The Rioting Beauty Queen

Today, news broke about another upstanding citizen who has been charged in connection with the game 7 riot. She’s a twenty year old beauty queen, a Richmond resident and recent winner of the Miss Congeniality title at a Miss Coastal Vancouver pageant.

By my count, she is now the fifth highest-profile private citizen caught up in the riot. I place her narrowly behind angry asian kid with hockey stick, the Australian guy and the injured girl who hooked up amidst the rioting, and the water-polo player. To recap the faces of the Vancouver riot, we’ve got a beauty queen, a nerdy asian kid, an Australian who saw a drunk girl with a twisted ankle as a potential make-out, and a water-polo player with immaculate hair. How typically Vancouver is all of that?

I know the riot isn’t funny, I know it’s super serious and embarrassing. But what I can’t help but chuckle about when I think about what happened, is how unlikely some of the personalities involved are. Maybe it’s gallows humour.

So Miss Coastal Vancouver goes postal, joins the mob trashing cars and singing kumbaya (or a more guttural, rioty tune) around the car-fires before looting the London Drugs at Granville and Georgia with a group of friends. I find the entire thing so confusing, was she practicing up on her "rioting" ability for use in the "skill" portion of the next Miss Richmond contest?

The lesson: the human impulse for disorder and destruction can manifest itself among anyone. If you can root, you can riot. Don’t believe me, check out Freud’s Group Pyschology and the Analysis of the Ego. A beauty queen, or an athlete who excels at a milquetoast upper-class water sport, are just as likely to act the fool in a permissive situation as the ruffian in an Ecko hoodie (Ecko still exists right?). Basically the only group of people we know for sure will never, ever riot are the "real Canucks fans."