What hockey has become: As we have seen increasingly across the globe, violence is simply a local manifestation of frustration and anger generated by contemporary capitalism.
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Vancouver's hockey riot: How to understand it
How do we understand the riots that exploded in Vancouver after the beloved Canucks lost the Stanley Cup Finals? How do we understand the burning cars, broken glass, and injuries that stand as an enduring coda of their game-seven defeat at the hands of the visiting Boston Bruins?
Having communicated with several dozen people in "the most livable city in the world" I think I have a modest perspective on why the Canucks 4-0 loss was followed by fire.
We are the riot: The truth about Vancouver's history of civil unrest
As the annual ritual of hockey playoff hype began in earnest earlier this month, the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot of 2011 cast a dark shadow across the usually sunny media cheerleading. However, it now looks as though the Canucks’ playoff run could be over as early as this Wednesday and nobody knows how the notoriously fickle Vancouver fans will react.
Canada's madwoman in the attic
Don Cherry is our madwoman in the attic. The attic is hockey. The Victorian novelists put the madwoman in the attic because she was still theirs, a family member, scary but undeniable. I used to think of violence as our Canadian secret, and we kept Don on to honestly own up to it.
Other people think of Canadians as polite and peacekeeping. But in two world wars, when no one else would rush into the meat grinder, they'd send the Canucks. I thought of that rage as a suppressed result of subservience acquired during centuries of truckling to imperial overlords: French, British and American. You build up a lot of anger biting your lip. On the home front, it emerged in hockey.
