were a lot of student journalists rushing around too, and some of them were clearly thrilled by the direction events soon took.

The Shadows Gather

We were informed at around 7:00PM – the time the doors were meant to open – that there was indeed only room for those who had registered in advance (online) and received a confirmation slip in return.  However, we were told, since it was possible that some people who had registered wouldn’t show up, it might be worth waiting around to see if you could get in once the registered attendees had been admitted.  Lots of people left upon hearing this, but I chose to stick around.  New people were still arriving all the time, and, as I had come mostly to see the spectacle of it all, I was content to stay and watch whatever might unfold.

When the doors really were opened, the line very quickly moved forward, and eventually became a disorderly crowd milling around the entrance.  There were four glass doors at the top of several concrete steps; I’d say the people on the steps were about fifteen to twenty bodies across, but it would be difficult to measure it accurately.  Everyone was just standing everywhere.  The line behind us still snaked around the other building (I had moved up very quickly once it became apparent that no order whatever was being kept – nor could be kept), but it was now four or five times thicker.  This line slowly collapsed towards the doors as the evening fell, and eventually it seemed as though the crowd stretched as far as the eye could see.

A group of young men was escorted out of the building, and through (and out) of the crowd; they stood on the margins, complaining to some sympathetic onlookers that they had tried to trick their way in by either giving false names or falsely claiming names they had read on the list being held by the organizer – it wasn’t clear which.  Anyway, their ruse was discovered and they were ejected.  The injustice they had suffered, they felt, was obvious.

Angry Voices

At around 7:10-15PM, the first of the serious protesters showed up.  They came marching around a corner near the the entrance to Marion Hall, chanting slogans about an end to hate speech, an end to homophobia, islamophobia, anti-semitism, sexism, and so on.  There were about thirty or forty of them, at first; they had several signs and at least one megaphone, but they used this device only to play loud siren-like noises rather than to amplify what their spokesman soon began to say.

(I had noticed, by the way, that posters directing students to protest and disrupt Coulter’s speech had indeed been posted throughout the building in which advertisements of the speech itself had been banned.  They trumpeted the need for the creation of “an open environment,” or something like that, which was apparently best to be achieved by shouting down someone who had been invited to speak.)

The spokesman (clean-cut guy apparently in his mid-twenties, black jacket, good vocal projection – I didn’t catch his name, unfortunately), who clearly relished his position, shouted out his message about ten feet from where I was standing.  He stood on top of one of the concrete walls of a planter right next to the stairway.  I would occupy that position myself before the night was through, but I’ll get to that later.  He declared that Ann Coulter was an agent of all the things (homophobia, etc.) denounced above, and that, as she was indisputably a hate-monger, she was not welcome on the University of Ottawa campus.  This received a loud cheer from those standing next to him.  I should add that plenty of people waiting in the rather large crowd had joined in the protesters’ chants, though almost everyone else stood in silence.  A few brave (in light of the atmosphere), foolhardy souls attempted to challenge the protesters with counter-chants or the occasional comment shouted during convenient silences, but there was scarcely any spirit in it.  It’s doubtful that many of those present – or even many of those who pre-registered – were there because they supported Ann Coulter’s views or rhetoric; I certainly wasn’t.  Whatever the reason, though, the things being shouted were generally one-sided.  There were a few memorable zingers fired back at the self-important grandees on the planter, but mostly the crowd was just content to watch things unfold.  I’ll stress again that the great majority of those present were not obviously protesting anything.

A second spokesman (slightly burlier unshaven guy in a red shirt) shouted through cupped hands that perhaps those of us not joining in their chants and booing were unfamiliar with what Ann Coulter has actually written and said.  This earned a lot of jeers from those who were perfectly well aware of it, and also one delicious shout from a woman standing near me that it was precisely because she wasn’t familiar with it that she had chosen to come to the lecture.  This didn’t seem to make much of an impression on the planter crowd, though (if they even heard it, which is unlikely), and they began to read aloud the famous and contextless snippets of Coulter’s prose and utterances that have so incensed the English-speaking world.  That she is essentially a polemical comedian seemed lost upon those scornfully bellowing her words, and their particularly outraged reading of what was a pretty innocuous and clearly light-hearted quip about Canada’s relation to the US struck me as pandering and dumb.

