Take it to the streets

Y’know, I like sports and hockey as much as the next guy. I wept the last time the Canadiens won the Cup and again the last time they made an early playoff exit. And I lustily cheered every Oilers’ goal last night. But at no point did I feel compelled to run down the street, yelling my fool head off, or drive around honking my car’s horn. After all, it’s not as though I had anything to do with the win; I didn’t accomplish anything, so what’s to celebrate? But that obviously didn’t occur to the thousands of well-liquored Oilers partisans who descended on my neighbourhood last night to demonstrate their pride in their local sports team by kicking over newspaper boxes and baring their breasts. As I tossed fitfully in bed, fantasizing about the EPS helicopter swooping down, Apocalypse Now style and machine-gunning the revelers, it really struck me what a big fat waste of energy the whole spectacle is. I thought of Paris in May 1968, of civil rights marches and other mass movements. These are distant memories, never to be duplicated: we live in a society where people passively accept every single obscenity the government and corporate world inflict: it takes a meaningless sporting event to get people to come together in a spontaneous show of unity. And that, friends, is fucking pathetic.