I’d like to treat the national celebration of the return of the Winnipeg Jets — along with the simultaneous debate over fighting and violence — as a contemporary case of Depression Culture. Culture during the Great Depression has been widely studied. It included glitzy Hollywood musicals, gangster films, dance marathons, the explosion of radio as a mass medium and the proliferation of sports teams, leagues and superstars.

I know we’re not (yet) in an actual depression. But in a way neither was the 1930s. If you read through papers and magazines of that era, what’s largely missing is the Depression itself. You get celebrities, culture and lots of sports. U.S. president Herbert Hoover chose the term, Depression, because he thought it sounded calmer than crisis or panic. But he missed the emotional component: during a Depression, people really do get depressed. Besides, for many people today, things have been rough for a long time. Incomes have stagnated or fallen. It’s normal to turn your thoughts to happier places, like your team. It might be the last thing you think about before you fall asleep, and based on experience, I’d say it can help.

One catchphrase from Thirties culture was, “Hey kids, let’s make a show” — from the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies. Most shows that Canadians got then came from the U.S. But in hockey, we made our own shows. At the pit of the Depression, in 1931, Maple Leaf Gardens rose on Carlton St. in a mere 5½ months! It was a miracle like the pyramids and only cost $1.2 million ($22 million today). The Leafs opened to a packed house.

The new Jets, too, rose suddenly, not from long-smouldering ashes in Phoenix but from Atlanta, largely due to the economic downturn there. They and the Quebec Nordiques had both been snatched away during the Roaring 1990s, after free trade agreements also stripped Canada of many of its best manufacturing jobs. The jobs never returned but one of the teams now has, to great joy.

Is this escapism? To some extent. But escapism is underrated. The elegant dances of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their Thirties films weren’t escape, they were about grace under pressure — like the scene of two gamblers who’ve lost it all and are near suicide but decide, instead, to “face the music and dance.” We tend to overlook hockey’s beauty and grace in all the contention about violence. You never hear Don Cherry rant about elegance — though skating is how we seem to move in our dreams. But Jim Thomson, one of the enforcers called “pukes” by Cherry, says unembarrassedly, “The game is beautiful,” made so by “the puck and the motion.”

I find nothing more poignant than the fact that Wade Belak, another enforcer whose recent death is being treated as a suicide, was preparing to appear on Battle of the Blades — dancing on ice! As if he, too, sought to recover the grace under that pressure. Morris Dickstein, in his book on Thirties culture, Dancing in the Dark, says you can’t really unbundle the sadism and rage from the rest: the pain, pity, beauty.

Rage tends to go with economic despair: at oneself for failing or at others like the rich for profiteering at the same moment. In Thirties U.S. culture, the rage found expression through mythologized criminals like Bonnie and Clyde. Canadians have always expressed suppressed rage via our cultural form, hockey. It seems to me the vehemence and resonance in the current debate over violence, reflect the harsh times we’re passing through.

Even that debate is part of our culture. It is a cultural artifact only here. In the U.S. they tend to see it as a kind of joke, in a game that’s hard to take too seriously: it even has a little jail (the penalty box) on the playing surface. In Europe they simply don’t fight. But the debate, and the violence, are built into our cultural makeup. It’s been our good fortune that the most insightful voices so far in this debate have come from the very fighters and enforcers who know it well — either through their explicit words, or their tragic, heart-rending deeds.

This article was first published in the Toronto Star.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.