The Annotated Rick's Rant

WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in order to form a perfect union, establish justice; ensure domestic tranquility; provide for the common defense; promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.

That's the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. I just typed it from memory.

I learned it from Television.

I learned it from the same place that taught me that 3 was a magic number, and that conjunctions joined up words and picked up clauses.

Schoolhouse Rock.

I learned an awful lot of other things from TV, too, when I was a kid and a teenager. Some good, some bad, some indifferent. The point was that TV was always there and it was always giving out information. Rare was the stuff I learned on TV -- is the stuff that I learn by watching the News. No. It was St. Elsewhere that first taught me that the Homeless were people other than bums. It was TV that taught me, when I lived in the South, as a matter of fact -- the long, tortured family story of Alex Haley and his ancestor Kunta Kinte, and sparked my exploration through books and other sources, America's tortured history of slavery. TV taught me about the Korean War through M*A*S*H, it taught me about class through All in the Family and The Jeffersons and Upstairs, Downstairs, and it even inspired my future career choices through the views of Minneapolis Newsroom WJM, and a radio station called WKRP.

Rick Mercer had a rant on his show this week that was angrier than usual, but also pretty trenchant:



What does that have to do with what I wrote above?

Everything.

Like it or not, TV is the major window on the world for millions of people. That is just the way it is. And of those millions, most won't pick up a newspaper or watch a nightly newscast. What they will see is stories. Those stories on TV in whatever form help shape what people think about.

So while there may be a lot of bleating from Alberta or from Little Green Footballs, Red Meat Eating Paleocons screaming about Liberal bias on the CBC news, the fact is that far more people are learning about the law, medicine, social policy, and yeah, politics -- from TV dramas and comedies than they ever learn from a "news" source. I don't say that's the way that it should be. I say that's the way it is.

No wonder Canadians were confused. Most of them haven't heard a peep about the Canadian Parliamentary system since they struggled through their last high school history class.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., a show about the inner workings of the U.S. Government ran seven seasons. In the UK, they've had two or three shows about how their Parliament works -- most of them comedies.

You sell your airwaves completely to U.S. programming, and it comes with a cost. And though Canwest and CTV might bitch about how that cost affects their bottom line, the truth is the cost to our bottom line as Canadian citizens is far greater. We've been on the spike to another countries' values for a long time now. Those values are similar more often than not. But similar is not the same.

The people who hold the airwaves in trust for you, and the people who oversee them, for you, have gamed Canadian viewpoints out of that arena for a long time.

That comes with a cost. There's just no way around that. Having a climate where even when you do get something on the air, you can't really make it too local because you can't screw up that U.S. sale with talk of proroguing or Parliament or anything that might seem....not American, well....that's the greater sin, isn't it? What a small price to pay -- all we have to do is deny the entire populace any chance to learn anything by osmosis that isn't about Hockey or Tim Horton's.

I'm as angry as Rick, and I was as disgusted as he was when I saw all that crap go down before Christmas. In fact, I heard so much stupid, misinformed stuff coming out of people's mouths, people with no idea how their government worked, that it made me want to punch somebody. For which I probably would have gotten arrested. But at least if that happened, I would hope I was lucky enough not to try and take the fifth on the stand, because of course, I know that under the Canadian system of law there is no inherent right you can invoke against self-incrimination.

Think most Canadians would know that? I'm not so sure. There sure are a lot of Law & Order repeats on the air.

David Milgaard was a miscarriage of justice. How many people know that from the news, and how many from the TV Movie? How many people learned about Tommy Douglas from The Greatest Canadian, or Prairie Giant?

You give away your culture, you give away your soul. And then, really, what does it matter that you don't know how the nuts and bolts of government work?

Pssssst. It's all. the. same. thing.