P.K.

Finally, someone had the stones to stand up and say the obvious about Habs rookie (and former Hamilton Bulldogs idol) P.K. Subban. I am not referring to this interesting if sometimes troubling article from Charlie Gillis of Macleans, which rightly tells NHL players (and especially talking heads) to man up and shut up.

I am referring to a comment by "Silver24" below the article, which nails with devastating accuracy the problem that I, too, am seeing. Subban is being targeted by the media and his fellow players in a way that I cannot recall any other player having been targeted in my time following the NHL - I have seen him attacked by TV talking heads for not fighting after delivering a devastating and completely legal mid-ice hipcheck. I have seen him called every name in the book twice by Don Cherry for having the audacity to talk to other players on the ice. I have seen national reporters tell outright and blatant lies about his conduct while playing in Hamilton.

Silver24 sees the same thing. And like me, he thinks it's perfectly obvious where it comes from. The criticisms of Subban for being a rookie without "respect", for being flamboyant, for not "knowing his place" don't get echoed around the league because he is young, promising and audacious. They don't get echoed because he is passionate, aggressive but inexperienced. They get echoed around the league because Subban is flamboyant, talented and black.

Especially black.

Silver24 says it well...

At first I never bought the racism card either. There's even a great sound bite of Subban himself completely discounting that possibility. But the longer this goes the less I like the taste it leaves, and the more I think about it the harder it gets to find another decent explanation... I can't ever remember any one player being on the receiving end of this much public criticism from his fellow players.

I almost choked when I heard Mike Richards spouting off about 'respect' that night. Maybe someone should put a microphone in front of David Booth (season over - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIXcGOr4-04), David Krejci (season over - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpZLhuizPrA) or Ron Petrovicky (NHL career over -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd3gmPkVtk8) and see what they think of his brand of 'respect'...

...And by the way, I find your comparison of Subban and Avery to be pretty distasteful. The only thing Subban has ever done in the NHL is play a hard, aggressive style with a little more flair than most of the other guys in the league.

Gillis in the article is more skeptical:

you can forget the idea that Subban’s race is playing a part. Other black players, including Evander Kane and Wayne Simmonds, endure no such criticism. Those guys gladly play to type.

But the skepticism is obviously misplaced, isn't it? If you "play to type" as a modest and unassuming young man, sure, no one is going to hassle you. We've gone beyond that. Probably not until guys finally left Jarome Iginla alone after he proved he could whup any middleweight in the league and still smile his million-dollar smile afterward. But hockey is beyond that. OK, except for minor hockey. And obviously, Europe. But hockey is beyond that. Really!

Anyway, it's when a Subban plays his natural, effervescent, hard-hitting, fan-pleasing game (and Montreal fans have seen nothing yet - the Subban we had in Hamilton was an absolute folk hero to the regulars like few others have ever been, he's been playing within himself) - that is the line that I guess a black player can't cross in the NHL without being given the kibosh by his self-declared white betters.

Let me be clear. I am not talking about ribbing from the fans for being the "Pressbox King" or the like. That shit is funny, and entirely appropriate. I am not talking about Pang contrasting Mike Pietrangelo with Subban saying Pietrangeloi plays the "white way". That is an embarrassing slip of the tongue. I am talking about the whining and the veiled threats from opposition players and the hockey talking heads. I wouldn't expect opposing fans to like Subban - and many clearly don't, often for good reasons. Michael Farber's Sports Illustrated article shows a guy who is unquestionably cocky. Indeed, I would not necessarily object if you said that the kid quoted in that article is pretty douchey.

The article also says that Richards says P.K. stands for "punk kid" and that "mostly Subban harangues opponents with a playground you-can't-beat-me braggadocio, which has prompted one NHL assistant to observe, "It's almost like he's an athlete in a different sport.""

A different sport, eh? Subtle. Can I suggest 'hoopity-hoop'? Maybe 'negroball'? At least the coach had the sense to remain anonymous, or maybe Farber is taking pity on him. Clearly North American hockey, which has reacted with considerable ill grace these last two decades to the European invasion, is still finding its feet in terms of merging hockey culture with the wider culture. (Unsurprisingly, the other guys who get it in the ear on the "respect" nonsense are still, 35 years after Anders Hedberg, Europeans like Linus Omark, who was accused of "disrespect" by the pathetic Dan Ellis after he scored a wonder goal on his sorry ass to win a shootout in December).

For God's sake, look at the aforementioned Richards, who can't stop levelling guys with dirty head hits (see the links above from Silver24), and compare his work to Subban's preferred brand of legit, testicle-rattling destruction. Yet, after this clean hip check, noted daddy's boy Lil' Greggory Peggory Campbell does the "ooh, hold me back, you better hold me back, hold me back, I wanna get him, DUDE HOLD ME BACK" routine; and talking turnips Mike Milbury and P.J. Stock spent the rest of the game berating Subban for not fighting every Bruin on the ice. The words they used? "Respect" and "knowing your place".

