If Monday’s provincial election results are to be believed, Albertans just want more of the same, so I’m feeling tempted to just file something that’s been published before and let readers draw comfort from the sheer pointless, redundant, repetitive familiarity of it all. Just because the PC party has given away our natural resources, let our cities and roads rot, starved our healthcare and social support mechanisms, neglected education and refused to slow the environmental destruction going on in the oilpatch, we’re really A-OK with that and would be pleased with another 37 years of short-term gains and long-term disparity. Welcome back, Ed.
Maybe it is as oddly coiffed political scientist Chaldeans Mensah stated during Global’s election coverage, that Albertans weren’t presented with anything like genuine alternatives among candidates for the premiership, and that electoral reform is absolutely essential to bringing real representative democracy to the province. Ralph Klein swaggered (note how I refrained from saying “staggered”) up to the Global newsdesk to remind viewers that he too was once premier, and that he is no less a pompous, self-satisfied windbag now than he was then. Watching Klein chide his former political foes for opposing his authority while dodging all blame for the state in which he left his former fiefdom, I had to be relieved that at least the new boss (same as the old boss) isn’t disposed to being a blustering lout.
And I’d already had my recommended weekly allowance of blustering louts, thanks to a free ticket to an Oilers game that came my way. I should note here that I’m a terrible hockey fan. I am totally uninterested in learning player stats, players’ names, who plays for what team, where we are in the standings, etc. But I love going to games.
I tend to agree with the suicidal French thinker Guy Debord, who wrote in his situationist manifesto The Society of the Spectacle that the spectacle is not a collection of images. “It is a social interaction among people, mediated by images.” I’ll play fast and loose with his definitions, however, and suggest that going to Rexall for a game is like sitting in a few dozen family rooms all at once, where all eyes are fixed on the same giant TV. People are so comfortable in the act of watching—passive identification with the spectacle has replaced genuine activity, says Debord—that they forget they’re actually seated amidst thousands of other humans.
(A digression: the Eskimos throw the best spectacles in Edmonton sport as far as I’m concerned; cheerleaders hurled aloft, capering mascots, novelty firetrucks orbiting the field of play and frequent pyrotechnics, and a panopticon of drunk ’n’ disorderly behaviour. Periodically the cops pointedly frog-march some shitheel out of there in full view of the fans, the perp’s hands pretzel-twisted into restraint holds.)
My ticket entitled me to a seat against a pillar in the last row of the second tier straight back from the goal. It also entitled me to four guys standing right behind me gesturing with their overpriced cups of headache juice. I don’t believe it’s possible to get drunk on hockey-arena beer, so I can only guess the Rexall draft results in isolated cases of ergot poisoning and that the guys behind me were tripping out of their brains. They’d certainly fallen under the collective delusion that they were a rich source of amusement to those around them, though their mealy-mouthed exchanges didn’t dwell too often on what was happening on the ice.
Maybe they were having the same problem focusing on the game as I was because it wasn’t very interesting until the very end. The top-ranked Detroit Red Wings hadn’t shown up to annihilate their divisional inferiors and the score sat at 1-0 for the home team after 40 minutes.
On the other hand, the game might have been thrown for the benefit of Nintendo or Molson or XM Satellite Radio, since those commodities and others commanded the lion’s share of the Jumbotron’s time between replays and the audience-cam’s relentless search for cute kids and pretty girls. (“Bring her back! I’ll take her!” the comedy troupe behind me shouted as the image of an especially comely hockey fan faded from the screen—but alas, the game resumed.)
Eventually I became convinced that, no matter what happened next on the ice, I would soon have draft beer splashed onto my scalp and shoulders and decided to retreat from the social relation this collection of images entitled me to. I left, confident in the knowledge that the Good Old Hockey Game, like our provincial elections, would always be there to provide the same overhyped spectacle of conflict and consequence, and that the real outcome—the veneration of commodities—would benefit the same folks who always benefit.
I never did hear the final score. As far as I know, the ultimate outcome of the game was not widely publicized—but I could be mistaken about that.
