I probably shouldn’t give you the
impression that I know anything about high school reunions, since I’ve never
been to one. Everything I’ve seen about them in movies and on TV portrays the
institution of the high school reunion as a giant game of “can you top this?”
in a gym festooned with crappy crepe paper streamers. I’m not particularly keen
on hanging around people I’ve been trying to avoid since I was sixteen, just to
hear them tall tales about themselves. The only possible interest for me would
be to compare the tales with the ones they told about themselves when we were in high school.
There’s one character at
the reunion in this episode who does nothing but tell tall tales, and wouldn’t
you know that one of his most blatantly obvious exercises in falsifying memory
led to other people hearing what they wanted to hear to give an ego boost to their
own worldview. Yep, high school all over again, folks.
Here’s the background
on it: in the early 1990s, Wal-Mart had just come to Canada. Their stores are
all over the country right now, and I’d be lying if I said I never shopped there.
What galled me about Wal-Mart at the time was the rah-rah employee culture they
tried (and subsequently failed) to impose on the minimum-wagers who were reduced
to seeking a paycheque from them. Uniforms are a necessary evil in retail—although
this doesn’t explain the countless times I’ve been asked by a fellow customer
in one store or another “do you work here?”, even when I’ve been wearing a shirt
that couldn’t have been a more obviously different colour from the ones that the store
employees wore if I’d just finished dipping it in a vat of dye with everybody watching me. As
I said, uniforms are all well and fine, but making cash register jockeys sing
fight songs and do cheers at the beginning of every soul-sucking shift starts
to veer towards the totalitarian. I’m also pretty sure it’s against the Geneva
Convention. I’ll lay a wager that enforced singing was at least mooted as a
possible addition to the list of charges at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.
People who are aware of
some of civilization’s less-than-finer moments from the Twentieth Century might
be able to guess where this is going. One of the scenes in this episode is an
anecdote by a character who has already been proven to be the proud owner of an
unreliable memory whose chief defining characteristic is hyperbole. He compared
working at a Wal-Mart-like department store to being in…
…wait for it…
…a World War II German
prisoner of war camp.
Everybody get that? A
prisoner of war camp. NOT a concentration camp. There’s a difference (see “Geneva
Convention”, above). Not only that, but it’s based (albeit ham-fistedly) on a
specific FICTIONAL German prisoner of war camp—the one in the movie Stalag 17. I’m going to digress for a
second to mention that the key German military personnel in this film were portrayed
by actors who had fled Nazi Germany. Not exactly members of the Hitler Fan
Club, any of them. As a matter of fact, one of the points that Stalag 17 made, and rather graphically,
was that collaborating with the Nazis—no matter what nationality you were—meant
that you deserved to have the crap beaten out of you. This is one of the
functions of art in a civilized society, folks. It forces us to look at things we
might prefer to remember never happened, in an effort to ensure that we
understand why they must never happen again.
I mention this so you
have some sense of why I hit the ceiling when we got that letter from Simon
Fraser University’s radio station. SFU was one of a handful of little outfits
across Canada that broadcast Vasco da
Gama during the time we were trying to turn the show into a cottage
industry. It never got past the status of a lean-to, but that’s beside the
point. Anyway, my memories of the emotions I felt are coming back very clearly
to me (I think “seething rage” is a fair, if understated, description), so now
is a prudent time to turn the floor over to others in the Vasco gang who remember the whole thing with considerably more
sang-froid than I do. Ian’s memory of the experience runs like this:
There was a joke in this episode where an idiot character compared
the department store they worked in to a POW camp. I believe Rob, the
character, called him an idiot. I seem to recall a line about the Germans
rounding up everybody with more skin pigment than Ronald MacDonald. Our friends
at Simon Fraser got upset about any reference to World War Two, any reference
(no matter how tangential ) to the Germans putting people in camps without
specifically referencing their persecution of homosexuals and gypsies, and the
worst crime of all was mentioning a corporate shill in the same sentence as any
of this stuff. That diminished the importance, etc., etc. The interesting thing
was that we did the math and SFU must have ran the episode at least twice
before they got upset and pulled it. This is either a testament to how tolerant
our audience was or it tells us that not even the people playing the tape were
paying attention.
You read that right,
folks. People who made it to all the way to university—and a university with
one of Canada’s best political science departments—didn’t know the difference
between a POW camp governed by a set of internationally-agreed-upon rules and places
like Auschwitz, which were governed by terror, hatred, racism, and every other
unpleasant aspect of human nature you can imagine. I don’t even want to
speculate on whether they could tell the difference between the prison at
Guantanamo Bay and the song “Guantanamera”, whether sung by Trini Lopez or not.
Okay, now I’ve got bad
music running through my head, so over to Kel, who remembers that “we actually
had a character who sounded like Hitler…I believe that triggered their upset”.
Well, the character was based on a
Nazi, but not quite so high-ranking or factual a one. As writer and performer
of this particular role, I can tell you that what you’ll hear was my
bargain-basement impression of Otto Preminger as the POW camp commandant in Stalag 17. I think Kel must be
remembering what I sounded like in the studio between takes while we were
recording…
Like how I just seamlessly slid into the
link there, folks? It’s a good thing that all this stupidity happened so long
ago, and that I’m over it. Otherwise, I’d use the rest of this space to say
some things to the Thought Police from Simon Fraser who sent us that letter…things
about how vital it is to get your facts straight before going off half-cocked—particularly
when you work in a university setting. However, I’m sure that the greater sense
of justice that governs the Universe has taken care of this. If they haven’t
learned to think first and speak only when they’re sure of what they’re talking
about, the sort of advancement that a post-secondary education is supposed to
provide will have been denied them, and they’ll be working in a Wal-Mart somewhere.
Of course, there is always the remotest
possibility that justice has been delayed, and that they’ve gone on to
post-graduate degrees and teaching positions. In that case, I’m sure that their
inability to leave preconceived notions and biases aside when examining facts
has made them the laughing stock of one student body after another as they’ve
bounced down the pedagogical ladder, watching their careers disintegrate into
hopelessness on their descent. In the faint chance that hasn’t happened, I’d
probably advise current university students not to be too quick to trust any
statement made by a professor who waxes nostalgic about their carefree college days
of the early 1990s, when they ran Simon Fraser’s radio station.
Fortunately, I’m above that sort of thing
now.
Or am
I…? I really can’t remember…
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