you know what's wrong with the 2010 olympics? not enough white people!

remember how this morning you read that story about the hen rescue? and the tiny chicken sweaters for the rescued hens? and then you had your morning cry?

well its time for your 5:00 pm cry, and this one is sponsored by racism!

one of my lovely friends posted this article on her facebook: "vancouver's 2010 winter olympics are peddling a politically correct fantasy" written by a crazy lady named rachel marsden.

ms. marsden has a serious concern, so serious that i won't even paraphrase it for her:
"who is fighting to ensure that the immigrants of european descent are adequately represented at next year’s vancouver 2010 winter olympic games?"

indeed! who?!

there is no need to even think about any of the other issues that have been brought up by the 2010 olympics--like land rights, environmental degradation, super high costs for cleaning up the city and upgrading infrastructure, the costs of building an olympic village, the shipping out of the homeless, the increase in demand for the sex trade which inevitably rises in every city the olympics has ever been held in, the blatant consumerism, or that it pits nations against nations in an already unstable world.

none of that is really important.

marsden is angry because the people "who can be credited for turning the city from a giant wilderness into the budding metropolis of today" are just not getting props they deserve.

after all, canada was "pretty third-worldish until until the english, french, and various other europeans arrived and started planning and building infrastructure and government, and teaching the natives discipline, order, and capitalism. canada or the USA without european immigrants would look somewhat like africa."

if europeans had never come and taught the natives discipline, order, and capitalism there wouldn't BE any olympics yo!

and africa, as a rule, is generalized to mean one place and peoples--more convenient that way.

in order to celebrate the racist and colonial history that has given us the olympics(as well as the land we'll be holding the olympics on) we need to stop pretending that the peoples who lived here first were anything more than crazy savages who rolled around in their own filth.

marsden thinks that it's no "coincidence that the best countries in the world are either european or founded by europeans" because "european immigrants make things better" until they are "asked to leave, at which point everything usually descends back into chaos." and leave they do, without thanks of course.

i'm just going to assume that what she means when she says "european immigrants" is white folks.

so, she asks, what the hell are the vancouver olympics going to do to ensure the visibility of white folks' contributions to canada.

marsden is pissed because the logo for the games is just goddamned crazy: "some sort of native Indian stone carving resembling a bloke with massive oedema of the legs."

she's actually a little off here, the logo is an inukshuk... it's not exactly a carving. or, it's not a carving at all. they're man made stone landmarks-piled rocks, to be exact.

but enough of those "facts".

while "natives" were "carving away at such lovely things" the europeans were all building the world up, you know--making things civilized and awesome. but nooooo, noone remembers that.

the mascots for the games are "legendary native indian animals that could only ever exist only after a good toke-up of canadian weed."

yes, because such cultural aboriginal traditions have been dreamt up only recently, by crazy high indians who have taken over the international olympic committee and have been plotting for decades!

she says that if she took the quiz "which mascot are you?" she would be none of them because she's not some "native indian hallucination with a japanese name who resembles and asian cartoon character", she's "descended from the people who built [this] country."

actually, the mascots probably aren't that "authentic", so probably marsden would end up getting one of them as the quiz result because they--like her-- are a result of the exact same culture: white, racist, colonial culture.

eff said it right when she called marsden canada's ann coulter

marsden's cutting analysis doesn't stop at race and racism though, watch this video where she displays her smarts against andrea horwath on feminism starting at about 1:05 :