NHL players ought to get their heads out of their butts on this. We see right through the "respect" nonsense. If you don't want to get embarrassed, don't embarrass yourself on the ice, and like Gillis says, keep the prissy stuff at home. Grow up and treat your fellow players like men. If you don't like him, say so. Don't pretend he has some deficit of character after he whups your butt and tells you about it. Because THAT, folks, is the real time-honored Canadian tradition.

In Tune With The Zeitgeist, or its English-language equivalent

Let no one pretend that professional xenophobe and serial treason accuser Gilles Rhéaume does not have his finger pressing directly on the pulse of English Canada (no wonder I was feeling a bit faint, I think he was impinging my carotid artery).

Here is Gilles being quoted by the Toronto Sun on the new Macleans "hey, Bonhomme is just French for 'Goodfella', right?" cover, the one that is lightin' the kiddies up like a house afire.

hardline Quebec sovereigntist Gilles Rheaume [sic] said the cover was an affront rarely seen in what he dubbed the "long history of francophobia" in English media.

"It's like putting on the front page of (Quebec news weekly) L'Actualite a picture of the Queen of England dressed as a prostitute," he sniffed.

Finally, someone who understands the extent to which the Queen of fucking England is a beloved symbol of all things English Canadian! I'm sure that the first thing a reasonable Anglophone would do in this situation would be to scream "Anglophobia!" instead of, you know, laughing their ass off.

A Reader Writes

Scorn for Macleans is pouring in from all sides but this one I couldn't resist sharing...

Okay Chief...

Maclean's recently announced the results of a Parliamentarian Of The Year poll, apparently filled out by MPs or other equally-clueless morons, and Angry John Baird was named the winner--erroneously, one hopes. Maclean's did not conduct the survey themselves, but any publication that aligns itself with something that praises that man for any kind of parliamentary goodness isn't worth any of my time anymore.

As It Happens absolutely *destroyed* Baird the day this was announced, in a Canadian way, doing the old "playing the wrong footage" trick (you can guess what kind of footage they played). It was beautiful in its savagery.

But your Steyn objection is far better, and far more deserving of scorn.

The archive, by the way, I found here, and the Baird piece is at 23:30. It might be more easily explained if it's understood that the rules of order provide that only a member of a committee may raise a point of order to the chair.

And so it begins again...

With an open-mouthed double-take at the audacity of professional poop-disturber Mark Steyn, over at the grande dame of the fussy Canadian middle class, Macleans. I'll ignore the nonsensical analysis that our famously panty-twisted American friend is providing and instead focus on one paragraph that made my jaw hit the floor and me scramble for Google...

“The Europe that protects” may, indeed, protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray last year. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”

I realize that there's nothing so shocking in this rather tame swipe at the comforts of European life (other than the sheer audacity of a "fellow" at a think tank criticizing others for being disconnected from life). But let's look at the tape again, folks:

“The Europe that protects” may, indeed, protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray last year. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”

Does the name ring a Bell?

If not, it should, because Charles Murray is an odious and deranged fruitcake whose only claim to fame is having co-written The Bell Curve, the foremost work of "scientific" racism of the last two decades. (He's still at it, incidentally, publishing his worthless "findings" about race and IQ tests all over the less salubrious organs of the U.S. media).

Murray wrote a book, based on "research" that was later demonstrated to be totally fraudulent, stating in bald terms that blacks and Hispanics were inferior by nature and that this was responsible for their lagging social and economic achievement. Its primary practical suggestion was that persons of disadvantaged social backgrounds be discouraged from having children. It was, as Steven Fraser memorably put it, "a chilly synthesis of the work of disreputable race theorists and eccentric eugenicists".

The work has been thoroughly and entirely debunked by a vast group of researchers, thinkers and academics from Steven Jay Gould to Thomas Sowell.

Steyn, of course, with his many friends on the racist right, would doubtlessly have no problem with this sort of work, but I'm sure most of us would feel differently.

There are many, from the Wall Street Journal to his scattershot employer the American Enterprise Institute, who have been counting on the public forgetting Murray's eternal shame, so he could be rehabilitated as a seller of political misdirection. Let's have none of it. I don't know who edits Steyn at Macleans - (s)he'd need to have a strong stomach to digest his egregious taste in show tunes alone - but overlooking the approving quotation of one of racism's best and truest academic friends is an oversight that sullies the whole publication.

For shame.

(LATE UPDATE : Received some comments to the effect that I'm unfairly crying racism and that Murray has not been debunked. I encourage readers to weigh the evidence and make up their own minds. Neither, in my considered view, is correct.)