As the minutes wore on, the original protester spokesman (black jacket) shouted to the crowd that those who hadn’t registered wouldn’t be let in.  He seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in loudly informing us (it almost had the tone of an accusation, if that makes any sense; it’s hard to describe) that we’d been waiting there for nothing.  In the silence that immediately followed this I managed to get off my only broadly audible response, loudly informing him that that may be so, but at least it meant we all got to listen to him, so clearly it was worth it in the end.  This got a few sarcastic shouts of agreement but it was mostly lost in the resumption of the stock chants (“hey hey, ho ho, etc.”; “Whose campus?  Our campus!”; “No more hate speech!”; “This is free speech!; “This is what democracy looks like!”) with which the protesters peppered the night.

A Sense of Anxious Expectation

Media reports suggest that there were “2,000 protesters” present, but this is an absurd lie.  There were maybe that many people, to be sure, but the initial party of protesters was quite small, as I noted above, and would grow to maybe 200 at its height, many of them sprinkled throughout the crowd.  I find it particularly irresponsible for the media to be spreading this number, as they are, given that all the reporters and cameramen I saw had to slowly push their way through the giant, silent, unprotesting crowd so that they could get good footage of the actual protesters, who stood on the other side.  In any event, pretty much everyone just stood in silence, waiting to see what incredible thing would happen next.

It came with the sudden flashing of lights and the wail of a siren.  One wag yelled out “you’ll never take me alive, coppers!”, but in fact it was the fire department.  This sent a murmur of nervous interest through the crowd; had they been called in to hose us down in a bid to disperse the crowd?  Had someone been injured?  Had a phony call been made to further disrupt the event?

This proved, substantially, to be the case.  Someone had pulled a fire alarm inside the building, and the event organizers and their meager security forces now faced the unenviable task of “evacuating” the several hundred people who had already been admitted.  A lot of them didn’t want to leave, but the reasons for this varied; some were so glad to have finally gotten away from the protesters that they refused to give up their seats and go back outside; others were convinced that, if they left, they’d never get back in; still others were protesters themselves, and suspected that the fire alarm was itself a ploy to empty the building of undesirables.  There were apparently some tense scenes, but the front doors were forced open at last and a stream of people began to make its way out.

The news that the event had been disrupted by a false fire alarm, once it became known, was greeted with unrestrained joy by the protesting element.  That this is a fairly serious (and stupid and dangerous) offense mattered to them not at all.  To the crowd’s credit, there was a brief chant of “BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT” at this turn of events, but it was cut off by the terrible thing that happened next.

The Very Edge of Disaster

As the security guards cleared an area on the steps so that the people being brought out from the inside could make their way down and be reabsorbed into the crowd, a couple of people up front – for reasons I don’t definitively know, but possibly to try to beat the registration problem – decided to make a break for it and rush through an unguarded door.  The people behind them followed.  And the people behind them.  And then, with the smooth inevitability all such things seem to possess, the whole mindless crowd was stampeding forward, with me in the middle of it.  There were cries of “stop!” and a few screams; a woman next to me stumbled and fell, but was thankfully dragged to her feet at once by the man behind her.  I had run into a friend while there, and we linked arms and slowly tried to push our way over to the side.  This proved fruitless; the crush was impassable.

The doors fortunately constituted a bottleneck, and the crowd was forced, by necessity, to slow down maybe twenty seconds after the stampede began.  That’s an estimate, to be sure; it’s hard to measure time during something like that.  My friend and I managed to weave our way out to the margin of the crowd and thence – because it was so near, and now had some free space – onto the concrete planter previously occupied by the protesters.

Surveying the Scene

The view was good.  The crowd was simply enormous, stretching back out through the parking lot towards the distant corner of that larger building around which the line had previously snaked, and I could see a few signs being held aloft in the drizzle and darkness.  There were lots of lights on cameras, too, and from phones periodically raised to take pictures of the confusion.  I asked several of the people near me what their impressions were of the unfolding events.  Two – visitors from Carleton University, across town – said they were disappointed that they’d probably never be able to get in.  They were vehemently against Coulter’s views, and even her presence, but they figured that as long as she was going to be there they might as well take the chance to be in the crowd, and perhaps ask her a pointed question during the Q&A that was intended to follow.  “But this… this is just dumb,” one of them said with a shrug.  Another – a young woman from U of O – said that she had managed to get into the building earlier, having registered in advance, but that it was such pandemonium inside that hardly anyone actually made it to the room in which the speech was intended to take place.

