bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1996) — Winter 1996 // Hiver 1996, p. 2
“It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. It is war minus the shooting”
George Orwell — not on Diplomacy, but Sport
From 1985 to 1989, my wife and I lived on a sailboat, my only contact with world news being snippets passed on by other sailors, the BBC World Service and the local newspapers of such cosmopolitan centres a Atuona (Marquesas Islands) and St. Helena. News from Canada was remarkably sparse (sobering in its paucity, in fact). The crew of a Victoria-based vessel told us that Bill van der Zalm (remember him?) had been elected Premier of B.C. – an item we discounted as too fantastic to be true. Of Meech Lake we heard nary a word — indeed, when I sat my FS exam barely two weeks home from the sea, I imagined that the various questions on this topic must be to do with some environmental disaster, perhaps in the High Arctic.
But there was one Canadian-related news item that made it not only to the World Service and the Fiji times, but to fishermen on the Skeleton Coast of South Africa, to village schoolchildren in Mauritius, and to what seemed like every mocking boat boy in the Caribbean; I am referring of course to the sorry tale of the Canadian athlete who turned bad, Ben Johnson.
As Foreign Service Officers, we do our best to promote our country abroad — its values, its achievements, its culture. How frustrating we find it when a Ben Johnson comes along and, for a period of several months and for most of the TV-watching world, becomes Canada.
But there’s a lesson to be learned from this. Sport is perhaps the most undervalued weapon in our arsenal of cultural diplomacy. The amount of money our Government devotes to it is infinitesimally small but it is arguable that Donovan Bailey and the other three members of Canada’s 4 × 100 relay team did more for Canada’s image and renown worldwide in 1996 than any other four Canadians. As diplomats, we should not be in the business of sponsoring Donovan Bailey directly, but we emphatically should be doing more of what the mission staff in Atlanta did so ably this past summer and which they describe in the colourful article beginning on page 11 — pulling out all the stops at high profile sports events and making the most of the superlative ambassadors we have in our top sportsmen and women. The other items in this issue — an archival piece that takes us back to the Montreal Olympics and a book review of “Sport and Canadian Diplomacy” are further reminders, if such were needed, that sport is diplomacy by other means, and as such should not be underestimated as a mere diversion.
And Now for Something Completely Different. Thanks in part to the many supporters and past contributors of bout who wrote in to the PAFSO Executive, the magazine has not been cut as sharply as we had initially feared; its 1997 budget will remain at 90% of the 1996 figure. That 10% will not be especially easy to find, but in recent issues we have (through exceptionally careful proof-reading and editing) been able to reduce substantially, for example, the budget item known as AAs (Authors Alterations) — changes needed in the final stages of proof checking.
Now, with this hurdle past us, the fundamental challenge to bout is again the perennial one. Our stocks are better than they have been for several years, but — in the end — we can never receive enough articles, especially in French. “bout is staid, bout presents an overly-rosy view of the Foreign Service”: that’s what the “e-whine” says, at least the parts of this always interesting and occasionally subversive FS communications network to which I’ve been privy. But we’re not covering up anything; we truly do publish what we get, with some small allowance for the stylistic whims of the editorial board, who are typically sparing with their blue pencils. e-whiners, where are you? Let’s hear from you! If it’s literate, relevant and non-libellous, we’ll publish. More succinctly, put up or shut up….
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1996) — Winter 1996 // Hiver 1996, p. 2. Read the rest of this issue →
