A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Dangerous CBC Reds Are Under our American Beds

 

Poor Canada. It is North America’s Poor Edith. Canada, particularly through its public broadcaster the CBC, has, over the years, produced some excellent and stimulating television shows. Hardly anybody within and outside of Canada, however, watches them. When people do watch them in significant numbers it is often a cause for at least some Canadian national celebration. 

There are several Canadian television shows that come to mind when I think about fine Canadian television. There is the excellent and very Canadian Due South, a cop show that explores, with humour, wit, and sometimes even sarcasm, Canadian and American ideologies of exceptionalism. There is Cold Squad, a show about usually cold murder cases from the files of the Vancouver constabulary which the US ripped off in the form of Cold Case. There is DaVinci’s Inquest, a show which superbly explores the dark realities at the heart of policing and politics in Vancouver. There is Slings and Arrows, the best show, in my opinion, ever produced on the theatre and theatre life in which each season centres around two Shakespeare plays and, in the third series, a musical comedy instead of another Shakespeare play, and a show which some regard as the finest TV show ever made. There is Heartland, a family saga set on an Alberta ranch that recalls excellent US family fare like The Waltons though with a Canadian twist and in which its American distributer, particularly in the early seasons, blurs out Alberta licence plates for presumably moral reasons—the dangers of Hot Ash licence plates?—or national reasons—it doesn’t want us to know that it is Canadian? There is the wonderful absurdist comedy Twitch City that precedes and foreshadows similar British comedies like The League of Gentlemen and the work of Julia Davis. And there is Murdoch Mysteries, a show about the Toronto constabulary in the Victorian and Edwardian era that reminds one of great British cop shows on ITV. All of these shows I have enjoyed immensely and been given much to think about as a result of watching them.

Well presumably some Canadians were intrigued to learn that someone, namely American diplomats stationed in Canada, were watching CBC commissioned shows. They were watching The Border (2008-2010), a show that reminds me less of 24 (2001-2010, 2014), a connection some commentators have claimed to see, than to the BBC’s spy, crime, and action-adventure show Spooks (2002-2011) with which The Border has a lot in common including an indebtedness to John le Carre. This last, by the way,  means that The Border, like Spooks, has a lot of reality in it. They were watching the excellent Intelligence (2005-2007), a show about the messy realities of the cross border drug and crime “trade" between British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest and the American and Canadian intelligence and surveillance agents involved in tracking and trying to stop them, brought to us by the same person who created the superb DaVinci’s Inquest, a show that preceded and parallels much in the very realistic US TV show The Wire. They were watching H2O (2004), a drama about an American plan to steal Canadian water co-written by Paul Gross. And they were watching Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), a situation comedy with an occasional bite centring on Canadian Muslims living in a fictional town in the prairie province of Saskatchewan. 

How do we know American diplomats and American agents stationed in Canada were watching these shows? Well in 2010, during the Barack Obama presidency and the prime ministership of ex Reform and new Tory pro-American Stephen Harper, it came to light, thanks to the Canadian national newspapers the National Post and Globe and Mail, and thanks particularly to Wikileaks, which had gotten hold of thousands of US secret diplomatic “cables”, that some bureaucrats in the US diplomatic corps who had watched these three shows reported in cables dated 2008 that they thought they were “anti-American”. These diplomatic and perhaps not so diplomatic missives accused these four CBC shows of stereotyping Americans via emotion laden “anti-American” melodrama. They claimed that that while these shows, produced with Canadian governmental aid, hardly constituted a diplomatic crisis between the two now close neighbours, they did reveal that the CBC, Canadian pubic television whose remit, in particularly, was to make Canadian television, twisted current events in order to feed Canadians negative images of the United States (ah there is that old saw of Canadian identity being a product of Canada and Canadians marking themselves off against Americans). They asserted that these shows reflected a Canadian nationalism that counterpointed Americans engaged in all sorts of “nefarious" actions while Canadians tried to stop them and even sometimes opposed them, shows that all too often counterpointed American black hats to Canadian white hats. 

