It's Easy to Bash the CBC

This piece appeared in the print versions of the Montreal Gazette and the Calgary Herald in early June.  It was panned by local radio guy, Ted Bird, in his Bird Droppings blog, and by close friends and family.  After an e-mail exchange with Bird, he invited me on the TSN990 morning show to discuss with his colleagues over knishes.

MacLean's 9/11 Comparison Wasn't Insensitive

With all eyes moving between the streets of Montreal and the Mother Corp during a dramatic second round series in this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, it was easy for Pat Hickey and other national columnists to rebuke Ron MacLean for his recent equation of NHL hockey players with the 9/11 first responders (“MacLean’s 9/11 comments were insensitive,” May 10, 2012).  To claim that his remarks were insensitive or dumb, however, is to deny a central role performed by athletes in society.  It is also a missed opportunity to acknowledge Canada’s social identity at this moment in our history.

With the selflessness, bravery, and strength that it takes to do the job, firefighters and police officers clearly represent the best values of a society.  In times of crisis, such as during the 9/11 terror attacks, we are amazed by the tasks they perform under life threatening conditions.  As citizens watch men and women coolly perform their duties, communities come together.  Solidarity is engendered not only out of shared fear and uncertainty.  It results from the fact that a community’s highest values are embodied in, and publicly displayed through the actions of, the first responders.

It is neither inappropriate nor preposterous to suggest that identical social dynamics and meanings characterize the performance and fan appreciation of athletes.

As with the first responders, athletes are also implicated in a community’s value preferences.  In discussing, for example, the presence or absence of character traits like leadership, gameness, and integrity in the actions of the players, fans apply venerable societal values to what athletes do.  A hero in sports is thus not necessarily a player who scores the most, but the one who competes and comports him or herself in a manner that conjures up the highest qualities a society encourages in its members.  Community bonding around sports heroes is not only engendered by collective appreciation of their skill.  The special feelings shared by sports fans when they watch athletes perform also flow from the satisfaction of a social need to be reminded of a community’s core set of values.  This happens routinely in fan involvement with athletes.

Though first responders literally work to save lives and athletes do not, they are both rightly hailed as heroes.  This is because, in invoking many of society’s highest principles for human conduct, the public practice of both of their jobs serves the function of animating moments in time when individual citizens share the experience of sensing, and participating in, their community in truly meaningful ways.

If the preceding arguments are compelling, then how can the swift rejection of MacLean’s similar analogy be explained?  Is it, as most commentators suggest, inherently obscene to compare those who save lives to million dollar athletes?  Are the values that are embodied by the first responders more important to members of our communities than those that are symbolized by athletes?  There are better answers.

It is a time of small and large ‘c’ conservative ascendance in Canada.  In response to cuts to our social services and to belt tightening in the private sector, we are disdainful of our very own student opposition movement and we seem ready for the chopping block to be dropped on the public broadcaster.  With the CBC susceptible, it also doesn’t help MacLean’s case that Hockey Night in Canada and Don Cherry are widely believed to have lost their direction.  Add to this context the fact that the private media corporations for whom the Canadian columnists who led the attack work are angling to squeeze the CBC out of the business of sports broadcasting and there was a perfect political-economic-cultural storm brewing not far beneath the surface.

It was certainly delicate for a highly paid broadcaster working for a targeted public institution to compliment highly paid sports heroes by comparing them to first response heroes.  Calling the analogy insensitive, however, establishes an invidious distinction between athletes and first responders that is both inaccurate regarding the social functions that two the groups share and less than forthright regarding the range of reasons motivating the censure.