I noticed a short woman nearby into whom I had been thrust during the stampede, and went over to apologize and ask if she was alright.  She looked at me with cold contempt and said nothing.  It was very strange.

An uproar at the very threshold of the doorway began.  An older man with a French accent, wearing a purple windbreaker, was leaning with his hand against the open door, holding it open.  He was arguing – with increasing passion – with a young woman standing in front of him who was accusing him of touching her.  Not improperly or lecherously, by her account, but just touching her.  If he did it again, in fact, she would have him charged with assault.  He maintained that it was she who had touched him, and that neither of them could help doing so in a crowd like that anyway.  The argument went exactly how you’d think, though, and he was eventually shouted down and forced to move somewhere else, to a round of applause and cheers.

Vignettes Aplenty -and- The Event is Canceled

Things stagnated for a bit.  We could hear protesters making their usual chants inside the building somewhere, but couldn’t see anything over the heads of the tightly-packed crowd that had choked the vestibule.  There was a moment of excitement when an exasperated Coulter fan – a burly guy in a suit, with short-cropped hair (see image at top of post) – managed to disrupt the outdoor protesters’ chants by insinuating himself among them and then loudly changing the words of what was being chanted (“No hate!”, or something like that, became “Coul-ter!”).  He was quite loud, and several protesters confusedly joined him.  The crowd cheered.  It eventually came down to him and one of the protesters’ spokesmen shouting their respective chants in each other’s faces – an encounter around which the video cameras circled with quiet glee.

Someone started tearing pages out of a copy of Coulter’s latest book, and then tearing those into confetti which was then strewn about.  This earned another round of cheers from those nearby.

The protester group began chanting “SODOMY! SODOMY!” with great enthusiasm.  You think I’m making this up.  I understand; I’d think that too.

Eventually the police came.  At first there were two squad cars, and then five, and then – I’m told – nine.  The police went around the side of the building first to do something (I suspect to secure all the other entrances, and possibly to whisk Coulter and Ezra Levant away, if they were even already there), but eventually came back and started dispersing the crowd.  Some people came out of the building and announced that the event had been cancelled; this naturally earned the most thunderous cheer yet from the protesters.  Slogans were shouted about how this was a victory for free speech, somehow; a confused jubilation reigned, and the police nudged people along warily.

Meeting with Seamus Wolfe

It was at this point that one of the people with whom I had been talking pointed to a lanky, fair-haired man standing nearby.  “That’s Wolfe,” he said.  Indeed it was.  Seamus Wolfe, as you may remember, is the president of the SFUO (Student Federation of the University of Ottawa), and was responsible (along with the Federation’s executive) for preventing posters advertising this event from being posted in the University’s main student center.  I motioned for his attention and asked him a few questions.

I wanted to know what his general impression of the night’s events was.  He informed me (all of this is paraphrased, to be clear, and I’ve sent a copy to him to be verified in its essence; if he believes I’ve mischaracterized any of his positions, I will happily make the appropriate changes) that he had arrived around 7:30PM, not really expecting to get in, but that he was glad to see so many students had come out to show that they were against hate speech and would not tolerate its presence on campus.  Might those in attendance have gone too far, though? I asked; a fire alarm was pulled, and the police were dispersing the crowd.  Wolfe said that he can’t control what people do, and reiterated that he was pleased by the turn-out.

In the Citizen article that initially informed everyone that this affair was taking place, it was stated that the Federation’s executive was “in agreement” that Coulter was not welcome on campus.  I asked Wolfe if that agreement was unanimous.  Not at all, he replied; these things seldom are.  What was the split, then?  Something like 11 in favour of the poster ban, and 7 against.  Hardly lopsided, certainly, but a majority in favour.  I asked why the student body at large wasn’t consulted about this, but I don’t know if he heard me.  In any event, the decision to prevent the posters from going up, he said, was made in response to student complaints.

