By: Ajay Parasram
At my 14th birthday party, I set my parents’ recently renovated basement ablaze. Freshly varnished walls, newly laid carpet, and my father’s filing cabinet burned that day, casualties of teenage stupidity. You see, my father had prevented us from lighting large rocks and patches of lawn on fire in service to our latest French-language project-turned action-adventure film, La Zone Rouge. An experienced documentary filmmaker, he helpfully observed that our proposed theatrics constituted “a stupid idea,” and wouldn’t be captured adequately by my friend’s 1980s hand-held camcorder.
I go public with this anecdote because I want to convince you that like Skylar Murphy, who accidentally brought a pipe bomb to the Edmonton International Airport, I too was a stupid boy. I understand that irrational masculine teenage urge to blow things up, burn them down, and film it – even prior to YouTube. However, unlike Murphy, even as a 14-year-old in the pre-9/11 security age, I would not have forgotten to remove a pipe bomb from my camera bag before boarding a plane.
Murphy and I walk through airports differently. His cavalier approach to airport security shows that he is not accustomed to being seen as a “threat” by the national security apparatus (police, security guards, courts, CSIS, etc.) at the airport and throughout Canada. My anxiety about airport travel begins days before going to the airport, I plan routes to avoid America where possible, and I go to great lengths to inspect every bag, pocket, and belt-hoop one last time while waiting in line prior to inspection. I rehearse explanations for why I have a Pakistani visa. My body is conditioned for being viewed, screened, interrogated, and investigated as a threat by the national security apparatus.
In light of Murphy’s case, his eventual arrest and $600 fine by the court, I want to make three observations about the significance of this case that should not be overlooked:
First, I genuinely believe Murphy would never have used that pipe bomb on board a plane. He’s a damned fool, not a terrorist, in which case the small fine levied by the court is generous and just. The fact that he has since tried to sell “his side” of the story to the CBC to pay his $600 fine is regrettable, and perhaps overly entitled, but supports the aforementioned claim of foolishness. No one should be unfairly detained/arrested/tortured/ assassinated for crimes they didn’t consciously commit. In the legal world, they call that mens rea.
Secondly, in applauding the court’s just ruling, I hope the judiciary, police, and the Canadian public remember cases like Skylar Murphy’s – cases where white, Anglophone men accidentally break the law and commit terrorist-like crimes. They should remember what appropriate punishment looks like. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Murphy, it’s that our crass national security apparatus should not: shoot bodies to death (such as the murder of teenager Sammy Yatin on an empty street car by the Toronto Police); taser bodies to death for not speaking English (such as the RCMP killing of Robert Dziekański, looking for his mother in the Vancouver Airport), or collude with global spooks to kidnap bodies for the purpose of foreign torture (as was done in the tag-team RCMP/CIA mission to send Maher Arar to Syria).
Finally, the examples listed above only scratch the surface of innocent, non-white-or-Anglo victims of the Canadian security apparatus. Murphy’s case succinctly illustrates that the security apparatus in Canada is, at a minimum, racialized and designed with the unwritten but nevertheless accepted norm that some bodies represent “threats” and other bodies do not. Threatening bodies must be stopped, intercepted, policed, jailed, tortured, or otherwise removed from the population, while non-threatening bodies can make mistakes and move unhindered by the various levels and boundaries of security. Heck, if they look innocent enough, security will even re-arm them before they get on the plane!
Everyone knows that Murphy should have been dealt with immediately, and not after coming home from his vacation. But his punishment of a $600 fine is appropriate to the crime. There should be a precedent set by Skylar – “Murphy’s law,” whereby similarly appropriate punishments are applied for all bodies, even those that look or sound like threats. Because if it was Sammy Yatin with a pipe bomb in Edmonton International Airport, things would have likely gone the way of Robert Dziekański or Maher Arar instead of the way of Skylar Murphy.
This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol. 6, No. 6 (Mar/Apr 2014).
