Move Over, Moose and Squirrel

Because Boris and Natasha aren't done yet. And neither is the spy swap saga. It might just be getting longer--and more unnecessarily dramatic--than the Twilight saga.

It seems, now, that everybody is getting into the spy swap that recently occurred between the United States and Russia after ten folks were arrested in the US for spying for the Motherland. As any casual viewer of Cold War-era politics can tell you, the US and Russia don't have the most trusting of relationships, and frankly, these sleeper agents shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. During the late days of the Bush Administration, when the US worked to stiffarm compliance with its proposed missile shield, feelings ran hot, and US plans sparked tension--and dissent--from Sarah Palin's across-the-Bering-Strait neighbors.

But now, the spy swap is starting to obtain a sort of cult, "OMG Britney Spears shaved her head!" status. Recently, two of the Russians expelled from Moscow in the swap--Igor Sutyagin and Anna Chapman--have been sighted in a London hotel. Not just sighted, mind you; technically, they've been reported as "being undercover" in a hotel. And now there are questions of where they're going to go...can they get visas? Will Chapman, who has a British passport through a previous marriage, be permitted entry into the country?

This is, by now, a usual pH/Penguin in the Machine complaint...but (1) why are people surprised that there are still spies and undercover agents, (2) why are these the headline-grabbing current events instead of things that might be of more import to daily existence, and (3) while I feel this would make an interesting human interest story or essay...why don't we focus on the policies and the public personas of the governments these spies were representing? Why don't we ask why they were spying, for what they were searching? It's a question that requires introspection, as opposed to a sort of oohing and aahing that apparently comes much easier.

We have more important concerns. Like snapping photographs of spies in hotels. Just you wait, in the future photographs of a spy at a fountain will be like postage stamps: everywhere, yellowed, thumbed over, and seen by everyone.

A recent Least I Could Do strip provides, I think, the best possible response to this conundrum: Get the experts after all of these spies. I imagine they'd do just as well, and it wouldn't have the predictable inanities of a soap opera plot.

Patriotism, Hockey, and Canuckland Stereotypes?

Wow...this one's really delayed, apologies for that, but my mind's been a half dozen different places today. So now for something completely different!

Hockey. (Go Penguins. Antarctic fowl should win every Stanley Cup.)

Does it make me a bit of a traitor that I was hoping the Canadians would win the ice hockey finals? (C'mon, on the men's team, they had Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins! And how could I cheer against penguins?)

Or does it just make me unpatriotic? What does it mean to be patriotic?

These are questions intimately tied to the Olympics; basically, we want to prove we're better than everybody, smash the competition, and let out political tensions and anger in a global stadium that doesn't result in violent bloodshed. (Wait, and hockey is an Olympic sport?) So it's about national pride: Consider Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, who pushed for Russian Olympic officials to resign after Russia had a disappointing finish in the medals race. So there's Russia--we have to beat everybody--or there's the way that Kate Beaton pumped up Canada in one of her recent sketches--wowee, we actually managed to beat the Americans! (Note, you have to scroll down through a few about Queen Victoria and Top Gun, first.)

(Actually, look at Kate Beaton's most recent comic, as well: Canadian Stereotype Comics.)

I've always had a difficult time getting into the Olympics, precisely because I'm not very patriotic. America may be a great country to live in, but I find obeisance to a certain ideological mindset to be incredibly limiting, incredibly diminishing. Also, it's an incredibly polarizing force. Often, patriotism today doesn't lead to the extremes it does in Yukio Mishima's fantastic (yet gory and shudder-inducing) short story "Patriotism," in which a Japanese Lieutenant and his wife commit seppuku because of the lieutenant's belief in a particular cause.

But the attitude toward the Olympics this year in Canada caused a stir; Canadians--as Kate Beaton points out humourously--are often known for being a passive, inviting people, and yet their entire Olympic campaign was to win big on home soil. And this was contentious because the Canadian public doesn't much care for arrogance and also has had enough problems with ambitious athletes falling short of their intended goals (kayakers who claim to be able to win the gold and then finish next-to-last will remain nameless).

So the point here: I feel that patriotism is one of those little myths, and that nobody's better than anybody else. If one takes the Christian perspective of "God bless America," then...why just America? Why not everybody else in the world? Okay, that's a little tautological, but you get the point--the Olympics ought to be, first and foremost, good fun. But that's not going to prevent them from causing political problems and tensions--both home and abroad, the way that Medvedev's desire to sack officials and Canada's PR nightmare both indicate.

And final note on the Olympics: I myself am quite put out that the Jamaicans didn't have a qualifying bobsled team this year.

Cool runnings!