My review of the 2010 Olympic opening ceremonies

I thought it was a bit overly political, honestly. Glorious from a design point of view, but weirdly politicized in terms of content.

I mean, everything made total sense from a Canadian perspective… but that’s also a problem. Instead of making a good show for the world, the Vancouver people made a so-so show that carefully appeased each of Canada’s quirky idiosyncratic hang-ups — a pursuit much less interesting than we tend to assume.

All the native stuff, for example. Native anything in modern Canada seems to have transformed into the favorite plaything of the elite class, excessively paraded as a symbol of post-modern tolerance at every available opportunity. In reality, as every Canadian knows, traditional native art, dance, costumes, etc comprise a tiny, tiny subset of contemporary Canadian culture, something most of us will rarely encounter unless we bother to attend some government-run spectacle, like an inauguration for the commissioner of Nunavut. Yet at the ceremony, native stuff comprised, what, 50% of the show?

Here’s another thing: I don’t know if you heard about this, but the four native chiefs of the bands whose “traditional lands” encompass the territories of the games (whatever that means) were given “head of state status,” and thus got to sit in the special gallery containing the prime minister and the governor general. That’s pandering on the highest level. What exactly are we implying to the world? That Canada is co-governed by its 2% aboriginal population? It may be good image politics for the government of British Columbia, which is currently overcommitted in treaty negotiations of ambiguous scope and schedule, but it warps the reality of Canada for everyone else.

Everyone, even poor John Furlong , was speaking a lot of French. This served no legitimate communicative purpose, but is a bit of Kabuki theater all Canadian big-wigs are expected to perform when speaking to a “national audience.” It perpetuates the mythology that Canada is some sort of seamlessly bilingual country, where people can drift in and out of either language and everyone will just follow along. It’s a very popular trademark of made-in-Ottawa productions, but why subject the rest of the world to this fantasy? People will, after all, eventually leave their seats, walk outside, and be exposed to the cold, cruel reality of unilingual English Vancouver.

The wheat field thing was very cool, but it was also hard not to interpret it as a heavy-handed sop to regionalism. “Look, something from Saskatchewan!” Now we can tick that box! I’ve already heard people bitching that Ontario and Quebec were “unrepresented.” This is the can of worms that Canada cannot resist opening.

Then there was that fat guy from the Northwest Territories, giving his whole rant about how the future belongs to Canada and how we pronounce it “zed” and blah blah blah. An obligatory foray into the realm of what one of my poli sci professors once dubbed “high school nationalism,” the sort of Molson’s beer commercial stuff that drives insecure anti-American types nuts with delight. The hooting that greeted the reference to “zed” alone (to say nothing of the grotesquely paradoxical yelps of delight when he mentioned how polite Canadians are) was Canada at its most chauvinistic and unattractive.

Put together, all this sort of stuff highlighted the degree to which Canada is a perennially naval-gazing nation, a country so thoroughly trapped in the political concerns of the present that it has a very hard time transcending into something greater, something timeless. We can’t just produce cool stuff that happens to be made in Canada. No, everything that comes out of Canada has to be aggressively about Canada in the most ostentatious way imaginable. Our long national drama of self-examination and identity construction is an odyssey the whole planet must enjoy along with us — we’ll make damn sure of that.