The Border

I got a kick out of CBC's The Border tonight. I hemmed and hawed about tuning in, because I knew what I would see. But I did it anyway, just for a laugh.

For those not living in Canada, the CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It is given federal tax dollars to stay afloat, but that doesn't mean that it is a reflection of Canada as a whole. For those not interested in bad TV shows, anti-Americanism, crummy comedy specials, poor television journalism, and environmental propaganda compliments of David Suzuki, then you're out of luck. But if any of those criteria sound like your idea of a good time, then channel 6 is right up your alley.

The CBC is the mouthpiece for the Canadian Left, and The Border is its next installment. I flicked back and forth to it between commercials during the LSU/Ohio State game. I knew what I would find there, and the CBC obliged me.

The Border is a show about a special Canadian spy service. They're trying to locate terrorists, but alas, there aren't any. During tonight's show, every Muslim male accused of being a terrorist turned out to be Mr. Nice Guy. One of the Mr. Nice Guys was tortured for months in a Middle Eastern prison, to which one of the Canadian characters says, "I smell the Americans in this."

In another scene, when an angry Canadian official asks one of the Canadian super spies, "Are you trying to bring down your country?" the super spy responds, "No, just CSIS." That's the Canadian spy agency, which the super spy thinks is inept and racist.

Inept, I agree with. There's ample evidence of that. Racist? I'm not so sure. Besides, which race is he referring to? I didn't know that you had to be any particular race to follow Christianity, Judaism, Islam, so forth.

The show mentions the word "torture" upwards of a dozen times, and only in the context of Western spies torturing Muslim people, sometimes at home, sometimes overseas. Indeed, if an alien were to come down from Mars and watch the program, he could be forgiven for thinking that Canada and the US are made up of racist, violent hatemongers, while everyone in a hijab ("The hijab makes some women feel protected," a whitebread super spy broad says) or of the Muslim faith is an innocent victim of Canadian aggression.

Which is, of course, hogwash. Let's get the "of courses" out of the way as I say, "Of course, not all Muslims are bad people," but let's be frank: many Muslim people around the world are blowing things up these days. For the CBC to produce a program that ignores this fact is simply silly.

Still, it's nothing new for the CBC. Their version of Canada's number one enemy has been, and always will be, the United States. Nevermind that several Muslim men were caught plotting to behead the Canadian Prime Minister a little over a year ago. The CBC gets around that small problem by keeping their focus on "the border," i.e. the United States. After all, why bother bringing up the men that were plotting to kill the Prime Minister? They were born and raised in Canada, so the only border they had to worry about was the Ottawa city limits.