Hand Jive

Some of you may have noticed that I didn't post anything on this blog regarding the recent passing of Nelson Mandela. My reasoning for this was quite simple: I didn't know the man. Don't get me wrong, every word I read about his life was inspiring and leads me to believe he was one of the greatest leaders in my lifetime. However, the simple fact is I'm not from South Africa, never have been there and have no intention of going and I get rather annoyed when people who are not from an area try and comment on what an event means to the community it directly impacts. For example, last April when there were all these people in New York trying to explain to the nation what was going on in Boston I wanted to leap through my TV and slap them. If you're not from here than I don't want you to pretend you know what it was like to live here during that week and in return I will pay you the same courtesy when a major event happens where you live. To me this form of fake sympathy is the worst part of social media. It used to be that if you were truly sorry that something happened to a person you took the time to track them down and tell them face to face. Sure, it was painfully awkward but it showed you truly cared. The ability to just press a button and pass along condolences from miles away makes it far too easy to avoid all that awkwardness which also manages to hollow out the emotion from those same condolences. Let me put it another way: if you are back to browsing Reddit seconds after saying how sad you are that Nelson Mandela passed away than you aren't actually all that sad and I would rather you not pretend to make yourself look deep on the internet.

Instead, in situations like this I tend to focus on the things which actually bring us all together in a shared experience, such as a crazy person infiltrating the memorial service. By now I am sure you have heard about the man standing on stage who was supposed to be the sign language interpreter for people watching on TV was a total fake. He was standing there, waving his hands around but not actually saying anything in sign language. He was closer to telling people to steal third than he was to correctly conveying the words which were being said in tribute to Mr. Mandela. As you would expect the deaf community is outraged by what they perceive as a lack of respect for this disability since any kind of background check or simple sign language test would have been enough to discover this man had no idea what he was doing. I'll admit that it does seem like it should have been pretty easy to detect because while I don't know sign language other than a few basics (and, thanks to last year's string of weekly snowstorms the sign for 'snowdrift') even watching a couple of very short clips I could tell this guy was faking. I would have been willing to give event organizers a pass because I imagine putting this memorial service was a logistical and security nightmare given all the VIPs who were schedule to show up, so the idea that hiring the most qualified sign language guy could have fallen through the cracks. However, that theory sort of falls apparent when you learn this was not the first time he has done this, as he been the official sign language interpreter for the South African Congress before. I can only assume this means there aren't many deaf people watching the South African version of C-SPAN.

A lot of people are desperate to know how this person managed to get through security without a background check which would have revealed his lack of credentials. I guess that is a fair thing to be worried about and in some ways the event organizers were lucky this guy was harmless. If he had a terrorist agenda that could have made this story go from odd to sad in a hurry. But since he didn't appear to have evil in his soul I can go back to concentrating on my main question, which is why would you do this? As you would expect, the writer in me has already cooked up a backstory for the man, one in which he was looking for a job and answered an ad for a sign language interpreter. Desperate to get some money coming in he did what many people have done in the past and lied on his application about his qualifications. For a while he was getting away with it because, again, how many deaf people watch South African congressional proceedings on TV? When Mandela died he was sure they would bring in someone who looked far more professional than him and he would just attend the ceremony as a government employee, thrilled for the chance to be part of an event honoring his hero. But then someone grabbed him at the last minute and informed him he would be the one doing the signing for the entire ceremony. Well, he certainly couldn't confess to not knowing any sign language now so he went up on stage and took a big gamble that no one in the audience would call him on it (and he was right), all the while thinking, "I'm so busted... I am so busted." Sure, he'll get fired but at least he didn't get yelled at. You have to admit, movies have been made by major studios with huge budgets and far flimsier premises.

In some respects you could argue that this man did the world a service. I mean, when do you really need a laugh more than a funeral? I don't have any science to back this up but I would contend laughs get 50% harder when they are done in a place where laughing is seen as social unacceptable and you can't get much more inappropriate than laughing at a memorial service. For all we know this was all an elaborate comedy installation and we didn't get to enjoy it in real time. Rather than get all pissed off what the deaf community really should have done was told us the guy was just waving his arms around and saying nothing so we could laugh at him as well. (Obviously this will be a "Saturday Night Live" sketch this week. It practically wrote itself.) The only person who I really feel bad for in this situation is the next person who goes in to apply for this job because they will have to know how to sign every possible word under the sun, even some words which don't have official signs. The people who have no right to be mad at this man are any humans who didn't know he wasn't signing actual words until two days later, such as myself. This all ties back into my original premise which is people shouldn't try and act offended about an act after the fact, especially when the person doing the offending wasn't doing it to you. If these citizens were truly concerned about the authenticity of the person doing the signing on television than they would have taken the time to learn sign language and known about it as it was happening in real time but instead they are posting Twitter comments with faux-outrage about disrespectful this man was. I would simply ask them this: do you know how to sign your anger? Because if the answer is no than why don't you let the deaf sign for themselves and you can go back to the internet and continue telling someone you've never met how wrong their views are about an issue you had never heard about before yesterday in a place you couldn't find on a map. Seems like a better use of their time.