The controversy that resulted over these cables, some of if gosh this is what American tax dollars are paying for variety, when they were released by the Canadian national press and Wikileaks was such that the American ambassador in Ottawa was forced to confess that while he had never seen any of these shows he doubted that any of them were “anti-American” while a spokesman for the US State Department in Washington emphasised the close friendship between the two countries and claimed that no one knows us, the US, better than Canada, a comment that opens up the Pandora’s box of double edged swords. What he also neglected to note is that these “anti-American” not “anti-American" television shows were also shown in the US on retro channels, if often late at night and in the wee hours of morning. Can US TV be "anti-American" too? 

Speaking of being an anti-, The Border one of whose creators was Lindalee Tracey of Not a Love Story fame, also sometimes skewers the Russians, the Chinese, two nations regularly skewered on US TV, the British and the Canadians, the last two often for good reason. MI6, the British not so secret spy and sureveillance agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, in particular, come in for criticism, the latter quite regularly, making The Border, perhaps, at least for those Canadian politicians and nationalist Canadian historians—you know, the Canadian politicians and historians who think that only they are the only real Canadian patriots and who seek a more militant Canada with greater military, surveillance, and intelligence ties to the US—a prime candidate for the epithet “anti-Canadian”. Can Canadian TV be “anti-British” and “anti-Canadian” too?

Of course, what is never interrogated and never analysed empirically in this claim that something is “anti-American"is why and how something is “anti”  Now I will grant you that comments such as America sucks and Americans are dicks, that Israel sucks and Israelis (not Jews) are pricks, that Iceland sucks and Icelanders are sicks, and that evil Russkies suck and Russkies and dicks, pricks, and sicks (a common ideologically driven malady in the US which is used to great effect by the military, industrial, governmental, and university complex) are ill considered, if intellectually considered at all, lowest common denominator nonsense perhaps not even worthy of a seventh grade or first form mind. What I will not grant is that claims that the US is an imperial power, that it often throws its weight around, including in Canada way too often, that it regards itself as the chief policeman of the “civilised" world, that it has an increasing divide between the haves and have nots, and that it has had and continues to have racial problems, to name a few, is "anti-American". All of those critiques are valid empirical critiques of real America and, save in the minds of manipulating demagogues or polemicists and apologists and the socialised for conformity manipulated masses is not "anti-American". They are simply descriptions of reality. 

One can, of course, extend this point to other “antis". The differentiation between emotion grounded lowest common denominator schoolyard criticism versus empirical and analytical criticism can be applied to Israel as well given that Israel, empirically speaking, is a regional imperial power, thanks particularly to the US, with all that entails in terms of policing, surveillance, violence, and power, and where some Jews and many Muslims and Christians are second class citizens and experience segregation and violence. A lot of the same empirical criticism made of the US can also be made of Russia, including the observation that it is an imperial power, with the caveat that Russia is a second or third rate great power compared to the US (and certainly isn’t a threat to world domination and even if they were surely 007 or his American counterpart would be able to stop them single handedly as always) and so one’s empirical criticisms of that state’s power ambitions—all great powers including the US and Israel have power ambitions, of course—have to be adjusted accordingly in order to more accurately fit the Russian case. 

That so many of the socialised for conformity masses who are easily and readily manipulated by demagogues, by polemicists and apologists strategising for ideological and hence political advantage through the use of  emotional appeals, fall for the spurious rhetoric and discourse that even empirical and empirically verifiable criticisms of the US and Israel and Russia are the same as lowest common denominator “antiism" tells you a lot about the life of the mass mind in the modern and postmodern world and about how cultural and ideological power works in the modern and postmodern world. And who says that human life is not inherently absurd?

Read the cables here…https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/canada-08OTTAWA136