NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
January 13, 2010
Unmanned
The best defence is a good offence, according to ancestral lore; and as Canadians we understand the principle in hockey. Play the game in the other team's zone and they won't be scoring many goals on you.Not that you can do without a couple of defencemen (or a goalie for that matter); but even there, the point holds. You want defencemen who can move the play forward, who can get the puck out of your own zone. Just dumping it out is ineffective: you want to pass the thing forward. Indeed, it is a relief to watch hockey, a game of limited consequence except that it remains a little frozen oasis of common sense. The big professional teams are all-male. The inability to skate is seen as a liability. Puck-handling skills aren't negotiable, either. Merit continues to be rewarded in hockey, and there is no nonsense about this. Mere "credentials" will get you nowhere. Coaches who prove useless are fired, and even overpaid players who consistently fail to contribute to overall team performance are sent, unsentimentally, down to the minors. Refereeing is still done, so far as I can see, without any recourse to post-modern "rights language," and an offside remains an objective thing. We have yet to see even the theatre of whining that adds a sheen of disgrace to international soccer. Not that we should cease to be vigilant. Recent campaigns to eliminate the good old-fashioned hockey brawl -- on the grounds that people might get hurt -- are a cause for concern. We need to appreciate the greater evil presented by the intrusion of effeminacy into what is essentially a man's game. "A man's game." I do not doubt the power of that phrase alone to provoke people. That is why it must be allowed to stand. Among the most urgent requirements of our moment in the "evolution of western society" is to halt the progress of emasculation. An effeminate society will never withstand the challenge of psychopathic masculine aggression -- in the form of, exempli gratia, contemporary "Islamism." We need men who are men, to defend us; men who are not merely shrill, from the pain of their gelding. Hockey is itself a surrogate for warfare, and if you doubt it for a moment, listen to the crowd. (Including the women. Especially the women.) And while I might think professional sports in general a circus for the masses, and a lure into couch potatodom -- real men don't watch, they play -- hockey in particular has become valuable as a museum exhibit of many forgotten virtues. I was writing last week about airport security, making the point that the very fatuity of the latest "politically correct" security regulations -- the refusal to profile likely terrorists, the insistence on punishing everybody equally, the abject dependence on fallible and hideously expensive technology, the mindless willingness to be held hostage -- may be contributing to the demise of political correction itself. Even people in the mainstream media are beginning to ask questions like, "How do the Israelis handle these threats?" But I have learned not to count on public outrage. The polls are now in, and the willingness of air travellers to submit to "full body scanners" -- that render them nude to security personnel -- proves we continue to be "a nation of sheep." Imagine this! Look at the denudations of Auschwitz; see the hell-paintings of Hieronymus Bosch; read the Book of Genesis again; think carefully about what is wrong with pornography. Now consider the crowds going willingly in nakedness into their airplanes. The tyrant has reduced us to a shivering, humiliated mass. I, for one, have resolved not to board an airplane through a full-body scanner, and I do not believe anyone with a lively sense of his own human dignity should submit to that farce, short of physical compulsion. Yet there is worse. The "knicker bomber" who tried to bring down an airliner approaching Detroit -- intentionally choosing Christmas Day -- was, immediately after capture, singing like a bird about his connections with Yemen, and the imminent threat of further attacks. This vital conduit of life-and-death information was then intentionally plugged, when President Obama made his decision to have him charged as a conventional criminal, read his "Miranda rights," and lawyered up. This is of a piece with the closing of Guantanamo, moving the 9/11 trials to New York, the feints at prosecuting senior Bush administration officials, the persistent White House attempts to undermine Gen. McChrystal and Gen. Petraeus in the field with second-guessing and press leaks, and -- so on. And this isn't hockey, this is war -- with thousands upon thousands of lives on the line in America itself and around the world, and the integrity of our society under siege. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top