Pistorius trial – voyeurism or cultural insight?

Oscar Pistorius certainly divides opinion. And no, I am not talking about whether he is a murderer or not. I’m talking about why we care – if we do care – about this case.

The reaction we are getting online to our live streaming of it proves there is considerable interest in terms of number but more, the increase in number of people wanting to watch it live, have a seat in court as it were, bypass the traditional reporters outside telling you what you already know if you tune in.

So , like it or not, people care, or at least are interested. But does that make it all just mawkish voyeuristic trashy and tabloid? Or does this case begin to tell us something of South African culture and the global culture of celebrity as it unfolds in often ponderous, sometimes a little chaotic, fashion.

The gun culture of South Africa , notorious for years, is surely being peeled back layer by layer of us in terms of one man and one family. We have him firing a gun in a restaurant – corroborated by several witnesses and injuring one of the guests at his table in so doing. Indeed, the man who handed him the gun.

Today another place, another firing of the gun. This time in a car, through the sun-roof and just after being stopped by the traffic police for speeding.

What strikes me is something beyond the obvious. Not simply that it is outlandish in UK terms to have anyone going around firing a gun, but far more, that these episodes appear to elicit little by way of shock among the witnesses.

Further, they appear to have resulted in little disturbance to the lives of those involved in any way. After the incidents life pretty much goes on as before.

Nobody did anything

Incidents anything like this in the UK involving the use of firearms would invoke massive and immediate police response, large-scale arrest and absolutely the use of armed officers and a pretty major court case arising from each such episode.

In both these cases nobody, basically, did anything.

In the restaurant a man at the Pistorius table suffered injury to a toe as the bullet disappeared through the floor. The restauranteur’s response?

Mild admonishment to those on Table Pistorius along the lines of “Hey lads – keep it down a bit will you?”

The very concept that this could or should have been a police matter does not seem to have dawned upon anyone.

For in modern South Africa it very clearly is not such a matter. And this is truly wild west stuff.

Equally out of the road with Oscar, stopped by the cops for speeding, his response was to say he’d like to shoot a robot (traffic light) and then, laughing, fire one off through the sun-roof.

What a hoot! What larks eh? Again no police action, they were presumably not close but they had seen the gun earlier when he was stopped but hey – it’s only a gun and speeding was the thing.

Once more the afternoon out with Oscar proceeds – post-firing – just like the evening out at the restaurant, with barely a murmur of surprise after the bullet is discharged.

High-profile celebrity

The second dimension to the case is also fascinating, though possibly less significant. It is the inevitable appeal of peeling back again, layer by layer, into the isolated and possibly paranoid world of a high-profile celebrity in that gun and crime culture.

A man who wakes his former girlfriend several times at night to ask if there are intruders in the house. A man who takes his mobile to bed every night and almost every night is making calls.

A man who lives in the gated, guarded housing complex. This is the man who will call not the police, but the private security guard when the shooting happens.

Reliance upon the forces of the state appears not the first line of defence – the police. This again, surely a far distant state of affairs from the UK, where many may not trust the police, but most would call them in, or near, a situation like this.

Lost in showbiz or lost in the bubble-wrapped world of celebrity in a culture of high and violent crimes against the person and the homestead? The case, as they say, continues.

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