28 February 2010

24 comments:

e.l. tempete said...

yes.

vive le quebec IVRE!

vive le canada!

TheBlueMask said...

Looks like the protestors ran out of steam after the first week

cara said...

I'm not sure if it's just been a long time since I've watched any olympic events or what, but was anyone else surprised with how nationalistic and exclusionary of the rest of the athletes the closing ceremonies were?

I thought I remember the festivities being more reflective of the multi nation thing...or has my sensitivity been heightened?

Lorne Roberts said...

i didn't watch the closing ceremonies, but nickelback, hedley, and simple plan? avril lavigne? jaysus krikey. what a let-down.

as far as the protesters, they have a pretty legitimate case about *legally binding treaties* signed by our gov't and then not honored. perhaps in your eyes, bluemask, that makes them wet blankets, or jerks, but i can't imagine you being so cavalier about the issue if it was land that had been signed over to your great-grandparents, and then simply taken away by the government.

jc said...

3 to 2. yeah baby.

TheBlueMask said...

I was referring to the hooded vandalizers who did not seem to have any agenda. I'm all for legitimate protest Wolfie, don't jump the gun! My boys are 1/3 aboriginal.

assofuandme said...

fair enough. i like jumping the gun though.

it's too bad that every time there's a legit protest, 150 or so jackasses show up in black masks and throw shit through windows.

of course, the question of how many of those 150 are RCMP officers in disguise, trying to stir up shit so the RCMP can make arrests, is a whole other issue.

jc said...

Put up a Canadian flag and wouldn';t you know it, it's the quebecors that talk about protest.(and oddly enough quebec was beat out by vancouver for this year's games...and arguably would have been a better venue...they have snow!)

And what about pride! What about that nationalism(which isn't necessarily bad), I see this flag and I think Vancouver baby! Olympiad!

And people singing O' Canada at every turn. I'd say these games has brought us together as a country, given us a voice....after so long without one. It had a little of everything, opening to closing, which kind've amounts to not a lot on the surface, but people who were there were knee deep in Canadian-ness. And the Canadians apologize.

I think these games were the best thing Canada has done in a long time, specifically in regards to bringing a vast country of individuals into one realm. love it, love it, love it.;)

TheBlueMask said...

As long as they aren't wearing blue masks :)

Yes, the games were truly unifying. I could have done without the inflateable beaver though.

micro said...

Whoa, I missed the whole thing!
... there was a giant inflatable beaver!?

c-dog said...

"I'd say these games has brought us together as a country, given us a voice....after so long without one."

I don't think so.

I think this country is still very divided along nefarious lines, As David Naylor, U of T's president recently said (although I cannot find the source!), Canada has many a great aversion.

We abscond from the truth about how ugly (and beautiful) we can really be.

In fact, in hockey, I'm super happy we won, but we just weren't as great as we once were, and you could feel it in the uncomfortable tension of what lay beneath. We were happy to try not to win, b/c we were afraid to lose. There was a trepidation there, of being found out for what we are, an amazing idea, but still falling short in so many ways.

To be sure, Canada has plummeted in many an international health and well-being indicator over the last 10-20 years, and badly.

We have hope, we have space, and we have resources, it's time we step up to the plate, and the Olympics can be a great starting point.

So one voice, one vision, I'm not sure, but I know we can get there!

Heheh.

Love you guys.

jc said...

I don't know dude, Crosby's goal will be remembered. it happened so fast that he didn't even know what happened. that is magic.but hey, you can always say 10-20 years ago things were better. nostalgia rules.

but that was just hockey. how about the dude in the 50km ski that lost by 1.5 seconds. there is something about that that speaks volumes to me. part of being a canadian really. almost...almost....almost. it's sort of what you are getting at Carlos. trepedation? knowing you can win, but not winning...soemtimes ever. always being forth, without a medal.

What else is interesting is being in Winnipeg during all this. close to the action, but not really. In Tornto you must have felt a world away?

micro said...

