Enough with welcoming the world, let’s talk about ME.
I don’t want to come off as someone who is excessively bashing Canada in my country’s moment of triumph, but… well, someone has to.
The main conclusion to be drawn in the aftermath of the 2010 games is that they were remarkably self-indulgent. The cloyingly insecure opening and closing ceremonies, which I have previously deconstructed, were one particularly overt manifestation, but the larger theme could be felt everywhere else in Vancouver too. Maybe that was a good thing for Canada, and a good thing for Canadian morale, and a good thing for our athletes, but it was still the reality. If we got a glimpse of some sort of “new Canada” over the last two weeks, it was a country that is first and foremost interested in gazing lovingly in the mirror.
A writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Gil LeBreton, wrote an article yesterday in which he compared the nationalistic excesses of the Vancouver games with those of the 1936 games in Nazi Germany. Obviously that was an over-the-top and sensationalistic analogy, and the Canadian press has had a lot of fun mocking it, but a more mature reading of LeBreton’s column reveals some perfectly valid criticisms. “An Olympic host is supposed to welcome the world,” he writes. “This one was too busy being (their word) ‘patriotic.’”
“One thing I never saw: a simple flag or shirt with the five Olympic rings,” he adds. “Not anywhere. After 15 Olympics, that was a first.” There’s very little that can be factually disputed in his piece, and he provides numerous examples of Canada deliberately shunning all that brotherhood-of-man stuff for a more chauvinistic, Colbertian theme of Defeat the World.
LeBreton wrote a second, follow-up column today, responding to the backlash that greeted the first. And again, while he backpedals from the harshness of his Nazi analogy, he repeats “what passed for patriotism in Canada came across differently in the eyes of an international guest.”
The games were a success for Canada by any imaginable standard, but they also exposed, on a global stage, some of the less-than-appealing qualities of the Canadian national psyche: hypocritical boastfulness, pompous entitlement, chronic narcissism, and the underlying, crippling neediness and insecurity from which these other traits flow.
Sometimes it’s in moments of great success that we need to be the most self-critical, precisely because the impulse to do the opposite will be so strong.
