On August 8, 2012
(I) The Good: Excellence in Advertising — A Celebration of Canada in 96 Seconds
We may only be two-thirds of the way through 2012, but the race is run as far as assessing the year’s best television commercials is concerned. And the gold medal goes to a wonderful celebration of Canada in 96 seconds created by the RONA hardware, home renovation, and gardening store chain to air during the current Summer Olympic Games in London. The commercial is as much a paean to Canada as it is an ad for a retail chain. It takes the form of a coast to coast relay race, while ingeniously referencing a host of different summer Olympic sports (watch for fencing against a grizzly bear), and it is a gorgeous road-trip between two of Canada’s three oceans. The music, a selection from Ennio Morricone’s score to Sergio Leone’s 1966 motion picture “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” is note-perfect. In the film, the musical selection is used when Eli Wallach, as Tuco, the film’s eponymous “Ugly,” runs through a sprawling cemetery searching hundreds of gravestones for the one that conceals buried gold. The expression on his transfixed face is a mixture of determination, exhilaration, and anticipation. He is close, painfully close, to realizing his dream of gold. And Morricone’s name for the selection is “Ecstasy of Gold.” If that’s not a sly allusion to the athletic quest for gold at the Olympic Games, then it’s a record-breaking coincidence! (Observant film trivia-buffs may notice another point of convergence: A solitary dog barks at about the same point in the film and in the commercial.) The tone of the commercial is at once exciting, inspiring, and playfully funny. It cries out to be seen on cinema screens, and, watching it, you’ll see why it’s no wonder people say that North America is God’s Country! With only minor tweaking, this smart, cinematic, superlative commercial could be (and should be) reissued as an irresistible promotional piece for Canada for broadcast abroad. As it is, it is Artsforum’s pick as the Best Television Commercial of the Year! For those who have not seen it, enjoy:
http://youtu.be/xvEQtdtDuQk
Produced by Visant Le Guennec and directed by Ivan Grbovic, the commercial is the work of a Montreal-based advertising firm called “les enfants.” They aim to be “a place where artists once again dream without limits, without cynicism, and with all the innocence and wonder of our most cherished childhood dreams.” They have accomplished all that and more — bringing artistry and heart to the medium of television commercials. Bravo!
Incidentally, RONA is one of the few corporations based here that is still Canadian-owned. Ironically, given the celebration of Canada embodied in their commercial, the talk is that RONA may soon be bought out by a foreign concern.
(II) The Bad: Selling Out Canada’s National Interest to the Highest Bidder
It was announced recently that a state-owned company from China (the China National Offshore Oil Corporation) wants to buy a Canadian energy company (Nexen Inc.) for $15 billion. What defies human understanding is that governments in Canada even need to consider whether or not to permit such a flagrant threat to our national interest. It’s a sad truth that large swathes of the Canadian economy are already owned by foreign interests. No self-respecting sovereign state should countenance the high degree of foreign ownership that has been the norm in Canada for many, many years. But the situation goes from very bad to egregiously intolerable if we start to allow foreign governments to purchase portions of the Canadian economy. As a general proposition, foreign states should not be permitted to invest in this country, either openly or through the indirect expedient of proxies that they control. That prohibition should be iron-clad in sensitive areas like energy, high technology, aerospace, transportation, communications, agriculture, water, resources, armaments, and cultural industries. Furthermore, foreign investment of a non-state sort in those broad areas — as vitally sensitive as they are to Canada’s national interest — should be restricted to minority shares, with a view to keeping effective control of companies in those areas of economic activity in the hands of Canadians. But there is an added layer of madness to the specter of Chinese state-controlled companies increasing their control over Canadian oil, natural gas, and other resource production. That aggravating factor is the nature of the state in question: China is a one-party dictatorship, a totalitarian regime which is utterly hostile to our way of life — assuming, that is, that we really care about the liberty, inalienable human rights, rule of law, and democracy which we profess to hold so dear. Should an ugly dictatorship be allowed in invest anywhere in the Canadian economy, let alone in the vital area of energy and resources? Not if Canadians care one whit about our national security and national sovereignty! If the federal and provincial governments in Canada can not see that blindingly obvious truth, then we urgently need new and better governments.
(III) The Ugly: Crushing Free Speech and Creative Dissent in Putin’s Russia
Three young women (all aged 20-something) are currently on trial in Moscow for daring to stage a creative protest against Russia’s autocrat, Vladimir Putin. The women (Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich) are members of a girl-band called “Pussy Riot.” In March 2012, they entered Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral, when the church was not in use, to stage and film a brief mock-religious song in the form of a “punk prayer,” asking to be spared more years of Putin’s autocratic rule. Putin, it should be remembered, subverted constitutional term limits by arranging a job-swap with his trusted supporter Dmitry Medvedev. After ruling Russia from 2000 to 2008, Putin installed Medvedev as nominal President while he himself waited in the wings as Prime Minister until he could resume the presidency in Spring 2012, after an election of dubious legitimacy. The young musicians broke a second taboo when they implied collusion between the Kremlin and the Orthodox church. The defendants in this political show-trial face serious criminal charges, which carry a maximum sentence of seven years imprisonment. Apparently, Putin has urged his kangaroo-court to show ‘leniency,’ so the prosecution is seeking a sentence of ‘only’ three years. If there were in fact any “culpable” element to the Pussy Riot protest, it amounts to no more than non-criminal “nuisance,” for which even an overly stern society would seek to impose no more than a probationary slap on the wrist. But, the fact is that all these women did was to exercise free speech and freedom of expression in a country where those basic rights are scarcely more than notional. To criticize Putin and to impugn the reportedly cozy relationship between secular and church power in Russia is to run dangerously afoul of the authoritarian powers that have Russia in their relentless grip. The outrageous, unjust criminal prosecution mustered against three brave women who dared to protest the undemocratic state of things in Russia is a political show-trial. But what it shows to the world is the criminal injustice of the Russian state itself.
Copyright © August 2012 by John Arkelian.
The author is an international law and international relations analyst and a former diplomat.
Editor’s Note: On Friday, August 17, 2012, the three “Pussy Riot” protestors were each sentenced to two years imprisonment for “committing hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” It seems Putin & Company didn’t find the dissidents’ mock-prayer pleasing to their tin-ears. If this doesn’t make Putin and his lawless regime a laughing-stock — and a pariah — we don’t know what will. It’s a travesty, and its consequence should be a suspension of Putin’s invitation to attend G-8 summits, as he is clearly unfit for civilized company. But then, events in Chechnya, and in Georgia, and the thinning ranks of independent journalists in Russia already made that clear a long time ago.
