That Olympic Feeling
As the world awaits tomorrow’s opening ceremony, which is sure to include a gazillion sequined schoolgirls mechanically executing painful contortions in unison, I wonder where the true value lies in these mega spectacles. Thanks to the Olympics, people’s lives have been irrevocably upturned, as whole neighbors in Beijing were demolished to make way for Starbucks and Nike; undesirables swept off the streets to be either shipped away, thrown in prison, or euthanized; and potential dissenters systematically detained or imprisoned. All this damage before the Games begin, to save Chinese “face”.
In my life I have never been able to understand the collective “we” that people employ when referring to their favorite sports teams. The willed delivery of self that defines mass spectatorship has always tasted like cheap wine to me, and one has only to look its most notable effects (the murderous passion of hooliganism, for example) to understand what’s really at stake:
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. -George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
Filed under: events, international affairs, war | 4 Comments
Tags: Olympics
he he – yeah they are also going to shoot down skies to prevent it from raining – but I am totally with you on that one… there was a danish runner who didn’t get to be on the olympic team but she had shaved off her hair to show her sympathy with Tibet – she would have worn a hat and taken it off during the parade…
I don’t get the olympics either – or sports for that matter =)
Good to know that I’m not the only one!
The ceremony? A revolting demonstration of how “One World, One Dream” means the destruction of all diversity for the sake of some governing power that be, forcing a single idea on everyone. A vomiting sequence of thousands of ants and bees moving at the compass of the negation of self.
That’s what that ceremony is all about: a demonstration of power: “we have 1500 million nameless people under our power, ready to move as we tell them to”. It makes me think of the “Borg” in the Star Trek movies: “All resistance is futile”.
You know what? This ceremony & in general these games makes me think about the 1978 Argentina Soccer World Cup. There were merely 200 meters between the largest stadium (River Plate, in the neighborhood of Núñez) and one of the biggest concentration and torture camps of the dictatorship (The “Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada”).
This ceremony is as revolting as the declaration of Muñoz, a radio and TV speaker, saying “We Argentines are Human and Righteous”. Because right there they were drowning and burning pregnant women and stealing their babies. And 500 meters away from the river, where they were throwing corpses (and living people too) into oblivion, with their feet in concrete to ensure their eternal silence.
For me this ceremony is like watching Argentina winning 6-0 against Peru in the semifinal. The same bad joke, and the people in the country defending themselves against the “bad foreign press”, who are “jealous” of how good their country is doing.
I want to vomit. This is a big circus and everyone is watching it. Geez. I’m not happy.
Adrian, I think you called it right – these things are about power: its display and propagation through sound and image. But despair not, for Resistance Is Fertile.