Yeah, but -- are we really all Canucks?

I mentioned in the post launching this new Substack venture that I’d been motivated to start it from experiencing the sweet, sweet release of typing out some of the ideas that had been jangling/screaming in my head this afternoon as real life sentences — but, like a sap, I’d been doing it for free on Wordpress; like a man lighting cigars with ten dollar bills and then, remembering that he’s allergic to tobacco smoke, using toonies to catapult the Benadryl into his mouth!

I feel a little conflicted about posting this here — on the one hand, it feels strange not to include it, given that it’s the post that gave me the urge to try this out, and it also seems odd to start a project like this without offering a sample of the kind of writing that it’ll offer. On the other hand, the best and most substantial part of the post by far is confined to the screenshots of another writer’s tweets, and at one point I literally ask the question “Does anyone benefit from these skirmishes, besides the Content Mills of perpetual online static?” which is a rich way to begin one’s blog-for-pay enterprise. Ultimately, the embarrassment of those last two clauses were outweighed by my inclination to give at least a little bit of a taste of what this endeavour will try to offer. You can follow Robert Jago here. He’s a terrific writer.

Now, here’s me for a couple hundred words, then him again:

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As a passive hockey semi-fan with split loyalties between Montréal & Vancouver on the rare occasions when I am following the sport, the latest Culture War idiocy of the last day and a half has given me the sudden urge to order, I don’t know, a fucking Raptors jersey.

The worst thing that could happen from an excruciating & trivializing episode like this would be for the general public of a country with desperately, urgently real emergencies tied to the ongoing colonial project at the heart of our economic & political infrastructures — in a year with race riots terrorizing Indigenous fishers on the country’s East Coast ; in a month that found that the majority of injuries for Indigenous youth, who are twice as likely to be injured as their non-Indigenous peers, occur in those under ministry or delegated care on the country’s West Coast; in a week where even police authorities had to admit that an officer captured on video verbally abusing and physically intimidating a citizen appeared to be racist in the middle of the prairies — to believe that decolonization is some sort of frivolous game in which academics go after demonstrably anodyne team insignias.

Does anyone benefit from these skirmishes, besides the Content Mills of perpetual online static? Does anyone think justice, restitution, or redress for Indigenous nations will be delivered by TMZ? The bleakly hilarious suggestion in one news piece that justice could be done by the Canucks reverting to their old stick-in-rink logo (which wasn’t even the most recent logo before the non-offending offending orca, but since everyone agrees that the penultimate logo, the old “flying-skate spaghetti plate,” was super fucking ugly, well…) the aesthetic bounds & political limits of this issue were ultimately made clear: if the Canucks ownership were feeling cagey, why not admit “wrongdoing,” re-brand, and sell a bunch of new merchandise?

Is there anything to salvage from 36 hours spent cringing so hard that we all pulled our necks? If there is, it’ll be because we learned something from the elegantly pithy exasperation of these two tweets by Robert Jago, which sum it all up better than anything I’ve seen, and for my money ought to be the final word: