It’s become pretty clear that writing about Wayne Gretzky leads you down a path to indecipherablegibbering, so it is with some trepidation that I take up the pen here. I’m not totally kidding about this, either. We are living in a period of uncertain length in which it has become disreputable to remain wholly rational about politics — one of those occasional frenzies that beset the human race, like McCarthyism or Europe in August 1914, and which are inherently difficult to comprehend in retrospect, even by the participants.
Justice is the first thing to fly out the window in such circumstances — and bare justice would suggest that it is hard to specify anything that Gretzky has done wrong in living in the United States, like 1,000 other accomplished Canadians, or in having a friendship with Donald Trump that suddenly became suspicious because of things Trump has done and said. The bill of indictment against him is mostly negative, consisting of things he “refuses” to utter, along with a few imaginary patriotic offences, like making infinitesimal gestures of friendliness to fellow hockey professionals on the U.S. national team.
Gretzky’s crime is that he no longer lives among us, and he thus has no practical means at all of belly-feeling the public mood in Canada. He has grown old and physically distant, and spends much of his time warming his bones in Florida, as do quite a lot of the people who are baying for his blood. The complete sum of his offence, reckoned rationally, is that he is out of touch — and I don’t think you can improve on that metaphor even though it’s a cliché: he has just lost fingertip touch with his native land.
As an employee of an American hockey broadcaster, he surely never imagined having to navigate a high-temperature conflict between Canada and the U.S., two countries which aggressively boasted for most of Wayne’s life and mine of having an “undefended border” that made us exceptional among quarrelsome humans.
None of this is to say that Gretzky doesn’t owe Canada anything at all. (One of the features of these historical panics, these sudden mass departures from reason, is how quickly everyone becomes ultra-conservative about matters of theology or nationality or political allegiance.) I’m not personally capable of enforcing any such debt, as an Edmonton Oilers fan: Gretzky’s existence has been a special blessing to me, and it’s naturally impossible for me to go hunting for reasons for hostility toward him.
But he never asked to be an object of nationalistic (or civic) worship, which is what current events are really revealing. He’s a totem, and the harvest has gone haywire, and some folks are whetting their axes. His critics should admit this.
I keep thinking of the statement President Trump made last week, obviously at Gretzky’s behest, trying to urge Canadians to behave with less irrationality and cruelty toward the Great One. There’s a remark amid the blather that nobody has seized upon: “(Wayne) supports Canada the way it is,” Trump wrote, “as he should, even though it’s not nearly as good as it could be” as part of the American union. Nobody, to my knowledge, has pointed out the astonishing three words “AS HE SHOULD.” Trump’s attitude seems to be that it is perfectly proper for Canadians to resist his own verbal intrusions on Canadian nationhood: Gretzky’s a patriot for his country, and I’m a patriot for mine, and that’s the way the world ought to work.
National Post