As you have doubtless observed from our incoherent ramblings, French Immersion is something of an authority on character flaws – our executives exhibit several of them.
Not surprisingly, some are typical of the society in which we live, which shares more with the mythical ROC than most in either place would care to admit, but tends as a rule to express it more emotionally.
Take our irrational fondness for nostalgia, for instance.
Faded glories and historical injustices are a more or less constant preoccupation – we can no more get over the Plains of Abraham than we can 16 years of Stanley Cup drought.
Quebec is also big on the notion of entitlement; the peuple wants what it wants, and it should get it, dammit.
The main outlet for these sentiments used to be politics.
But there’s no referendum talk to keep people occupied, and the Action démocratique du Quebec, which came within 10,000 votes of winning power in 2007 (brrrr, what was that, the cold hand of death?) is disintegrating and nobody seems to care.
Given there always needs to be a villain in the piece – your Chrétiens or Parizeaus, and more recently Muslims, Hasidim and brown people during the reasonable accommodations “debate” – these are lean times.
In a nationalistic society, factionalism is something of a natural consequence – and in lieu of societal debates on language, identity and immigration, folk pick up whatever’s at hand, like, say, Habs goaltending.
That’s a gross generalization, lots people find subjects to argue about other than hockey (like municipal corruption), but none draw as much saturation coverage. Besides, we specialize in gross generalizations.
Which brings us, rather ramblingly, to Allan Walsh, Jaro Halak’s California-based Mr. 10%.
Much of this ground has already been tilled, so we won’t to go back over it, after all, we wouldn’t want to dispel our work-shy rep.
Suffice it to say that on Saturday night, Walsh tweeted a snide mention of Carey Price’s win-loss record. (If you didn’t see the Interweb this weekend, there’s a good wrap-up of the controversy here).
Walsh has created a stir in hockey circles, where the culture is to address player-management grievances privately and failure of same results in recriminations – see the uproar over Heatley, D., late of the Ottawa Senators, and the case of Kostitsyn, S.
But he’s also toyed with important social conventions in the most rabid hockey market in the world (get over it, Toronto).
A healthy portion of the adulation reserved for Halak in many quarters stems from the fact he’s the underdog, and suffers in silence.
Well, this kinda undercuts the argument, eh?
What was a collective sense of entitlement on the part of many Habs fans now seems to be his sense of entitlement (as expressed by his representative).
It’s one of the things people instinctively dislike about Price – that he would be anointed the franchise goalie, by Bob Gainey and others, without having had to fight for it, and receive preferential treatment.
And now Jaro wants what’s his – or at least his agent does; for the purposes of irrational fandom, the two are indistinguishable.
Predictably, the reactions on talk radio and the Internet – and oh, has there been reaction – have ranged from the merely hysterical to the deranged.
Price is still the primary whipping boy, but there are more than a few people who think Halak’s agent is well out of order, and we daresay it’s starting to trend poorly for old Jaro.
Nice work, Al!
Maybe the idea is to force Gainey’s hand and perhaps engineer a trade (we hear Carolina’s nice this time of year), but it seems a weird way of going about it.
