Dying for the Gold

I never had much sympathy with the guy who decided that Hurricane Wilma was just the ticket for kite surfing fun in Ft. Lauderdale a few years ago, or even the guy who went paddle boarding last week off Palm Beach during an annual shark migration, but as dangerous as the luge is at any time, Nodar Kumaritashvili, the 21-year-old luger from Georgia deserved better.

Kumaritashvili's practice runs showed he was not quite up to snuff. He didn't finish one practice run and his speeds were significantly lower than other athletes', but the safety of this very fast course has been questioned and critics may have been right. He was killed in a crash yesterday, the second one in practice for the Vancouver games. Of all the things not worth dying for, "going for the gold" and for ephemeral national glory have to be amongst the least valuable.

I don't know if it's too late to correct the design, but let's hope nothing else like this happens.

The view from Olympus

I've long thought that the Olympic games differ from other professional sports events mostly in that they exploit the athletes with a quasi-religious fervor, rather than paying them. The idea of "amateur" competition, as I see it, was a pretense used to keep working class people out of games meant for Edwardian gentlemen of leisure and inclination toward neo-classical, cthonic re-enactments. Of course today's contestants are scarcely that and hardly amateur, and they're there mostly to demonstrate the athletic prowess and by some atavistic extension the political status of their countries.

Despite the puzzling, faux-pagan Hellenic torch-running ceremonies, it's about politics and not about re-enacting ancient religious ceremonies of body worship and warrior training. So it's no surprise that Jonathan Alter writing in the current Newsweek would presume to use the opening ceremonies as a platform for chastising China. It's too bad for him however, that we're not sitting on Olympus but in the laughing stocks and pillories of the world.

Yes, China could do something about Darfur, but criticism should come from a source not so well associated with supporting monsters and tyrants for our own causes as we are; a source not preening over "shock and awe" terrorism, the slaughter and displacement of millions, the toppling of democracies and a source second only to China in number of incarcerated and executed citizens.

It's all too easy for someone like Alter to pretend that Tibet was a free and independent nation after the 13th century or that the quasi-Buddhist religion that stifled, enslaved and impoverished Tibet and kept it in a state of stupendous ignorance and isolation for centuries was benign, but a country with a history like ours can only succeed in looking arrogant and hypocritical in justifying torture of terrorists while condemning it abroad. Imagine our reaction to China's bellowing at us for occupying and suppressing Puerto Rico and Iraq; our interference in Central and South America, Asia and even Iran. Imagine the giggles at China's biggest client state preaching about its "Global Irresponsibility."

Maybe it's time we just shut up for once and let someone else use the pulpit. Maybe if we want to influence that country we should end the buying and outsourcing spree. Maybe if we want to continue blowing hard about morality we should try practicing it.

Let's medal and not meddle

"Can we really send our athletes to compete in a country that tortures its own citizens merely for expressing political thoughts? That has enabled the Darfur genocide by supplying weapons to Sudan?"

asks an editorial in The New Republic. (10/22/07) The country in question is of course, China, which soon will host the 2008 Olympic Games. It almost makes one nostalgic for a time when the US had enough moral standing to be able to ask that kind of question without risk of seismic damage caused by worldwide jaw dropping.

Yes, as the article points out, political protest is often treated brutally in China. China often supports brutal dictatorships. Those who blow whistles and expose or protest corruption or in one case, start a petition against the Beijing games, are treated brutally; sent to prisons where prisoners have to carry out humiliating tasks and are forced to endure uncomfortable positions. It's called "subverting State Power" and sadly, the US has any number of proponents for the same kind of thing. You can read about it every day in letters to editors, hear it expressed in barber shops and bars and hear it on Fox News. Our human rights are eroding along with the polar ice caps and our record of support for barbaric regimes is well known.

Of course it's worse in China, but "enhanced" interrogation, disappearances, denial of council, denial of Habeas Corpus, domestic surveillance and extended "detention" of people the government is suspicious of are now firmly identified with the US in the mind of the world. Valerie Plame wasn't chained to an iron cot for embarrassing the Bush administration, but official power was used to punish her for that embarrassment and it wasn't an isolated case.

The New Republic would have us use the Olympics for it's primary value; a way for nations to insult and humiliate each other while pretending to be resurrecting an ancient Greek body worship cult. They're advocating more than athletic victory however; their proposal is for our athletes deliberately to be insulting toward their host and overtly support the subversion of China's government.

"Chinese-language banners unfurled by athletes at the opening ceremonies that call for the government to permit free speech, t-shirts slipped on during medal ceremonies that carry messages of solidarity with Chinese dissidents--these gestures could reach tens of thousands of spectators and, through word of mouth, many more."

Right -- and allow the long litany of American offenses: the wars of aggression, the torture, the kidnappings, the destruction of a country that had not attacked us and slaughter of it's citizens to be broadcast throughout the world to a chorus of laughter. Let's allow our athletes to be booed, jeered and shunned. It doesn't matter that we can rationalize our having become the ogre we are because the world does not believe in us any longer even when we are right. Yes, the Olympic games have always been a theater of nationalism and propaganda, but this time perhaps it's better simply to treat it as an athletic event lest we have our noses rubbed in our own mess.