The only thing that ever really made me notice that I loved my country, was visiting Korea. The space, clean air, vastness, water, trees (nature etc),and the freedoms... those are the things I love about Canada. None of them have much to do with the prowess of athletes, although I guess that's cool too. One of the things that turned me off of this Olympics was that they pushed it as "green" and then ravaged a provincial park with many truckloads of snow removal. And not just any park, my beloved Manning. Anyhow, a week from now the media spectacle will be over and people will be back to where ever they were before that. I'd get more excited if we rallied together like that for something meaningful or new. Imagine an art expo that got that much attention, hehe ,I know, bit of a contradiction, but whatevs. =P.

Does the Olympics make piles of money for the host town?

What does national pride do for us as individuals? As a country? Aren't there some downsides to national pride?

Ben Johnson is STILL the fastest said...

i think the making of money depends on who/when/where kind of thing.

montreal lost bajillions on the olympics, and only finished paying the debt from them off in 2008. the only major legacy of the Olympics in Montreal is an aging, useless white elephant of a stadium, and the fact that an Olympic-fuelled recession in Quebec lent great support to the sovereigntist/separatist movement.

and that recession, alongside the rise of separatism, led to a massive "English flight" from Montreal, in which something like 40% of the English residents left, along with LOTS of major international corps, and ALL the major Canadian banks.

if you look at data from 1970-1990, you can see Toronto grow in power as Montreal declines.

with Calgary, they worked towards avoiding some of Montreal's mistakes (i.e. building giant ego-fuelled stadiums vs. building infrastructure that would continue the growth of Canadian sport).

Calgary also had the benefit of being at the start of a 25-year economic boom, while Montreal was at the start of a 20-year bust.

i was telling anita last night, though, there's still something incredible about biking down to the Big O(we) and seeing the cauldron, the Olympic rings, and thinking of a time when the whole world's eyes were on this one spot.

so is Donovan Bailey said...

p.s. I saw two interviews with Stephen Harper, and not only is he an ACE hockey historian (currently writing a COMPREHENSIVE history of the sport) but he's actually quite humane and charming when he's off the script for five minutes and being a REAL HUMAN BEING.

he pointed out that we're seeing the legacy of Calgary's long-term planning right now, in that the bajillions of medals we're winning stem from the planning and inspiration of Calgary's games.

TheBlueMask said...

Told ya he wasn't so bad. Although, I'm still worried that he wants soldiers....on our streets...Candadian streets.....with guns..... lol

cara said...

I'm not sure that the Olympics has given us a voice per se. I mean and if we are looking for a collective voice to be recognized, I'd like it to say more than "we're number one."

Seriously, I think that the olympics matter more and was "heard" more by Canadians than the rest of the world. I was speaking with some American friends, and they remarked that most Americans hadn't even watched the hockey game...whether this is true or not, it brings up an important point in my mind -that the show of nationalism was more for Canadians, which is a bit nerve wracking, because I wonder why we need this bolstering? Does this kind of show of "canadianess" actually obfuscate from other feelings we might have about being Canadian?
I'd have to agree with the Dr. Dr.,
"Canada has many a great aversion."

easter island heads said...

it depends though, cara, where you talk to people.

northern U.S. states and cities are quite invested in hockey-- detroit, chicago, new york, philedelphia, boston, minneapolis, even some of the cities further south and west of there. in raw numbers, though not in per capita.

and to countries like norway, random events like the men's 4 x 10 km ski race are huge and memorable.

to me, what i liked in the olympics was people like alexandre bilodeau, clara hughes, etc, be so human.

it's not "we're number one" as it is "we're awesome and we celebrate it with humility and joy".

is that overanalyzing?

this is our identity AS A PEOPLE we're talking about. this is serious. what's the score here man? what comes next?

saint theresa said...

or, more than "we're awesome", i felt like lots of the athletes celebrated the notion of us being collectively awesome.

i hear the closing show was bunksville though.

micro said...

