Cindy George – Symbol of Victimhood

On the face of it, the cause of the deaths of Cindy George and her three children in Ashburton in early July 2015 lay between rank stupidity and abject ignorance.  The facts as known indicate George left a car running in a closed garage with the interior door opened, and they died of carbon monoxide poisoning.  It may be that given it was a cold winter’s night she kept the door open to use the heat from the car’s exhaust to warm the house. 

Poison experts waxed specific on carbon monoxide being odourless and an insidious killer, which while true wasn’t relevant, since it was the car’s exhaust fumes that killed the family and these are certainly not odourless.  Indeed they are quite unpleasant, which makes one wonder why a mother would permit such fumes to pervade the house. The press seemed to make excuses for George’s actions and could have been exhibiting a form of racial prejudice, mitigating her responsibility on the grounds of primitivism given that Mrs George was a Cook Islander and perhaps unfamiliar with both cold climates and car exhausts. 

That four bodies lay for up to six days without being found no doubt weighs heavily on the conscience of her community and will contribute to expressions of grief.

While there is little known evidential support, there could be another explanation for these four deaths.  The police will conjecture that for reasons of insanity or revenge George chose to kill her children then herself.  Were it found to be the case, this essay would have to be deleted as too many points would be irrelevant. 

Tweets and Responses

Beyond the deaths and their cause, the accident raised a curious response initiated by a ‘gossip columnist and socialite’ called Pebbles Hooper.  Whatever criticism I might have about a mother burdening her children with Google-whacking names that look like a bad Scrabble or Lexicon hand, Jetejura and Telyshaun (or Teiyzshwaun – the press couldn’t make their minds up), it was tempered by a woman named after an eternal baby from a 1960s cartoon that did more to place dinosaurs coexisting with humans than weird Christian thinking ever could.

Hooper illiterately tweeted that this was ‘natural selection’.  This laconic off-the-cuff remark was well grounded.  The George accident was a candidate for the Darwin Awards, ‘chlorinating the gene pool’ as the Awards site says, and one needed to balance the sex ratio favouring men 89% to women’s 11%.  That three young children sadly lost their lives by the actions of a mother whose prime purpose was to protect them will likely mean George won’t make it to the finals.  This, at least for those who knew them, is what turns farce into tragedy and Hooper’s tweet from joke into cruel insensitivity.

Response to Hooper’s tweet was as quick as it was condemnatory and forced her resignation.  Yet only a few years ago an event like the George’s would have raised a brief flurry of slightly off-colour jokes via word of mouth or email that Hooper’s comment would have formed part of.

But no longer.  What has changed?

For this we need to consider societal changes generated by the political Left.  It had achieved many of its goals but was atomised by the libertarian Right’s attack on unions and its transfer of wealth from the Nation State to a new and detached oligarchy.  Bereft of its Fabian roots and unable to escape the new governmental paradigm created by economic liberalism the Left had no alternative but to reposition itself. 

It did this by creating a whole new class, not of workers, but of victims.

And therein lies a whole new essay.