I have a long history with this city. I've always told my pals what a nirvana it is. And in most respects it's true.If you've not read or seen anything about it, thousands of hockey fans rioted last night, burning cars, looting, even beating other fans. I won't link to anything directly as most articles include oftentimes disturbing video.
But as I watched some of it, I kept seeing college-aged and early 20ish people. Cars on fire. People breaking store windows, and most of the rest, laughing and shooting photos or videos. A bunch of Twitter-fried and Facebook-glutted assholes throwing tantrums in their own fucking city.
I don't know. They burned shit in Vancouver when the Canucks lost to the Rangers in 7 back in '94. That was way before Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it was a little worse this time, but it hardly counts as new behavior.
ReplyDeleteAA and a half a dozen others of us saw this coming a mile back.
ReplyDeletePS: I heart Brian Leetch forever and ever.
Well, fuck me. I guess I'm the ignorant one who didn't predict it.
ReplyDeleteWhat bothered me the most was "citizen reporting" that the hoodlums were reveling in.
I don't think it's a new thing but I do think it's a youth thing and I too saw that these rioters were the same ages as my students. It's very disturbing.
ReplyDeleteI agree Terry, that's some shameful nonsense that went on. Ugh. And yes, carried out largely by packs of spoiled young 20-somethings.
ReplyDeletePeople in these parts take their hockey pretty seriously. I'm not even a fan, but was saying "Why didn't they pull Luongo sooner?" with the best of them when I met neighbours in the street after game 3, even though in my case I had learned my lines by rote. I don't live in Vancouver, but there was a ripple effect. After game 7 I had a strange urge to overturn my kids' bicycles and bedeck them with birthday candles. I overcame it. (Couldn't find the candles.)
ReplyDeleteSo, yes: shameful, over-indulged youth being complete assholes. On the other hand, WTF happened, Canucks? We were all rooting for you!
I have to say though: if they'd won there would still have been a riot. Perhaps less looting and car-burning though.
Terry, I grew up (and still live) in a pretty rough Canadian city - based on the hairdos, clothes and shoes of the 20-something rioters who torched Van, they look like the losers in my neighbourhood who still live with their parents while working the dead-end job that inevitably comes from barely even graduating high school, not the slack-jawed mouth-breathers that make up the campus population.
ReplyDeleteI did a lousy job explaining what bugged me the most. It was the people laughing and videotaping all of it. There are riotous nuts everywhere, of course, but I was dismayed at the 20 year olds in vintage collectible jerseys that cost 100 bucks a pop recording looters on their iPhones.
ReplyDeleteI should point out as my significant other lives in Vancouver that the people who started the riot weren't hockey fans at all. they were dressed as hockey fans but actually a political protest about lack of mail delivery due to a postage strike. The fires started with cars parked in front of the main post office.
ReplyDeleteI'm not absolving the hockey fans but they apparnetly didn't start it.
Sad as it may be, this is an improvement. I remember the winningteam's fans rioting after the championship. At least the losers' bruised pride correlated with their violent behavior.
ReplyDelete@ NEN: "a political protest about lack of mail delivery due to a postage strike"?!?
That's a new one for me. You Canadians take your hockey and mail delivery pretty seriously. I gotta party with you guys.
Of course we take our mail delivery seriously. That's how we get our hockey cards.
ReplyDelete@New England Natalie: Sorry, but no, that's not the case. Good story, though. (And it's a LOCKOUT, not a strike - I'm pretty sure we can all appreciate the importance of that particular distinction...)
ReplyDeleteTo further display my lefty team colours, here's an interesting take on the riots from The Nation, via rabble.ca: http://rabble.ca/news/2011/06/vancouvers-hockey-riot-how-understand-it.
The sense of entitlement was what really pissed me off (and yes, made me think of my students, and Homecoming at Queen's on a larger scale) - it's like it was a god-given RIGHT to f*ck sh*t up, a sentiment nicely summed up in this quote from Thursday's Toronto Star: "“This is releasing tension, man,” said a man in his twenties who set a garbage can on fire. “What else are you going to do when you lose the Stanley Cup? You riot.”"
