The last television I owned ended up being tossed off the roof of my house (by me) during a complicated spring during which my roommate at the time agreed (for reasons that I can still not entirely fathom) to allow the woman I had just broken up with to undertake an extremely large and complex installation art project in his room. This project involved her constructing a giant frame out of wood (inside his room) and then affixing numerous buttons that she had cast herself onto springs and levers and all sorts of other things and then attaching them to the frame. The project was massive and required her to be in my home every day hammering and drilling and just basically being around, which was highly annoying because we had already agreed to stay the fuck away from each other until our fucked up and embittered hearts were mended and as far as I was concerned she was doing a crappy job of respecting my space and need for time. Not only this, but I was trying to complete my master’s degree and the time and the combination of someone I was still in love with but who didn’t want to be with me being in the same house but ignoring me and at the same time making continuous hammering noises was a little too much for my sanity to take. A lot of dramatic exchanges happened and during one of them I threw my television off the roof. I don’t miss those times at all and I don’t miss my television, either.
In the end, things got much more fucked up because I ended up falling in love with my ex-roommate’s ex-girlfriend and she and I started dating, we became lovers, even while my ex-roommate was still in the same house. He didn’t like this at all. She and I (his ex-girlfriend that is) ended up traveling together, moving in together, sharing a TV, being together for almost four years, breaking up, and then over a period of a year or so becoming dear friends and we still talk every day more or less. When she moved out, though, the took her television with her and that’s the last time there was a television in my home. My ex-roommate, meanwhile, ended up moving in with my ex-lover the artist and they are still living together and I have no idea what the they do with their lives and I really don’t give a damn.
Back to the television, though, I used to watch a lot of hockey on the television but over the last little while I’ve almost completely lost interest in the sport. It’s not just not having a TV has precipitated this loss of interest, though; I can certainly watch as much as I like on the internet with streaming TV and the nature of the internet is to give the consumer more of the product than ever before, thus enflaming addictions rather than cooling them, but all the same my interest has waned.
I think the main problem for me is the increasing notice I have been taking of the interconnection between the culture of hockey and the culture of militaristic nationalism that seems to dominate a lot of the rhetoric that occurs off the ice. In the first place, as with every sport, I don’t understand why it is that fans and players are required to stand for the national anthem at the beginning of every game. There is as far as I can ascertain no tangible connection between the sport of hockey and love for one’s nation and so it seems to me that the efforts made to create connections in the minds of fans between the great swell of collective energy they are feeling and the swell of energy that the drum banging patriots tell us we ought to be feeling for our nation (whichever nation it is) are at best disingenuous and at worst sinister acts of brainwashing.
Hockey, of course, is a celebration of youthful masculinity (yes, I know there’s a women’s game, too) channelled through a collective team effort against a hated foe (who is ironically not at all different from one’s own team except for the colours of the jersey). It is, in this respect, a fine metaphor for the jolly good wars of yesteryear where everyone gave it their sporting best and everybody killed everybody else by the gentlemanly rules. There is no asymmetrical warfare in hockey and, while certain strategies may change, there is always a higher paradigm to which all participants must adhere.
I realise that my above statement in and of itself is a false parallel when taken on its own. Just because young men play hockey in uniforms on teams and just because young men fight in wars in uniforms on teams this does not mean that one is a symbol for the other. Yet the parallel becomes stronger when the element of national pride and all of the rhetoric of sacrifice for the nation attached to anthems is attached to the excitement of the game. Not only this, but the broadcast culture surrounding hockey (and here I have chosen to pick particularly on the CBC) adds greatly to the dulce et decorum est pro patria mori mentality that we see in hockey.
I’m reflecting on all this because it is November 11th today and this is the day we are supposed to remember WWI; and, particularly in Canada, to remember the battle Vimy Ridge when we ostensibly became a nation. Vimy Ridge is in and of itself a big nothing. A bunch of Canadian teenagers ran up a muddy hill during WWI and when they got to the top they murdered a bunch of German teenagers. Some people like to say that it was a big strategic victory for the allies but it really wasn’t. A few days later the Germans attacked again in another spot a few miles down and killed a lot of French teenagers and the war went on.
The entire war, in the long run, was really a big nothing. The was all kinds of imperial bluster and militarism at the time and it can’t really be said that any one nation was any better or worse than any other. They all sucked and they all were responsible for a lot of needless death and suffering.
Sometimes when I say this to people (especially in hockey chat rooms where the patriotic fervour runs high) they get angry and tell me I don’t understand the sacrifices that those kids made in WWI and that I’m enjoying the life I have today because of these brave soldiers. I personally don’t believe this. Because of the way that WWII went, with the Nazis and everything, and also because of the massive dose of guilt administered by the winning side to the losing side after WWI in the treaty of Versailles, it may seem like the Germans were villains in WWI, but they were not any more evil than the French, Italians, British, Russians, Turks, or anyone else participating, and I personally believe that had Germany won WWI, things would not be much different for Canada now. Well, actually, maybe things would have been better if Germany won WWI because there would have been no opening for Hitler to get in power…but there just would have been some other asshole, I guess.
So anyhow, Vimy Ridge. Those kids didn’t die to defend democracy or freedom or anything like that. If they died for anything it was for guts and glory and the Empire. This is shit that I don’t happen to believe in. I’m also pretty leery of claims that democracy and freedom are being defended in today’s wars, but this is a story for another time.
There was a big push by the Harper government last year (and it was echoed continuously on CBC and on Hockey Night in Canada) to contextualize the Vimy Ridge battle and what it meant to Canada. The thing that trouble me most about all of this was that the perfectly reasonable claims that war was senseless and should be avoided and that way too many people had already been killed by war already and all the other perfectly reasonable claims that made me used to want to wear a poppy were being conflated with stories about individual glory on the battle field and great patriotic sacrifice for the nation and so on. The latter sentiments do not make me want to wear a poppy because the message suddenly becomes, yes war is senseless, but we do it well and we’re braver than anyone when it happens. This isn’t talking people out of war, it’s talking people into war.
Since Harper was (and still is) pushing his own government’s completely pointless and misdirected war in Afghanistan at the same time as the Vimy celebrations were going on the emphasis on a continuing tradition of great bravery on the battlefield made me just a little sick to my stomach.
The CBC meanwhile, has been completely complicit in this regard by mixing in stories of war heroes (as if there is such a thing) of today and yesterday with stories of heroism on and off the ice. I’m running out of energy here and hitting too scattered a target, but I’m glad I don’t have a goddamn TV (youtube is great, though!).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM7rwvjoQw0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6373IRqSeU
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