I asked if it was true that the SFUO-owned printing service had indeed printed the posters for the event even as it was preventing them from going up.  He replied that this was an oversimplification.   First, the posters hadn’t been banned everywhere; the group that invited Coulter here could put them up all over campus, if they liked – just not in the building (the main students’ center) that the SFUO runs.  What’s more, it’s not like they have an official “print shop.”  Students can use an SFUO-owned service on campus that will e-mail their documents to the actual print-shop – privately owned, apparently – located elsewhere in the city.  The document to be printed just goes into a queue and is sent off automatically, so it’s not as though anyone in the SFUO knew that it had even been printed in the first place.  There was certainly no conspiracy to cheat anyone out of their money.  I asked if this meant they’d be willing to reimburse the students who had printed the posters; he said that he’d be open to the possibility, if they wanted to come in and talk about it.

From there I moved on to more pressing matters.  If he really thought that suppressing hate speech on campus was within his mandate, and if Coulter’s utterances really did constitute hate-speech, I could understand the position – which he and the SFUO executive did hold – that Coulter’s speech should be moved to some other venue.  Why, then, did they not make that the centerpiece of their efforts?  Why attack posters that only advertised the event?

Wolfe replied that the posters themselves functionally constituted hate-speech by advertising an event at which it was likely to be uttered.  I was somewhat incredulous at this, asking how “Ann Coulter will be speaking tonight” could possibly be construed as hateful or an incitement to hatred; he maintained that to consent to the event’s promotion was to tacitly consent to the event, and he and the SFUO executive did not so consent.

All of this assumes that what Coulter says really is “hate-speech,” though; isn’t that a pretty serious charge?  Doesn’t it deserve far more substantiation than the appallingly casual way in which it had been being thrown around that night allowed?  Wolfe stood firm.  He related to me some of her reported comments from the previous day’s speech at the University of Western Ontario in London – one comment to a young Muslim girl was particularly grotesque – and insisted that her speech was obviously hateful and, what’s more, likely to inspire hate.  I reminded him that there was a difference between “hateful speech” and legally-designated “hate-speech,” and that “inspiring” is a lot more amorphous than the “inciting” around which hate-speech laws typically coalesce.  While that may be the case, Wolfe said, there was enough of a response from the student body on this issue that he felt justified in making the call.  He had to serve his constituents.

I admitted that he did, but what about those constituents who had no objection to her presence, or who might even have been glad she was there?  How were they being served?  Wolfe responded that of course he couldn’t please everyone.  This being the case, I asked, why not maintain a more neutral policy on such matters?  That way, nobody was being specifically privileged or thrown under the bus.  Wolfe replied with a point similar to one he made earlier: as with the posters, there can be no neutral position on this matter.  To do nothing is to condone, and he and the SFUO executive did not condone Coulter’s usual remarks.

It was around this point that a CBC reporter tapped him on the shoulder and declared her hope of asking him a few questions.  I ceded the ground to the more important interviewer, and thanked him for his time.

All in all, I am somewhat better disposed towards Seamus Wolfe than I had been before.  The print-shop issue was explained most satisfactorily, and the fact that the outraged student who told the Citizen that the SFUO had taken their money with no intention of allowing the posters apparently hasn’t yet approached the SFUO to either formally complain or ask for a refund is noteworthy.  What’s more, the articulated his principles well, and stuck by them throughout our exchange.

Nevertheless, I am not swayed by his arguments.  This is generally because I am not particularly convinced that “hate-speech” has been usefully defined by anyone involved in opposing it – or that it should even be a matter of law in the first place – but also because I resent the patronizing attitude involved in the decisions that were made.  The students of the University of Ottawa are apparently too fragile to hear hurtful things – or are too credulous and pliable to be trusted to hear “incitements to hatred” without acting on them – and are certainly incapable of making up their own mind about what they’ve heard.  No, it falls to a team of junior bureaucrats to make these decisions, or, at least, to try to make them.  Junior bureaucrats and loud protesters.  I’ve got two degrees, here, and actually know something about the modern conservative movement, but I guess they know better.  I’m glad they were all there to prevent me from making what would no doubt have been a very grave mistake.

Things Wind Down, and Heat Up

The crowd began to disperse, at long last.  The chanting faded to only sporadic shouts, and there were a lot of people milling around, unsure of what to do next.  Tempers were flaring in a number of quarters, though, because the pro- and anti-Coulter factions were finally running into each other on an individual basis rather than crowd-to-crowd.  The anonymity of the giant, mostly silent mass was no longer possible, and people knew who they were shouting at, now.

