The scene: a mass demonstration in Tehran/Harare/Rangoon/Pyongyang/&c. The police are filmed shoving a 20-yr-old demonstrator with cerebral palsy from her/his wheelchair & dragging her/him across the pavement, to the horror of onlookers. Footage of this event is sneaked out & publicised. Accordingly, Iranian/Zimbabwean/Burmese/North Korean/&c state broadcasters cannot ignore it. Forced to report it, they stress, however, that there ‘is a suggestion’ that said demonstrator was ‘rolling towards the police’. 

The British & American media response can be imagined. Shock. Disgust at such overt & disgraceful victim-blaming. Sympathy for the young activist, who becomes an international hero. Revulsion at the outlet’s patently ridiculous claims of ‘objectivity’. Bitter humour, perhaps, at the sheer Leviathan absurdity of the implied justification.

‘Rolling towards the police’ might become a media meme, this year’s Comical Ali, a shorthand for any self-evidently ridiculous & tasteless claim by the media apparatchik of a repressive regime. Hipsters begin to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase & the face of the ‘journalist’ who spoke it.

Now relocate that attack.

Human beings, of course, would remain appalled wherever it occurred. Its location in London, say, however, might lead swaggering baby-faced bullies & official organs to deploy a very different reaction from that above, an oily mix of ‘who-us?’ ingenuousness & tendentious point-missing, even a breathtaking insinuation that in implying that the brutalised young demonstrator might have been a threat they are striking a blow for equal rights - that, just as Love See No Colour, so State Thuggery See No Disability.

Outside such bad-faith power-fawning comedy of the absurd, it would be a given that, unequipped with any wheel-blades, rocket-launchers & turbo-boosts, a wheelchair is a method of conveyance, & that its rollingness or not towards anyone is thoroughly fucking irrelevant.