The Olympics were of fundamental religious importance, featuring sporting events alongside ritual sacrifices honoring both Zeus (whose famous statue by Phidias stood in his temple at Olympia) and Pelops, divine hero and mythical king of Olympia. Pelops was famous for his chariot race with King Oenomaus of Pisatis.[12] The winners of the events were admired and immortalized in poems and statues.[13][14] The Games were held every four years, and this period, known as an Olympiad, was used by Greeks as one of their units of time measurement. The Games were part of a cycle known as the Panhellenic Games, which included the Pythian Games, the Nemean Games, and the Isthmian Games.[15]

The Olympic Games reached their zenith in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, but then gradually declined in importance as the Romans gained power and influence in Greece. There is no consensus on when the Games officially ended, the most common-held date is 393 AD, when the emperor Theodosius I declared that all pagan cults and practices be eliminated.[16]

renamaphone said...

lots of food for thought here...nice conversation going.

Like Cara, the closing ceremonies also made me uncomfortable. This discomfort followed me to school today, where I found the main cafe/lounge swathed in red and white (tablecloths, balloons, posters, banners) with a canadian flag literally covering an entire wall.

I think it's important to be careful with ardent displays of nationalism. I don't think this means we can't celebrate or be proud of where we come from, just that we should be aware that nationalism has a very intimate relationship with war and violence. I realize that as a student of war and peace I'm probably more sensitive to this reality than others, but I think it's a reality that is too often overlooked and minimized, so I bring it up.

Also, that the Olympics are extremely political. I realize most of us have acknowledged this a long time ago (I mean, this is what we're talking about here after all), but, like the previous point, I feel like it's so often overlooked that I have to bring it up.

NOT that I'm trying to rain on the parade here. I agree with some of what's been said, that the Olympics have done something positive for Canada. Personally, I perceive its benefits as deriving from a semi-collective experience of celebration and pride. It's feels good to rally around people, and it feels good to flex our sense of community beyond our usual boundaries, ESPECIALLY in the dead of winter.

Yes, the country is divided on a lot of issues. Obviously our problems are bigger than what the Olympics could ever do for us. But it's also clear that something positive happened here over the course of these last two weeks, and I don't think these two are mutually exclusive. The nature of positivity is that it is inherently valuable, no matter the extent of our problems.

On a personal note, watching these games made me think alot about the hard work that preceded them. Sounds like a simple thought, but I'm still engrossed by it.

Lorne Roberts said...

the relationship between nationalism and war/violence/racism is pretty much a part of daily life here in Mo-town.

at the st. jean baptiste day celebrations, for example, there's always this weird vibe about celebrating how awesome and diverse quebec is, but at the same time deliberately excluding any english presence. (last year, two english groups got 40 mins of time during an eight-hour show, and there were death threats, sponsors threatened to pull all their funding, etc). a columnist in the "journal de montreal" pointed out this year that if you're a tuba player from china who arrived here six months ago, you have a better chance of getting a show on june 24th than a fifth-generation anglo does.

groups like les jeunes patriotes, le RPQ, etc, are ostensibly about celebrating quebec, but really, at the end of the day, are little more than anti-english groups.

it's interesting for me to live on the "other" side of that for once.

and interestingly, too, they longer i live here the more i ponder our relationship to the U.S., because there's a similar "well, we're sure not THAT group" kind of vibe in both Canadian and Quebecois patriotism.

Lorne Roberts said...

what else i find intersting is the deliberate invention of national mythology.

i mean, in canada, we always say "we're not racist", and then compare ourselves to the U.S. to show how we're not.

but raise land claims issues, or welfare, and watch the rhetoric fly.

similarly, here in QC, there's this abiding belief that they co-existed wonderfully with the natives until the anglos came along and ruined it. like so many nationalist myths, there's a shred of truth in this one, but it ignores a history of colonialism, racism, etc, that's no better than anyone else's.

having said that, i like life here, but as Ren was saying, it's interesting to see that jingoism/patriotism when it's of a sort that deliberately excludes you.

hooded vandal said...

there is always reason to protest