It is getting so difficult to keep up with the daily tsunami of outrageous statements and acts coming out of MAGA America that we hardly know where to direct our outrage anymore. Modern day concentration camps? Stripping of voter’s rights? ICE goons kidnapping citizens off of the streets and from their homes? The Epstein files? Tariffs? Book/language censorship? Abducting the leaders of sovereign countries? Undermining allies and democratic organizations? Blowing up random fishing boats in the name of drug enforcement? The loss of rights for transgender people? On and on it goes on an iceberg of madness so high its tip nearly touches the sky. On any given day, at any given moment, any of these topics can be the story of the day, causing those of us who consider ourselves to be decent human beings to react with fists balled, brows furrowed and our feet stomping on the ground in Rumpelstilskian fury. How can the red hatted ones be so blind? How can they not see what is really going on? How can they actually think it is all ok? We tell ourselves that if only they saw the world as we do then everything and everyone would be just fine and we could all climb down from the moral high ground we have so zealously staked out for ourselves and we could all collectively exhale. And calm ourselves. And begin to relax. And dare I pray, perhaps even smile and allow for a smidgen of happiness to creep into our hearts. Imagine not having a care in the world except being happy and at peace?
These are definitely not easy times we find ourselves in and unfortunately, we are a long way from not having a care in the world.
As I write these words, the Winter Olympic Games in Milano-Cortina, Italy have just concluded. It was a terrific Olympics for Norway, who won the most gold medals, as well as the most overall medals. The U.S. had reason to cheer because its athletes achieved much success, the pinnacle of which were the two victories over Canada by the men’s and women’s hockey teams. Today’s outrageous moment concerns what has transpired in the aftermath of those two victories and why it matters. To put it all in context, here is what went down.
The U.S. women’s team played Team Canada and, in my humble opinion, were the better team for most of the game. They were bigger, stronger and faster than the Canadian women. However, for 58 minutes out of the 60 minute game, the Canadian women were in the lead because of a flawless, tenacious defensive effort on their part. It was a total team effort and it was almost enough. The U.S. women prevailed in the end and were deserving champions. Their play and their conduct was such that they earned every kudo that they received. Job well done!
In the men’s final, the scenarios were reversed, sort of. In the men’s game, it was Team Canada who were the bigger, stronger and faster team, with the Americans playing a bend-but-don’t-break style of defense that saw the play end up in their own zone for a majority of the game. However, unlike the previous game, the more dominant team (the Canadians) couldn’t get that extra goal when they needed it. Eventually, the U.S. managed to score on their chance in overtime and that was the game. If you watch enough hockey games you will know that, sometimes, it goes like that. The better team doesn’t always end up winning. The team that takes advantage of their opportunities better usually does. In this game, that team was Team U.S.A. Good for them. They won the game and deserved to revel in the glory that comes with that.
When they posed for their on-ice team photo after the game and brought out the two children of fallen teammate Johnny Gaudreau, I thought that it was a classy gesture. For a moment, I allowed myself to breathe, to calm down and to relax. It seemed as though the American men were going to accept their golden medals with a sense of grace and class after all. That thought lasted all of five or ten minutes. Back in the sanctity of their locker room, the world got to see the real version of who these men were and what we saw wasn’t graceful or classy at all. It was boorish and misogynistic. I have no problem with the hooting and hollering and beer drinking that was going on. Those things happen in times of celebration in sports locker rooms. However, when the MAGA world appeared in the form of FBI Director Kash Patel, all pretenses of good manners went out the window. Then, when Patel called the orange one on his cell phone (isn’t that a security concern?) and the players were invited to come to the White House on a military plane at taxpayer’s expense, Trump made a disparaging remark about the U.S. gold medal winning women’s team. When he did that, the U.S. men reacted, not by standing up for their peers but by laughing along with the joke. In a moment of juvenile infamy, those men threw away any and all goodwill that they had accrued. Every woman who heard it felt that laughter deep in their hearts and souls. Some say that this was just boys being boys and that this shouldn’t be taken so seriously. But, to me, I think it strikes at one of the core factors at play in this whole MAGA culture and that is that it is definitely a worldview driven by men. If you didn’t believe it was really a man’s world before then listen again to that phone call and how easily and uniformly those mighty female hockey champions were thrown under the bus by their hockey-playing brothers. Men, all.
As if you need more proof to know how the real world is working and whose values and viewpoints are being held up as being worthy of adulation, last week, as the Olympic hockey tournament was unfolding, the Premier of Ontario appointed a man named Don Cherry to the Order of Ontario. This award is the highest honor a civilian can be given in Ontario. It is awarded to people deemed to have contributed to the betterment of our province and the people it represents. If you are a Canadian then you probably know who Don Cherry is and why he is kinda famous. If you don’t know who Cherry is then, here is a short backgrounder for you.
