CBC is running a wonderful program during the summer season. It’s called Subcultures, and its hosted by one Hal Niedzviecki. Subcultures is a program that reveals more than it intends about Canada, the CBC and what this country is becoming.
In a richly varied country like Canada, the idea of subcultures is exciting. Canada is a place where so many millions have come from elsewhere, and made the adaptation to a larger society. It’s a place where what was previously habitual becomes exotic, and where what was exotic becomes the familiar, and this is true for those who have found themselves here recently, and those who have had generations of their families born and die here.
How do you represent the idea of a subculture? The dictionary defines it as “a cultural group within a larger culture, often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture”. The idea of variance, of conflict, goes against the dream of officially sanctioned Canadian Culture. Official cultural institution is where the CBC certainly seems to be. So seeing what our national broadcaster, charged with reflecting a varied nation, with all the contradictions that implies, would do with the idea of subcultures is revealing.
Today’s episode is about Larpers, a term I was not familiar with. Larpers for those similarly uninformed as I, is based on an acronym, larp. This term seems adaptable as verb – to larp – and transitively – to be larping. Perhaps things can be larpish, I don’t know. And to make this all clear, larp stands for ‘Live Action Role Playing’. Larpers act out, with mock swords and imagined characters, elaborate fantasies that take place in some mythic realm out of Dungeons and Dragons.
Now, I don’t think that a society with a significant immigrant population, and as a result a complex relationship between dominant culture and subcultures needs to expend all its energy on only representing aspects of the ethnic and nationalistic character. But I do wonder what awareness our official institutions have of how they may be seen by those who, having started to make a life here, are entitled to think of those institutions as their own. It’s not my business to do anyone’s worrying for them. I just think it’s interesting to imagine the problem.
How, for instance, might someone who has come from an area of the world where ethnic and racial discord – or even out and out war and ethnic cleansing – have dominated their lives, driven them from the places where their ancestors and their stories are buried… how would they receive a half hour program devoted to their fellow citizens’ fantasies of living in societies overrun by conflict and violence – in short, reproducing for entertainment and diversion the things that destroyed their lives? I don’t know, but I suspect that they might look for some context. What is it that would make that kind of activity attractive?
I don’t actually think that any great disservice is being done here. I used to know two men who had emigrated from Poland in the sixties, and for whom an orange was a rare treat back home. In their first week in the playground in their school in Thunder Bay, just after christmas, they were astonished at an orange fight that broke out, with dozens of oranges being thrown about in a kind of war, like the fantasy battles of the Larpers that Mr. Niedzviecki introduces us to. I think, but I don’t know, that to those two boys, the war of oranges was the clearest possible indication that they were living somewhere other than Poland, and that it was a place of plenty.
Perhaps that’s how someone from Guatemala, or Somalia, or Afghanistan or Iraq, or Rwanda, or South Africa, or Vietnam, or Serbia might understand the Larpers. I don’t know. But whatever larger lessons that my friends learned in Thunder Bay during an orange fight, they also remember running around, trying to gather up broken, precious oranges that their classmates saw as disposable, for them a thing coveted and seen perhaps once a year. And I do know that that was not a moment when they felt much other than complete alienation from the classmates that they could barely communicate with to ask why they were fighting with oranges, and not eating them.
Take another example. One of the Iraq war resisters living in Canada, and invited onto the CBC recently asserted that in Iraq, he had experienced his fellow soldiers severing the head of a dead Iraqi, and then the unit using it as a football, kicking it around in the dirt. In the Larpers episode, towards the end, one of Mr. Niedzviecki’s interviewees talks about the ‘human head’ – pretend, of course – that they kick around in one of the games that Larpers have devised to while away the hours that hang so heavy upon them.
