Monday, December 12, 2011

Scott knows from piss off

This was going to be a comment on another post, then I realized it was a rant. :)

After Sochi, whatever the result, Scott and Tessa are going to be like grifters who hit town, worked everybody over, squeezed people dry, charmed birds out of the trees, then vanished without a trace. They won't apologize, explain or talk about why they exploited fans, played them for suckers, jerked their chains, pushed their buttons, and made the rounds of television shows performing to a script that prompted the interviewer to bring up topics that set up Scott and Tessa to proactively tell another lie. Why? Because, by then, they will have already gotten what they needed out of people and they won't be on figure skating's competitive circuit anymore, dealing with those fans and that public.

Who are their role models? Well, look at those who have been holding the Skate Canada CEO and various Director positions. Those officials are doing the same thing Scott and Tessa are doing vis a vis the public, and - just like with Scott and Tessa - after Sochi, someone else will be holding the bag.

Scott and Tessa appear to have taken a limited rationale for a limited amount of fibbing and used it as a blanket excuse to lie about everything and anything every time they open their mouths.

This is part and parcel of the attitude inside Skate Canada too. It's not uncommon, in a niche public enterprise, for those within it to hate fans. It's a whole lot more common than we'd like to think. The more hands-on TPTB and "talent" (skaters, performers, etc.) have to be with the actual paying public, the more they hate fans as a category. Nice one-on-one, but overall - real disdain. If we're fair and don't over-rationalize, we can kind of see how and why they end up feeling that way.

However, nobody puts a gun to their heads and forces them into the business, so if you're in the business, you have to get over it, suck it up, be professional, and MOST OF ALL, do the job in good faith. 

I think Wilkes and MacDonald, and likely the others - hate fans. But do the job in good faith? They don't. They barely pretend.

What is their cause? Is it figure skating? No.

They're not out for figure skating; they're out for themselves. Debbi comes aboard and one perk of her "job" package appears to have been getting her own personal showcase, her own network to get her face on camera at every opportunity. This is how Skatebuzz launched. Debbi is allowed to actually find pretexts to get her face on camera (some of those numbing interviews with former skaters). Skatebuzz is set up to showcase Debbi. That's how it's been, and seems its real purpose, even if Debbi does lie low from time to time. She always gets her face back out in front during the highest profile Canadian events - times when you'd think she'd be far too busy doing that Business Development job of hers.

It's a terrible web site and isn't offering much to the fans. It's offered a lot of Debbi.

Then there's Barb MacDonald, who puts out a newsletter and tweets, rips off someone else's style, and who had no idea how to promote HPC until she saw how the USFSA was doing Champs Camp.

Why not? Didn't she give that any thought? Or was she too busy creating the impression that HPC was some type of crisis-driven news format requiring scrums that she, Barb, needed to oversee?

Media-wise, HPC was a Barb showcase - definitely not a skater showcase, and did little for fans. Then she takes to twitter to promote herself, piggybacking off Virtue and Moir's gold - which she treats as a media crisis - and the death of Joanne's mom - which she treats as a media challenge she, Barb, met with flying colors. Considering the state of Skate Canada, I thought Barb's self-promotion initiative took big balls, in a not good way.

Hubris is not something Skate Canada's personnel are lacking. They're out for themselves. Self-interest is a big motivator. They're not spending their energy on the organization; they're using the organization for self-promotion. The organization is an invalid under their stewardship. They get more out of Skate Canada than the figure skaters get from Skate Canada. They've set it up like that.

Fans are even left holding the bag for poor box office and a dearth of sponsorship. What Patrick Chan said is what the officials at SC want people to believe. Why else would they make such a huge show of outrage over his comments getting out there? It wasn't that big a deal. They pumped it up. It was a set up. It was the message they wanted, and then they posture about oh the humanity, that's not how we feel or how Patrick feels!

Sure it is. It's all our fault. It's not the fault of the Skate Canada officials, too busy feathering their own nests to build a functional corporate infrastructure, too busy bullshitting the great unwashed, too busy putting cronies in important corporate positions to do real work. All that stuff is what they're entitled to do. They've earned the right to use that organization for self-aggrandizement. It's us who are falling down on the job. We should have been way more excited about figure skating after the Olympics. Figure skating should have sold itself.

I think what Scott and Tessa do is okay if they only did what they needed to do to protect their privacy. But they got ambitious. They also do it (lie) - proactively. To squeeze money out of the public. That takes balls - to appear before the public with a book of lies, declaring this is a unique opportunity to look at the reality behind the "barrier" - when the book is another barrier. They know it's going to come out down the line. They can't hide til they're both dead. So it seems to me they don't plan on being around when the truth is out. They'll be long gone.

It's not necessary to write a book at age 21 and 22. Who decided to market a book rooted in fundamental lies? What does that have to do with privacy? Nothing. It's entitlement. Well shit, we can make money off a book and promote Skate Canada, but we don't want to tell real stuff. Okay, we're entitled to lie. We'll sell that, and sell our sincerity too. Who would brag on their sincerity while selling bullshit?

People inside Skate Canada, including Scott and Tessa. People with toxic hubris.

Then there's the final piece, which is willful ignorance and entitlement in how they get their lies out there. They'll do it from instinct, and their instincts are immature and unprofessional. Their instincts tell them to jerk the public's chains because VM (and those around them, including those with Skate Canada) are ignorant and don't care to educate themselves about how to do this stuff better, because they're above all that and have other priorites - like self-promotion. There's only so many hours in the day, people.

And because the cause of figure skating is noble, and in the interests of promoting figure skating in Canada making absolute fools of people is just fine. That's the fig leaf, anyway.

They are able to do this because they've accurately judged their audience as being either too gullible to suspect their chains are being jerked, or too polite to call them out. The contrast between the absolutely unctuous Canadian fan ass kissing and the actual baiting, gotcha, staging and hoaxing of these same fans, all the while selling it with a persona of earnest young folks, is a real piss off.

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