On Friday October 30 CBC Radio preempted its regular Daybreak North program with a province-wide special broadcast to mark the arrival of the Olympic Torch in Victoria. The plane carrying the hallowed flame from Greece was late, arriving only after the end of the radio program meant to celebrate its arrival. From 6:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. CBC listeners throughout British Columbia had to make due with an endless stream of babble and hyperbole about the pending Olympic Torch Relay!
Fewer than two full days earlier West Fraser Timber had announced that the Kitimat Eurocan mill would be shut down by the end of January 2010, permanently, at a cost of 535 direct jobs and who knows how many indirect and related jobs in the area. The Kitimat mill closure came as a surprise to many people, but it was just the latest in a long line of resource industry plant closures experienced by the citizens of central and northern British Columbia communities.
The excitement about the 2010 Olympics Torch Relay has been fomented by hyperbole. The relay is a superlative’s superlative. The torch is to be carried by 12,000 bearers over a distance of 45,000 kilometres at a reported cost of $30 million, although I suspect that even Sherlock Holmes would find it difficult to determine the actual cost of this extravaganza, from designing and building the many torches for this spectacle to the cost of flying a special aircraft to Greece and back to carry the select number of dignitaries singled out for the honour of picking up the sacred flame.
Fire plays a significant role in Greek mythology, and the flame maintained during the original games in Olympia had religious meaning. This history, however, has nothing to do with today’s torch relay. The tradition of igniting a torch in Greece and transporting the flame from there to the venue of a modern Olympics has a rather ignominious origin. This tradition goes back to the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics. The world was still firmly in the grip of the Great Depression, and government propaganda propelled the German people to the edge of an unimaginable abyss. The Nazi propaganda machine invented the torch relay not to honour Greek tradition or the virtue of amateur sports, but to demonstrate to Germans and to the world the superiority of its ideology. The object was to detract people’s attention from the stark reality of their daily lives. The grandiose 2010 Olympics torch relay serves the same purpose. Every kilometre of the torch relay is managed and controlled to distract the populace from Kitimat-type reality.
CBC Radio could have broadcast a province-wide special “Daybreak North” focused on mill closures in the northern regions of the province, a show addressing the causes and effects of mill closures. Such a program could have examined the relationship, the interconnectedness of social and economic policies and their effect on communities; it could have explored policy options open to governments. The show could have enlightened listeners to the fact that the free market economy is not imposed on society by a natural law, such as the law of gravity, that its rules and parameters are designed and enforced by governments. As economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz reminds us, the reason we cannot see the invisible hand of the free market is because it does not exist.
The 1936 Olympic Torch Relay was staged to aggrandize the Nazi ideology and detract the people’s attention from the stark reality they faced as a consequence of their government’s policies. The 2010 Olympic Torch Relay glorifies a different ideology but its purpose is the same: it is a strategy of distraction. Now as then governments spend millions of dollars on grand spectacles while ordinary people lie awake at night, worried about how they are to feed and care for their families and educate their children in the months and years to come. CBC Radio managers who decided to dodge the concerns of thousands of workers and their families to promote a government propaganda manoeuver whose roots go back to the darkest days of the 20th century should hang their heads in shame.
