"O Canada, We Obey the IOC"

Mack Hall

P.O. Box 856

1286 County Road 400

Kirbyville, Texas 75956

409 423 2751

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“O Canada, We Obey the IOC”

 

Last week Penguin Books pulled Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: an Alternative History from circulation in India, and destroyed copies still in its supply chain.

 

Professor Doniger’s book is almost surely boring – any book with a colon in its title is going to be a yawner.  After all, from our high school lessons in anatomy and physiology we remember what a colon is full of.

 

But Penguin didn’t destroy its own book because it is a doorstop; Penguin meekly surrendered to a religious group which didn’t like the book. 

 

One might expect self-censorship by a company in India, but surely not in Canada, the nation based on that whole thing about The True North Strong and Free.

 

USA-ians wanting a frozen-moose report from Newfoundland or another exploding-train-in-Quebec news item from north of The World’s Friendliest Border will not be hearing anything on CBC Radio via livestream.  To call up CBC radio on the ‘net (rather like Macbeth calling up those witches in Act IV?) is to be greeted with Hamlet’s “The rest is silence.”  The electronic page is there, all right, but nothing happens except a sign reading “From Feb. [sic] 6-23, CBC Radio One live streams will only be available to Canadian listeners due to Olympic rights restrictions. However, you can visit cbc.ca/radio/ to listen on-demand or download podcasts.”

 

Whatever amount of money was exchanged between the International Olympics Committee and the CBC apparently wasn’t sufficient to buy enough letters to spell out “February.”

 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which Canadian taxpayers must fund through taxes, chose to silence its own livestream outside Canadian borders.  The bit about listening to on-demand to podcasts is not technically a lie, but until the IOC gives Canada permission, no new podcasts are being generated.

 

If this self-censorship by the CBC applied only to live Olympics broadcasting, well, fair enough.  Bribes…um…money has been exchanged from oily hand to oily hand for the games.  However, the CBC has silenced all its livestreaming outside Canada’s borders – weather, news, recipes for roadkill moose, and the latest rumor about the whereabouts of the elusive Lyuba Orlova.

 

The last news USA-ians heard of the abandoned Russian ship Lyuba Orlova was that it was infested with giant cannibal rats and drifting toward Ireland.  Until the IOC gives its colonial minions in Ottawa permission to broadcast again, no one will know if the giant cannibal rats on the Lyuba Orlova are reading up Irish stew recipes in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Rod Serling’s To Serve Man, or innocently rehearsing choral routines from The Flying Dutchman.

                                                                                        

Canada is this nation’s biggest trading partner and a solid ally.  Every day thousands of Americans cross the border to work and shop in Canada, and thousands of Canadians cross the border to work and shop in the USA.  All along that 3,000-mile border people cross this way and that for lunch with the in-laws.  Tons of food, manufactured goods, raw materials, and the occasional moose are daily traded via rail, roads, and air between our two great nations.  That Canada can be bribed or bullied into silence, compromising friendly relations, suggests not incompetence by a few functionaries but malicious intent by a third party.  Who?  And why?

 

Emails to several CBC address were not answered.  Well, maybe all the headquarters gnomes were too busy listening to the games.  Certain the CBC leadership listens to the IOC.  The emails were not impertinent; they did not ask if some CBC vice-president’s daughter or son recently received a full scholarship to an exclusive private school in Switzerland or France, or if another CBC executive suddenly sported a shiny new SUV in his driveway.  To ask such questions would not only impertinent but wrong.  No rude questions were asked, and the respectful questions were not answered.

 

Perhaps CBC Radio shares the same ‘tude toward listeners that Air Canada displays toward passengers: “We’re Not Happy Until You’re Not Happy.” 

 

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