The results of this were not good; in one case, in fact, almost deadly.  Two men were getting up in each other’s faces in a very loud, essentially incomprehensible argument.  There was a thick mob of people around them, some egging them on, some trying to restore calm.  One of them was holding a stout wooden stick with a sign attached to it, and he was beginning to brandish it somewhat alarmingly.  I’ve seen this kind of thing before, unfortunately, and quickly went up to him.  Grabbed his shoulder, spoke clearly in his ear.  “If you’re going to argue like this,” I said, “do NOT do it holding that club.  Is that how you want this to go down?  Is it worth it?”  To his credit he agreed, and gave me the sign.  So now I have a nice stick, and nobody died.

In another quarter, the burly suited guy from before – the one who had briefly subverted the protesters’ chanting – was engaged in a five-against-one “debate” with a bunch of people further down the parking lot.  He was getting more and more flustered, and was making some pretty terrible arguments, unfortunately; his interlocutors weren’t helping matters, though, because at least one of them, who seemed to be a law student by some of his comments, was being very aggressive in what he was saying and certainly had both the louder voice and the sympathy of the crowd.  Not all of it, though; there were several – who, by their looks, were not Coulter supporters themselves – who were intervening and attempting to get the five to let the burly guy have a moment to collect himself.  Sometimes they even interjected to challenge fallacies put forth by the majority position.  When the debate became briefly more civil, with concessions on either side, one of the more reasonable onlookers waggishly declared (with impeccable timing) that he never sees so many people admitting that they’re in essential agreement as at a riot like this.  It got a good laugh.  The civility and even-handedness soon vanished, though, and the Coulter supporter eventually had to be quite literally dragged away by his friends, receiving jeers of jovial scorn from those who had been his inquisitors.  One of them threw a drink at his car as it went past, but was quickly confronted and rebuked.

I became embroiled in one of these group discussions myself, briefly, asking questions about how those in the group perceived the events that transpired, if they thought it might have gone too far, if it was not better for people to decide for themselves rather than to ban unpopular speech, and so on.  Few agreed with me on any of these things, particularly, but we were all so relieved that the issues were being discussed quietly and more or less amicably that the group broke up satisfied with handshakes all around.  I even went for a pint with one of them.  It was good.

The End Of It All

My own perspective on the events of the evening is fairly simple.  While Ann Coulter says stupid things in a stupid way – in a way that plays to the worst and most canting instincts of our modern discourse – she still has a right to say ‘em.  If she’s been invited to speak, and the university is fine with giving her a room in which to do it, that’s all there is to it.  Those protesting are also well within their rights, though, so long as they protest before, after, or outside.  Attempting to disrupt her speech is stupid; actually shouting it down, blocking the entrances, or pulling fire alarms is insane.

The freedom of speech we enjoy means that Coulter gets to say her piece, and we get to respond – to respond, mind you, not pre-empt – in whatever necessary manner.  That this was utterly prevented from happening is what enrages me the most.  I – and hundreds of other people there – would have been happy to confront or challenge her in the Q&A session that was to follow, but now that will never happen.

Nobody was obliged to listen to her speech; it was held in the evening, in a small venue, in a substantially out-of-the-way building on campus.  You had to voluntarily go there.  I do not think that the accusation that she appreciably incites violence is strong enough to warrant pre-emptively banning her, and – what’s more – I entirely resent that a bunch of protesters got to decide whether or not I’m allowed to hear what she had to say.

I’ll note in closing, though, that there was one thing that both impressed and intrigued me – mostly because of its actual nature, but also because of how unusual it was.  In the case of Seamus Wolfe, and the people arguing with the burly Coulter supporter, and indeed in other disputes I saw, there was a whole-hearted willingness on the part of the anti-Coulter folks to declare that the mere fact of speech does not necessarily validate its content.  What matters is what’s being said, not that it’s being said at all; there is value, and that value inheres in the substance rather than the form.  This is so utterly at odds with the general relativism to which I’ve become used among my contemporaries that I’m sort of at a loss to account for it.  I hope the people who have said such things will follow this way of thinking to even more glorious conclusions.  It could happen.