Senators in six: I love it when hockey writers end their in-depth analyses at the start of a playoff series by predicting which team will win. Senators in six, they said, before the Toronto-Ottawa matches. Leafs in six, or seven, many predicted yesterday before game one with Carolina. It has the terseness of telegrams, as if they’re just listing facts. They write as if there is a correct answer, the way there is on a math test.

This kind of thing is reassuring for our species. No one likes to feel that the important events in our lives — wars, children, Stanley Cups — are random and might have been entirely different. Take the First World War. It was comforting the way they used to teach it in school: The causes of the war really did cause the war, it couldn’t have gone any other way.

It was upsetting to read Barbara Tuchman’s book, The Guns of August, which argued it might as easily not have happened, had a few conversations or personalities drifted a few degrees from where they chanced to be.

Why do pundits bother predicting elections? They could wait and see. But there is a need to affirm things are under some control, even if you get it wrong.Of all the sports metaphors available, hockey most threatens that deep human desire to find a plan in the chaos.

Compared to hockey, horse races are rigidly predetermined. In hockey you have all those bodies, skittering around on skates, on ice, in a confined space, and worst of all, pursuing a fiendish puck, which is controlled (ha-ha) not by hands or even by feet, but by a curved stick. The notion of strategy in hockey is a joke. What do they talk about in those thirty second time-outs?

Some left-wing critics say they give us sports to distract us from politics. I incline more to the view that we turn to sports because the politics they give us (voting in elections etc.) is unlikely to satisfy us since no matter who we elect, little changes. But in both cases the existential uncertainty persists.

Few, if any, predicted the outcome of Leafs versus Senators this year, and fifth-teen years ago, no one even suspected the imminent demise of the Soviet Union or the ascent of Nelson Mandela. We proceed on little besides yearnings and guesswork. (Toronto in 6.5.)

Lock up your ethnics: I want to register how deeply miffed I am at a recent decision not to allow Toronto’s bars to stay open so patrons could watch the World Cup from Japan and South Korea. The reason ostensibly was that police feared disaster if the early morning rush hour had to mingle with end-of-game celebrators. Who knows, some Torontonians might actually have enjoyed the change in their dreary routine.

Beneath this issue lies Toronto’s traditional hypocrisy. I recently read a set of University of Toronto exams for a course on Canadian culture. Most students identified multiculturalism as our main trait. Toronto’s leaders love to yammer about diversity but they have never, as they say, walked the walk.

The city has yet to elect a mayor from any of the large, postwar ethnic communities: Italian, Greek, Portuguese, black, Chinese. The same goes for top administrators, with the exception of current Police Chief Julian Fantino, and for symbolic posts. Ontario, by contrast, has now had a black and a native lieutenant-governor. The social elites continue to have waspy names, and live in the same tory neighbourhoods.

As for culture, they keep the cafés open late for the film festival, so that stars and studio execs from the United States won’t have to break into their mini-bars. But the World Cup constituency, people who merely live here and keep the city functioning, got turned down. They should never even have had to ask.

The Clinton no-show: I wonder what it would have been like: Bill Clinton hosts a talk show. Maybe not so different from his previous gig. It was interesting to be reminded of that recent era in U.S. politics during which the main political debate was over some kissyface and fellatio in the office. It seemed to make sense because people said politics was over anyway and business would look after the things that mattered.

Another negative souvenir of the era came in a New York Times story about the return of deficit spending (“as far as the eye can see”) — and how no one down there is worried about it! Not right-wing politicians, not business itself. The same apoplectics who drew a line in the red ink.

I used to have lots of nefarious theories about the deficit mania of those years: a secret plot to dismantle public programs and redistribute wealth to the wealthy, etc. But you could just think of it as a sign of the times. There was no politics, there was only business, and the business of politics became clearing the accounts, paying off bills, staying out of debt.

Now that politics is back, so is public spending. Mostly on bombers, it’s true, and bombs, and border guards and missile shields; but don’t forget the gargantuan farm subsidies and even a bit for education. What was that Clinton era about anyway?

rick_salutin_small_24_1_1_1_1_0

Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.