Mr. Niedzviecki is neutral on this, or perhaps he’s simply conveying the listless attitude that seems to be his most distinctive quality. The CBC’s awareness of itself is such that it doesn’t make these comparisons. I do, but because I happen the have heard and remembered both pieces. But for the Iraqis in Canada whose families might include a family member treated so – or for any Canadian who comes from places and times where this and other atrocities far worse were realities – a comparative operation with another CBC interview isn’t really needed. The comparison is not between media reports, but between the relative level of seriousness with which two cultures, both of which they are part of, treat the same idea.
And seriousness is at the crux of this. It is no secret that CBC radio is pained by the notion of seriousness. Its legacy is either painfully phlegmatic (Morningside, Tapestry), relentlessly focussed on the least ironic of topics (Quirks and Quarks, The House), saccharine/maudlin(Stuart Maclean, Sheilagh Rogers), or resolutely middlebrow conservative (Ideas, The Sunday Edition). The exception is As It Happens, but even there, the issue that clearly has become core for the Corpse is the saleability of its programming to an under forty audience. And particularly the Young Ones is a questionmark of mammoth proportion.
The innovations of the CBC radio of late, which include the gratingly moronic Promo Girl, the joky/serious The Current, the Saturday cartoon-on-radio Go, and the strange raft of oddly inarticulate (and usually with whiny, nasal or mumbling non-radio friendly voices that somehow reflect that imprecision), proudly underinformed, resolutely post-Simpsons personalities that Mr Niedzviecki is part of add up to one thing only, and that’s the premise that radio-lite is the way. And the results are shows like Subcultures.
Unseriousness is also what makes Subcultures interesting, and perhaps valuable. The yawning gap between what a subculture has meant in this country, and what Subcultures, the show represents it as, tells us everything about a society that increasingly dreads the seriousness of life in the way a high school student who hasn’t studied dreads the morning as they decide to party the night before the exam. There was a time when CBC radio had something in it for a younger person of being in the room when the adults were talking, when they had forgotten that you were there. It wasn’t that everything was great, or perceptive or right. But it was a glimpse into the other ways of thinking, the ways not buffeted by the disorder of youth.
Subcultures – the show – is really a show about hobbies, and about people who have enough time and little enough ambition to pursue them. But it’s the charmingly stupid confidence with which it promotes juvenilia to the status of “beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture” that tells us most. Last week, it brought to our wondering ears those people who play ‘Second Life’ online, adopting personas of whatever sort, and drifting in a kind of narcotic haze of phosphors and mouseclicks as time ticks by in what is now, apparently ‘First Life’. The first (and only other) show was about people who explore storm drains under cities, and abandoned industrial sites, re-imagining the quotidian world occupied by security guards and janitors as quests into the unknown. Today it was people who devote their time to the extension of adolescent fantasies of knights and dragons and all things turgidly Tolkienesque.
So here is the place that we have all come to. It’s ironic, it’s light as a meringue, and its world is based on a geography that confuses the Roman Empire with Sim City, Middle East with Middle Earth, and whose understanding of history is the monolithic past, where all places and times are equivalent. To those who have just arrived, we say, welcome! This is what we would like your children to become.
And if you should think that what we have in mind is not for you, then perhaps institutions like the CBC are not for you either.
It’s more or less de rigeur for everyone on the CBC to say that everything is stories, we are story tellers, we love to tell stories to each other. From Stuart Maclean to Sook Yin to Eleanor Wachtel to Tom King to Hal Niedzviecki, they all say it.
Last month, I attended the rehearsal of a play being created by theatre types and members of Toronto’s Somali community, in the basement of a high rise in the ring-city west end of Toronto. A woman, one of Somalia’s great poets, now living here, narrated her poems and stories. They were about growing up as a child of nomads, of coming to the city, of seeing the end of rule of the colonists, of descent into chaos, of losing family to thirst and guns in the desert, of refugee camps in Europe and learning three european languages out of necessity before arriving here, where in her eighties she is learning english.
None of her stories were about hobbies, her own or those of others. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, according to our national broadcaster’s youth-afflicted braintrust, she wasn’t cutting it as a subculture. But I think she doesn’t listen to the CBC, so that’s alright.
