I was chatting with a friend about U.S. politics earlier today, and we discussed what the word 'debate' has come to mean in both the U.S. and Canada. Both of us realized that the 'debates' are anything but a serious discussion of issues and solutions. In Canada, as Greg Weston so accurately stated, it's 'stupid what passes for debate in Canada'.
It occurred to my friend and me that in hockey, to win the Stanley Cup for a single season, we have to watch several rounds of 'best out of 7' matches equating to dozens of hours of hockey.
In politics, we get 2 hours of carefully scripted two-tier linguistic rhetoric from politicans who read from a 'playbook' at a podium to decide who gets to be leader of a nation for four years. All the important issues of our time, summed up in tidy 12 minute segments. Sounds wonderfully tv-dinnerish.
Could you imagine a stanley cup game played out like a leaders debate? Let's see, each team captain (party leader) would have a beautiful uniform and would skate towards the opposing team's net attempting to score a goal (electoral victory). There would be multiple pucks which would represent the issues of the day. Each team would try to get as many pucks into the nets. Body checks, high sticks, low sticks, hooks, and whatever other tactics could be employed would be allowed.
What would probably happen is that the players would be fighting each other all the time and the pucks would always remain untouched.
On second thought, that sounds just like what we already have.
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