To place Don Cherry into his proper context is to understand the importance of the game of hockey to the culture of Canada. Hockey and the players who play it are often viewed through the lens of hero worship. This starts at a young age as the ones with potential begin to reveal themselves on the small rinks of their home towns and cities. As they progress through the organizational ranks, those top prospects tend to end up being placed on “select” teams and, from there, drafted onto junior teams in towns far away from their home. For these young men, contributing to the success of their team becomes paramount. When success happens for them and their teams, these boys earn the right to be drafted by professional hockey teams in cities far from their junior home. It is in those cities that these boys play with men. It is from these professional teams that players end up with the chance to play for their country far from Canada at the Olympics. Don Cherry was a player who made it part of the way through this process, his career stalling in the minor leagues. In time he became a minor league head coach and, eventually, the head coach of the NHL’s Boston Bruins. It was in this capacity that most Canadians came to know who Don Cherry was. His Bruins teams were filled with tough, skilled players. The rivalry that they had with the championship-caliber Montreal Canadians in the playoffs became the stuff of legend in Canada. Because those games were aired on the CBC network on Hockey Night In Canada, Cherry became someone who all Canadian hockey fans knew. When his coaching tenure ended in Boston, he was hired as a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada. For the next thirty plus years, Cherry was a regular fixture on a weekly television show that often functions as the heartbeat of the country. If hockey can be said to be like a religion in Canada then local arenas are the churches and watching Hockey Night in Canada at home was like going to church by proxy.
Don Cherry, along with co-host Ron MacLean, were featured during the first period intermission of the national game in a segment that became known as Coach’s Corner. In this segment, Cherry would talk about the game being shown, as well as other hockey-related topics of note from around the NHL. He was always loud and brash and was full of opinions. When he first started to appear on Coach’s Corner, I found him to be an oddly comforting presence. The reason for this was that he was unabashedly a booster of all things Canadian. It was rare in the early 1980s for a larger-than-life TV personality to consistently pump the tires of a country that was often more demure than that. So like many viewers, I became a Don Cherry admirer. I thought that he did a terrific job of analyzing why certain things were (or were not) happening in a particular game. He was a good coach and tactician and I feel as though I learned a lot about the game because of Don Cherry. But Don Cherry is a product of the world of hockey culture in this country and, as a result, he developed a set of personal values that he carried with him through life and that which he increasingly shared on air in Coach’s Corner as the years went by. Cherry valued toughness and often venerated a class of player known as enforcers. Enforcers were players whose job was to fight other players. No one was a greater supporter of hockey enforcers than Cherry. He even made money from it by releasing a series of VHS videos called Rock’em Sock’em hockey, which featured the biggest bodychecks and toughest, bloodiest fights in the NHL each season. As these fighters began dying from brain injuries incurred during their careers, Cherry’s boosterism began to fall out of sync with the mood of the country. It was then that he turned to the military. He became one of this country’s biggest on-air supporters of “the troops”! Personally, I find nothing wrong with supporting the men and women who put themselves in harms’ way to defend our democratic values. Good for them and good for him….until he started pairing the military with hockey. At that point, those who were repulsed at the notion of Canada becoming a militaristic, gunloving country like the US started pointing at Don Cherry as being a big part of helping that new state of affairs to grow and spread. In addition, Don Cherry’s flag waving for Canadian players, in time, revealed itself to be another thing that was setting him apart from modern public opinion. He was eventually let go by the CBC after an on-air rant against immigrant communities who weren’t wearing poppies for Remembrance Day (when we honour our fallen soldiers). His “You people” speech, coupled with a long history of making disparaging remarks about European players, refusing to learn how to properly say their names, etc., all combined to turn his Canadian flag waving from boosterism to nationalism. After Don Cherry was fired from Coach’s Corner, he remained defiant and has refused to retract a word of anything he has ever said on air. He is in his nineties and now has been honoured by the Premier with Ontario’s highest civilian honour.
Equally opinionated are the members of the Canadian punk band known as Propagandhi. Unlike Don Cherry, who had a platform on, arguably, the most important show on Canadian television, Propagandhi has toiled away for thirty years in relative anonymity. However, in the world of Punk Rock, Propagandhi are well-respected and highly thought of. Next to The Tragically Hip, Propagandhi is my favourite Canadian band. I like them for the same reason that I have always liked The Hip (and why I initially liked Don Cherry), because they are proud Canadians. Chris Hannah is the lead singer and main songwriter of the band. Like Gord Downie and The Hip, so many of Hannah’s songs touch on topics that are uniquely Canadian. The one I am sharing today is a song called “Dear Coach’s Corner”. Needless to say, the song is about Don Cherry and the nature of his form of masculinity. You see, throughout the whole history of Propagandhi, the band has had an equally strong set of personal values that it espouses. For example, they are anti-violence, anti-misogeny, pro-animal, proTrans rights and so on. They even went so far as to create a border for their second album called Less Talk, More Rock that states these values in bold print so that fans coming to a show of theirs will know what they are in for. Some people from the MAGA universe would call Propagandhi’s values as being “woke” but the members of the band don’t care about that criticism anymore than Don Cherry cared about what his critics (“lefty pinkos”) had to say about him. It has always struck me as funny that two people with such opposing opinions as Cherry and Hannah can belittle each other as they do without realizing how similar they really are. Chris Hannah, as he states in the lyrics to “Dear Coach’s Corner”, is a proud prairie born boy. He is a hockey lover and has played the game. He loves how interwoven the game is with the culture and identity of this country, too. Hannah loves it all, except for the culture of toxic masculinity that resides within the world of hockey. A culture that we saw on full display in the American men’s locker room.
