Out of the Bubble and Onto The Street

I AM kind of a news junkie. Always have been. When I don't know something that's going on in the world, I feel stupid. So it is that I pass by a group of Falun Gong protestors, and go home and learn about the group. (This is actually how I did learn about Falun Gong years ago -- the things you see walking through the city...)

I also consume newspapers and magazines voraciously. And online, too.

But in Vancouver, I was more out of touch than I usually am, and my online media habits started to reveal cracks in information flow. By reading my usual online sources like the New York Times and Salon and the Washington Post and others, I felt pretty up to date with what was going on in the United States, and more or less the world. For some reason, I didn't read the Guardian as much as I do when I'm in Toronto. Maybe it scared me, as, you know, since I was on Pacific time and they were in England that was like reading news of the future.

Anyway, obviously, thanks to bookmarking, and the newly revitalized Playback brand, I even felt like I had a sense of what was going on in the TV and Film industry.

Where things fell down was on the Canada front. I'm sorry, but Canada simply does not have a top level, quality online news site. Not Google news, certainly not the Canada.com branded portals (Vancouver Sun, National Post, etc.) The Globe has annoying firewalls for their best content; The Star is too-Toronto focused (and strangely, which may surprise some people, I'm not really eager to keep up with the Toronto news when I'm not in Toronto. Though I'm sorry I missed the Lower Bay reroute of the TTC.)

So it was that though I was up to the millisecond on news of Anna Nicole, her baby, Britney, her head, and the American Idol castoffs, and their dirty online pics -- I had only a vague, foggy sense of what's been going on in the country I live in for the last three months. Good thing it was winter in Canada, so the answer was largely, "not much."

Also, Macleans is a great site. Without Macleans, I would have sounded like a total idiot.

Anyway, this little bubble extended especially into my last weekend on the left coast. I did a lot of cool things -- saw the Fred Herzog show at the VAG, (which a reliable source insists is not pronounced in such a way that it rhymes with, "cadge." Yeah, whatever.) I also watched the world go by on a grey Howe Street afternoon, had a great meal at Feenies, saw The Lookout (Joseph Gordon-Levitt is dreamy.) visited with friends, met some B.C. writer and production types at The Irish Heather, and haunted my fave coffee spots -- but I didn't pick up a newspaper. I was more concerned with the geography of getting all my stuff into my two bags. Even having shipped two boxes off beforehand -- it was close. Too close.

So it was a bit of a surreal experience to see the solemn juxtaposition of the Vimy 90th Anniversary and the death of six Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan play out as point-counterpoint silently over the baggage carousel at Pearson Airport, as I waited for those two bags. It's then, for the first time, I learned the names of the dead, and saw the cutways to PM Harper and the Queen in France. A set of golf clubs sailed ludicrously past as the CBC switched to footage of a nursing home, and a poor, shaking, broken man who's presumably one of the last survivors of that battle. His grandson spoke for him, and though I'm sure he was saying all the correct things, I couldn't hear that, and I felt a little angry and unexpectedly melancholy at the thought that this old man was already silenced; his descendant already speaking for him, reshaping the narrative of that terrible day and what it all meant.

Jim Henshaw has a lovely little piece about Vimy and his grandfather's memory of it up at his place. For a different view about the juxtaposition of Vimy and the deaths in Afghanistan, today Doyle writes a piece that's thoughtful and interesting and will undoubtedly get all the people who get riled up by Doyle riled up again.

The talk, in the reportage, was of how the sacrifice at Vimy defined Canada as a nation. This was largely unquestioned as an idea and the image of the majestically large memorial only underlined that idea. Nobody seemed to be appearing on TV questioning the validity of the proposal that blood sacrifice is necessary to define nationhood.

This is a multicultural society, not one in which everybody can be assumed to share the same opinion on Canada, Canadian history and the meaning of being Canadian. To some, whose roots are in other societies and who have found refuge here, the acceptance of the idea of blood sacrifice is difficult. The public promulgation of the idea makes them uneasy, and with good reason.

The debate about the meaning of Vimy and the questioning of its accepted meaning happened in newspapers, this one is particular. TV is hopeless on such issues.

This is definitely received wisdom in Canada. The narrative is shaped in one very specific direction: At Vimy, the soldiers from the small nation, Canada, prevailed where the British and the French had failed. Canadians paid a terrible price, and came out the other end as a nation.

That's what I learned in my high school history class. One of the coolest things about history in high school for me was taking the U.S. History class. Because all the dates and events were familiar to me (I was a history geek way back) but having them taught from a dispassionate Canadian perspective was sobering and interesting. None of the tropes or myths were allowed to remain intact. It was intellectually bracing. (I also had a wonderful teacher, who sadly died a year later.) But when I took my Canadian History class, I remember feeling intense dissonance in how they could teach that Canada was born out of revulsion at the U.S. Civil War, and wanting to avoid that all costs (which is one of the reasons Confederation came together the way it did) and this idea that Vimy defined the nation. But I never put up my hand. I had the sense that this was one piece of national mythology that didn't bear examination...at least not in Canadian History class.

If you've read Doyle's book about growing up watching TV in Ireland, I think you have a clearer idea and context of where he's coming from. He was a boy who watched his countrymen explode into violence in a most peculiar way -- on the TV. The War on Terrorism by definition means something different to someone who grew up in that context.

I'm just not sure. I think what the Canadians did at Vimy was undoubtedly brave. But as a young nation, to lose so many young men who could have been building the country for a pointless, stupid fight a continent away -- well... we're ninety years on now. Can't we say that World War I was a bewildering, pointless, awful mess with impunity now? Or is that not - in the parlance of our time - supporting the troops?

I don't know.

Yesterday afternoon, I was in a cab and talk radio was playing and I learned the NHL had favored NBC, who pay nothing for NHL rights, over CBC, who pay a hunk o change -- giving the all-important Sidney Crosby game to the NBC afternoon sched, forcing Hockey Night in Canada to go with a game of lesser interest to Canadians Saturday night. If Hockey is religion in Canada, then the Saturday night game is its greatest sacrament.

I didn't get what was going on at first, in the cab. So I asked the cabbie.

"They move hockey to afternoon. Very bad. Very bad for Canada."

I asked his name. Asif. I may not have the spelling right. Asif comes from Jordan. He's been here five years. Asif knows his Canada, that's for sure. I thought about Vimy and the sacrifice and received wisdom and what defines a nation and how much better I felt when I wasn't living in a news bubble.

I went home, and restarted my newspaper delivery. They start coming tomorrow.