Citius, Altius, Fortius, Xenophobius
I don’t know the point at which the Olympic Games began morphing from being a spirited quadrennial contest for the world’s best amateur athletes into an orgy of bribery, propagandizing, chemically-enhanced derring-do and crass professionalism.
But I suppose the 1936 Berlin Games is a good enough place as any, and an appropriate bookend to the 2008 Beijing Games, the most-controversial-in-advance Olympics since then.
While I was born well after the games in which the magnificent Jesse Owens shamed Hitler with nary a U.S. official, let alone the president, in attendance, the Olympics retained a certain goodliness through the 1960s and 1970s when my parents would plan vacations around them so we wouldn’t miss the feats of the next Dawn Fraser, Mark Spitz, Billy Mills, Olga Korbut or Nadia Comaneci. Yes, we cheered for athletes regardless of whether they were Yanks and that brought a world that I was to travel extensively a little closer to our modest ranch house.
The Cold War boycott games in 1980 and 1984, the growing prevalence of doping and the dropping of any pretense that the games are amateur events, have dimmed the Olympic flame for me.
The Beijing back-stories — political suppression in Tibet, Internet censorship and stifling smog — will dim it further still, I suppose, as will the presence of that great human rights champion, George W. Bush, the first U.S. president to ever attend an Olympics outside the USA and whose in-house torturers have torn a page from the very book his hosts used to extract false confessions from captured U.S. airmen during the Korean War.
Some pundits have gone so far as to say they won’t watch the Olympics as long as the broadcast media obeys the Beijing regime’s directive that they not cover any human-rights angles. So since when have the networks stood up for anything? And since when have the members of the corrupt International Olympic Committee stood up for anything other than walking across a hotel room to get an envelope filled with bribe money from the representative of a host-city wannabe?
So I’m not holding my breath. And will park my butt in front of the tube for a goodly number of hours beginning with the opening ceremonies on Friday. I will smile when the tiny teams from, say, Turkmenistan or São Tomé and Príncipe enter the stadium and feel a burst of pride when the U.S. team marches onto the oval while giving my dear president the finger.
But beyond what happens in Beijing’s magnificent new Olympic Stadium and other venues, the big story will be China as emerging superpower.
While China is still very much a work in progress and the many millions of people who have perished or suffered mightily under the Communist yoke since the revolution are not to be ignored, the transformation of what was a feudal society a mere 60 years ago into the world’s fourth-largest economy is one of the most extraordinary chapters in history even if Mao Zedong and the people running the show since his passing should creep anyone out.
Some 22,000 journalists will be reporting first hand on the fruits and failures of that transformation, including the enormous infrastructure improvements, environmental degradation and the balancing act between authoritarianism and the freedoms that the hybrid form of Chinese capitalism have wrought.
And if they look really closely beyond the xenophobic leadership, they will see 1.3 billion people who have gotten a taste of freedom, like it a whole lot and yearn for more.
For more on the Olympics, hurdle on over to Kiko’s House today.
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9 Responses to “Citius, Altius, Fortius, Xenophobius”
I will do my four year rant about the Olympics. What changed the Olympics the most is the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles where the organizers managed to not lose money because they extracted such a high price for television rights. When NBC started paying such a huge price for the Olympics, the entire basis of the games changed.
First, the Olympics are not for sports fans. With the networks paying so much money, they need to attract casual viewers. This means having brand name professional play and for emphasizing sports that casual not sports fan women like. Why do you think the networks show so much gymnastics and why they do so many up close and personal segments. It is to attract women. I stopped watching when the networks made it seem that every athletes has overcome adversity in order to make the games.
The nationalistic aspects also manage to attract the casual fans. How even thought about Olympic basketball until the USSR beat the USA in 1972?
And last, the synergy aspects driven by consultants is horrible. Every media outlet has sent people to China. They are churning out China stories to justify the expense of going.
Shaun said: “the presence of that great human rights champion, George W. Bush, the first U.S. president to ever attend an Olympics outside the USA.”
Shaun makes a very interesting point here. Some folks here might be surprised at the close ties between the GOP and the Beijing leadership.
A personal story: The morning after the 2004 election was particularly surreal for me . . . as one of my clients – an aide to one of China's princelings – called me in near hysterics that Kerry had not conceded. He was terrified that Kerry & the Democrats would win, and protectionist trade barriers would go up. So I spent that sunny November morning with him in a Starbucks calming his nerves . . . reassuring him of a Bush victory and the status quo. A very surreal morning, to be sure.
You can be sure that China is hoping for a McCain victory this fall.
The ruling class hate/fear/despise the Democrats, as they have always had the best relations with a GOP run America.
Odd bit of trivia: The ruling elite keeps NO money in Chinese banks, as they don't trust the Chinese banking system (too easy for rivals to access). Most of their money was kept in HK banks . . . a British-run HK obeying the rule of law was very useful to them. Since '97 it is moved further offshore.
Stories of China as a rival US superpower are vastly overblown. The Chinese elite has no interest in playing rival games with the US, and is generally content to accept US global hegemony. They need the US badly.
I would point out how China suppressed any internal criticism of Bush's invasion of Iraq. They hardly made a peep of protest. They like and admire Bush, after all.
It will be fascinating to see how much of the reality of modern China enters media coverage hahahahahahaha….
Let the record show that I substantially agree with Superdestroyer and Marlowecan and that has nothing to do with the envelopes filled with bribe money that they sent me.
That was a nice photo on top of Obama's speech, Shaun.
Just kidding.
I don’t support a boycott and I want the Beijing Olympics to be a success.
But the Games are a chance, while the world is watching, to press China for change.
Without change China will carry on executing more of its citizens than any other country in the world, it will continue censoring the media and the Internet and it will continue locking up and torturing those who try to stand up for their rights and the rights of others.
It isn’t political. To stand up for human rights is to stand up for the values enshrined in the Olympic Charter.
http://www.uncensor.com.au
Good article. I won't be watching the Olympics for many of the reasons you pointed out. As for the transformation of Chinese society, this event will definitely prove to be a huge stepping stone towards “advancement”. I've written a long, meandering piece about the Beijing games http://www.theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com
Frankly, I'm surprised the Chinese haven't attacked Taiwan during this distraction.
As for the Olympics themselves, I wrote off so much in sports long ago because of the commercialism (which preceded the commercialized names of pro sports stadia nowadays), and of course the Olympics has the same commercialist annoyance that corresponds to what some would want to with — no, not Barack Obama yet, but — Ronald Reagan's name, prepending it to something in every county in the USA. “Official Olympic,” “Ronald Reagan,” “Nokia,” “Qualcomm,” all tawdry and tacky.
Since Obama is going to get the White House, not Hillary Clinton –
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport can now be changed to
The_ Barack_Obama_ Global Transportation Center
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