The freedom to combat the crazies

Bruce Arthur

Nationalpost.com


Between Wikileaks and Don Cherry’s noble quest to shame the world’s bicycle-riding, bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping, pinko left-wing kooks, it has been quite the week for freedom of speech. And hey, it’s part of what makes modern democracy great, along with the nachos.

That being said, it can be both exhausting, and exhausted. Take Baltimore Orioles outfielder Luke Scott, for instance. Not literally, because he would likely start babbling about black helicopters and The Manchurian Candidate, and he would likely be packing some serious heat. Scott gave an interview to Yahoo’s baseball blog, “Big League Stew,” in which he detailed his enthusiasm for hunting and guns, his corresponding admiration for Ted Nugent and, oh by the way, his belief that President Barack Obama was not born in America.

“There’s no one here in America swimming the Pacific Ocean — or the Atlantic, or the Caribbean — to leave this place. The reason why is because of the freedom,” Scott said. “Freedom for a man to mark out his own destiny … Obama, he doesn’t represent that.

“He was not born here,” Scott added, helpfully.

This caused a predictable firestorm, with the Orioles having to put out a statement that essentially read, “Luke’s not with us, aside from the baseball-playing part, and Obama was elected President.” Thanks, fellahs. And now surely Scott will be ceaselessly asked about the probably false beliefs he holds, as do between a quarter and a third of some of your less-than-sharp Americans. Eventually, like John Rocker before him, he will refuse to talk about it, and become manifestly less interesting, if not manifestly less wrong.

And that is what we do, in the media. We ask question after question, and when somebody actually strides beyond the clichés and says something really honest — maybe crazy and laughable, but honest — we descend in a horde, disseminating every syllable, debating the controversy like seagulls swarming a dead fish on the beach. It’s the business.

This is what happened when Don Cherry swooped down on Toronto’s City Hall for Rob Ford’s mayoral swearing-in like your basic half-senile grandpa, grousing about pinkos and their bicycles, left-wing pinko newspapers, left-wing pinkos in general, and closed with “put that in your pipe, you left-wing kooks.” Ol’ Don was festooned with a breathtaking pink suit, naturally. Clever.

This was all ridiculous, of course — many a Torontonian must be distressed to learn that they are communists for owning a Schwinn — but Cherry has made a fine career of such free speech on Hockey Night in Canada, where the taxpayers have been paying him to become a parody of himself, a cartoon in more than simply wardrobe, railing against boogeymen and Euros and left-wingers and visors while wearing an impressive set of blinders himself. As The Hockey News’ Adam Proteau put it the other day, Don is like Canada’s version of the Confederate Flag — to some, a symbol of good; to others, a beacon of bigotry and exclusion.

Now the complaints won’t cause the CBC to reconsider his employment, surely, though a truly unfortunate on-air moment is likely in the mail, sooner or later. For Cherry, of course, your basic unfortunate remarks are part of the shtick; for most athletes, coaches and executives, they’re land mines. Some guys are unafraid to say what they think, and never back down from it — think Charles Barkley, or Jeremy Roenick, or the two Montreal Alouettes who alleged a CFL conspiracy to help the Saskatchewan Roughriders win the Grey Cup. Matthieu Proulx and Étienne Boulay said that, and said it again the next day while engulfed by the seagull hordes, and that was that.

Then you have guys like Tampa Bay Lightning goaltender Dan Ellis, driven from Twitter for complaining about his money problems. (That led to the launching of the Fake Dan Ellis account, which periodically airs mocking complaints like, “My drawbridge is stuck.”) Or Steve Nash, who wore an anti-war T-shirt to the 2003 NBA All-Star Game, and has spent the better part of his time since then deftly avoiding politics, simply because it became a distraction. Or the vast legions of cliché-spewing athletes — hockey and baseball players, more than most — who find it most profitable not to become overly interesting.

So yes, pouncing on every single slightly controversial statement with the fury of piranhas may cause athletes to clam up, keep it simple, decide to just give 110% and tell us all about it. There should be, even as the media environment lurches further into chaos, a certain amount of perspective. Not everything interesting is a scandal. Dan Ellis is good for laughs, but he’s not a monster.

That being said, to say we should just dismiss the Luke Scotts and Don Cherrys of the world is a ridiculous notion. Not Obama-is-The-Manchurian-Candidate ridiculous, but ridiculous.

When FIFA president Sepp Blatter says “I’ll say it clearly: there is no systematic corruption at FIFA. That’s nonsense,” it should perhaps be pointed out that this is approximately as accurate a statement as saying the moon is made of fruit juice. When NHL commissioner Gary Bettman says prospective Phoenix Coyotes owner Matthew Hulsizer “thinks Phoenix is a terrific market and he thinks a well-run team with identifiable ownership can do very well there,” it’s fine to say that Matt Hulsizer must also think an NHL team would do just fine in Ulaanbaatar, or perhaps on the moon.

Falsehoods cannot go unchallenged. Crazy people should be corrected. Don Cherry should not be treated like your half-drunk grandfather at Thanksgiving, telling the kids about the good old days when Joe McCarthy was showing the Yanks what’s what, because in Canada people actually listen to him. Whatever the form of response — scorn, derision, satire, parody, half-based newspaper columns, or just good old-fashioned facts — a response is better than nothing.

On that note, feel free to email in and complain to this pinko rag about its pinko sports columnist, with his left-wing pinko pipe. I’ll probably be busy trying to undermine Canadian capitalism by riding my bike, but I’ll get back to you.