Seriously?! You wanna release tension? You take up yoga. You paint some watercolours. You rub one out. You don't burn stuff, throw beer bottles at the giant TV screens that have been temporarily installed for your viewing pleasure, then go looting in the motherf*cking Bay!
And given the hegemonic masculinity over hockey culture, is this really all that surprising?
@drunk in a midnight choir
ReplyDeleteYou forget the two cultures that make up Canada: French and Anglo-Celtic, and they take their sports and their drinking very seriously. Are they in their right to flip garbage cans and old Peugeots? Hell, no! But it goes with the territory, like finding a homeless man masturbating in a Philadephia subway station at 10:30 on a Thursday night.
@Strelinkov: We've been an officially multicultural nation for decades now. It helps us to manage our differences and deny our histories of racism and colonialism. That whole "two solitudes" thing is so 1945... ;)
ReplyDeleteOh drunk...maybe in big metropolitan areas around Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, but I guess you haven't been up much to some of the mining or forestry towns in tbe north, where everyone's white and there's an english part of town and a french part of town, and there's not much love between the two.
ReplyDeleteProf. Poopiehead - then why were the riots happening in Vancouver, and not in the small towns up north?
ReplyDeleteAgreed that the sense of entitlement was stomach-turning. A bunch of rich-dick white kids whose mommy and daddy will bail them out thought it would be fun to act out. I guarantee you they would have done exactly the same thing if the Canucks had won; they were looking for an excuse.
I almost hate to look on the bright side (and I certainly don't excuse any rioting), but at least Vancouver is trashing Vancouver, leaving the rest of us blessedly alone.
ReplyDeleteIf they'd won, the Smug emissions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smug_Alert!) would have been insufferable.
For me, the Senators losing to the Ducks in 07 was the low point for Canadian Hockey - even worse than Nagano.
Reporting in from Boston: BU and BC students are notorious for tipping cars over and setting things on fire when our sports teams win or lose big games. This time, they seem to have restrained themselves--possible because so many of them have already left for the summer. Most local folks I've spoken to are sickened by the violence in Vancouver. We're thrilled our team won, but it doesn't deserve this kind of reaction.
ReplyDelete(Luongo actually scored on his own goal, as a particularly apt epilogue to his earlier comments about Boston goalie Tim Thomas. Karma's a bitch, eh, Berto?)
Flash mob tomorrow at noon at Big Mountain College ! Woohoo!!!
ReplyDeleteI'll bring the torches if you bring the pitchforks!
@Popiehead: I grew up in one of those communities. Don't ever get either group you've identified started on how much they hate the "Indians" and the "immigrants"...or ask them to concede they are on stolen land.
ReplyDelete@Merely - I consider the single drinking establishment of any small northern town (they maybe have two if they have a Legion AND a bar) to be a powder keg ready to explode on any Friday or Saturday night, you don't need the Stanley Cup to release the dogs of war in those places. In one forestry town I was at, a knife fight around the pool tables was, well, just another Saturday night.
ReplyDelete@Drunk - totally agreed on that point. Unfortunately, when I've been in the sun too long I guess I look like one of "them" - the summer of 1990 (with the Oka crisis) was not a pleasant one.
@drunk in a midnight choir
ReplyDeleteYes I know that Canada is a multi-culti utopia, but the sporting/drinking culture seems Franco-Anglo-Celtic (Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Ulsterites) with the reverberating echo of Catholo-Anglican-Presbyt-Episco-Heathen rites in the background of every bar with a TV in the country.
@Strelinkov: thank you for so clearly illustrating how things that are associated with whiteness become positioned as core markers of the (dominant) "Canadian" identity. You have practically to pledge allegiance to Lord Stanley's Cup in the Citizenship Oath...
ReplyDeleteAnd, for your reading pleasure, some pearl-clutching over nice, middle-class (white) boys from *good* families (gasp!) RIOTING: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/gary_mason/the-sad-painful-truth-about-the-rioters-true-identities/article2066321/
(Clearly the author has never taught at the secondary or post-secondary level.)