The story behind the song is that one day, Hannah and his young niece attended a game together in Toronto to watch my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs play. This game was being played at the height of Don Cherry’s popularity on Coach’s Corner on CBC and, specifically, when he was in his “support the troops” phase. Hannah and his niece were excited to attend a game together. He loved hockey and was happy to go and see a game in Toronto. His niece liked hockey and was hoping to start playing soon where she lived. However, just before the start of the game, when the national anthems were about to be played, armed Canadian soldiers rappelled to ice level from the roof of the arena. Hannah’s niece didn’t understand why there were loud noises and people with guns at centre ice. This overt display, equating patriotism with military might, angered Hannah and soured his mood when it came to hockey. His niece was scared and wanted to go home. So she and Hannah left without having watched any hockey at all that evening. As his anger simmered to a boil, Hannah penned the lyrics to his song “Dear Coach’s Corner”. In the song, Hannah writes his “letter” to co-host Ron MacLean. MacLean was often viewed as the voice of reason on Coach’s Corner and was definitely the straight man to Cherry’s bombastic clown. Hannah asks MacLean to explain why he and the CBC provide a platform for “a sad old man” to indoctrinate an entire country and, more specifically, an entire generation of children, to equate love of game and love of country with love of soldier. Hannah swore that such unfettered pontificating would yield a harvest of bitter fruit for future generations. Throughout the song, Hannah takes great pains to point out that he is a good, old Canadian prairie boy who loves the game, too, all things that would normally resonate with the Don Cherry’s of the world, as well.
Obviously, we live in a world where certain personal values have been afforded greater currency than other values. Strength remains a key component of the worldview of those presently in charge. Those in charge are mainly men, as you know. I am not a MAGA-type man but I am a man, just the same. Possessing strength has been ingrained in me all of my life as well. I had to be a breadwinner and provide for my family in order to be a man. I have to keep my family safe at all times or what kind of man was I? I have to have ambition and possess initiative in order to be a man, too. However, of all of those things that are characteristics of us males, one of the things I try my best not to be is an asshole. If being a man means being strong and in control then I opt to marshall my resources for the good of others. It is easy enough to do. I can be charitable as easily as I can be selfish. I can be kind as easily as I can be cruel. I can acknowledge the successes and positive attributes of others as easily (if not more easily) than I can wave my own flag. I can build things up as easily as knocking things down and destroying them. I can easily act like those American male hockey players did when destiny called and found them wanting or I can act as I actually do, which I imagine is more like how Sidney Crosby and Marie-Philip Poulin would have acted, which would have been to shut that shit down!
Real life gets better or it gets worse by the choices we make. What is helpful in disorienting times such as these, is to realize the foundation upon which these personal and collective choices are being built. That the American men behaved atrociously is not in dispute. The misogyny on display and the absolute selling out of their female peers is abysmal in all regards. However, people have been claiming that hockey culture is toxic for quite some time now. That is not an excuse for the behaviour of the gold medal winners but it is a starting point for remediation. Most professional hockey players in the NHL have barely graduated from high school. The sheltered, pampered world in which they grow up is intensely hockey-centric. The difference in character that they display as adults often has as much to do with the role models they had as boys than anything else. In a world where young boys are fawned over and allowed to do almost anything they want as they grow up without fear of consequences, as long as they are producing wins for the team, you end up with groups of grown men who have no sense of responsibility to anyone else. It is an extremely ego-centric way to be. It is what you saw with Team U.S.A. men’s hockey in the locker room. Boys will be boys, indeed.
I will end this long post (I’m sorry) by saying that I am proud of the players who played on both the men’s and women’s Olympic teams for Canada. I would have preferred a gold medal for each but, having said that, I cannot complain in the least about the effort and the way in which everyone carried themselves on and off of the ice. I feel sorry for the American women’s team. They deserved a lot of applause for the excellence of their effort and the conduct of their character. Unfortunately for them and, by extension, for most women in this world, what they received in the end was a reminder of just how little they are valued by those who presently pulling the strings. What a sour way to end such a golden moment for these terrific champions and for the country who should be able to feel pride in their champions. But alas, as Chris Hannah has correctly penned in “Dear Coach’s Corner”, all that America really has to show for two gold medals is a harvest of strange and bitter fruit. What a shame!
The link to a video for the song “Dear Coach’s Corner” by Propagandhi can be found here. *(The man being interviewed throughout the clip is drummer Jord Samolesky). The lyrics version is here. ***You may find it helpful to watch the lyric’s version first so that you clearly understand the words that Chris Hannah has written.
The link to the official website for Propagandhi can be found here.
The link to the video for a representative segment of Coach’s Corner on CBC starring Don Cherry and Ron MacLean can be found here.
The title of this series on punk rock sings is taken from the lyrics to a song called “Boxcar” by a great band called Jawbreaker. Please head on over to their website and show them a little love. Click on the link here. Thanks.
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