I’ll be posting something shortly on the politics surrounding the Olympic Torch relay and I thought about including all this in that post but it would end up being insanely long. For now, here on SP Sports, I think the issue at hand should be what are the Olympics about and how does that related to the potential political move of boycotting the Olympics.
A Game for the Ages?
Jeff and I have had lots of political conversations over the years and one of his favorite and deepest questions relates to the difference between our generation and the so-called Greatest Generation, which consisted of the WW2 years. Jeff usually starts by telling the true story of a guy who went to enlist for the army during WW2 but was rejected due to poor physical health. The guy then goes home and kills himself because, seemingly, he’s so distraught that he won’t be able to have the chance to fight for his country. Jeff would then compare that to our present day society in which, as I’ve harped on in various other articles, we avoid any semblance of hardship or instance of sacrifice. The question, then, is whether our generation has the capability to accomplish the same sort of great endeavors that past generations have, or are we too far gone?
Not Enlisting in a Moral Fight
When Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics the U.S. used it as an opportunity to stick it to Hitler by having Jesse Owens, who was black, destroy the blue eyed, blond haired competition. When the U.S.S.R. was hosting the Olympics after their incursion in Afghanistan, we boycotted. And all the times during the Cold War when we didn’t boycott them and they didn’t boycott us, we made damn sure to beat the Russians on the field/court/ice/etc.
With China, however, there is barely a thought of boycotting the Olympics. Some countries, including the U.S., are toying with the idea of skipping the opening ceremonies and act as if this is some great symbolic gesture. First of all, the opening ceremonies are the worst part of the Olympics so boycotting a bunch of weirdos doing modern dance and waving streamers doesn’t mean much. What it does mean, more importantly for our purposes, is that the best our generation can muster is the mere threat of a lazy, half-hearted protest. This would suggest, in relation to the generational question that Jeff is so fond of, that we’re incapable of making the sort of principled stand that previous generations so often made.
What’s more is we won’t even paint the Chinese Olympians as people who need to be beaten athletically like the Soviets so as to prove that an open and free society is better than a closed, oppressive one. Instead, the Olympics will be the same old boring crap it has been for as long as I can remember; full of back stories about hardships the athletes faced or how they’ve been training since they were 2 years old or how everyone is a winner and it’s all a celebration.
Well it isn’t that. Sports has a habit of representing political or social issues, particularly when it comes to the Olympics. So to just sweep all the political stuff under the rug is absurd. Sure there might be one story about how China is somewhat polluted or how occasionally people get arrested and are never heard from again. They may even show the Tiananmen Square footage, but all that will quickly be followed by a shining story about how far China has come since then and how the political oppression has all but vanished and how they are now looking into environmentalism.
The bottom line is China poses the biggest threat to, or at least question yet to be answered concerning, the U.S. and world security both economically and politically. That’s why it bothers me that with this Olympics we are barely putting up even the facade of trying to wrestle with how to handle that. I’ll deal with how I think we should handle China in the politics post. In the meantime, the sports question is why has this Olympics tried to divorce the ever present metaphor between sports and politics, why are we avoiding this issue?
The Olympic Blings
The answer is money. The original Olympics might have been purely about who was the strongest naked Greek guy, but today it’s all about money. As I sit here in South Africa I get to witness first hand all the money that is up for grabs when it comes to preparing for the 2010 World Cup. Getting the World Cup or Olympics is a fantastically lucrative business; just ask Mitt Romney who ascended to a God-like figure after his involvement with the Winter Olympics that Utah got to host. Powerful people and powerful businesses make piles of money off these things and that’s why countries won’t boycott them. The advertising has already been sold, the TV rights are all set up, the businesses and magnates who run them already have their proverbial hands in the cookie jar, and the world’s national leaders are too gutless to pull the plug on them. To me, that means that the real driving force of the Olympics isn’t to have the nations of the world come together to compete or to see pure sport on display, but rather it is just a free for all money making opportunity. A gold rush that is guaranteed to happen somewhere in the world every 2 years.
It shoud also be mentioned that the U.S. will never say anything bad about China because they give us cheap products for our stores. Like junkies, we’re hooked on their junk and can’t do anything that might anger our dealer who has the power to cut off our supply.
But it’s not just the fat cats and money grubbers who need to be looked at more closely. Without athletes, there’d be no Olympics, so what is an Olympic athlete these days? Increasingly, it seems to me that they are people who have forgone all other aspects of life in favor of sculpting their body into a machine-like instrument fit for only their chosen event. Now I certainly respect anyone that trains themselves to the point of becoming a physical specimen and know that this is a sweeping generalization, but it seems to me that when the Olympics is driven by money and devoid of politics, then the creation of such a physical specimen is seen in the light of radically specialized individualism. Society has all but dismantled the ideas of community and nationalism (the good kind) in favor of a ‘look out for number one’ mentality, which thereby changes the Olympics from a competition between nations to a competition between individuals and makes the athletes a reflection of individualism rather than their country.
Conclusion
Given all that I’ve discussed, I find it hard to imagine the modern Olympics as anything other than money driven grandstanding that encourages the personal instead of the national and avoids any political undertones because those things would make the Olympics substantive and substance might negatively impact profit. In other words, if you don’t say anything, you don’t offend anyone, which means everyone can watch, which entails greater profitability.
Since money what is now at the core of what the Olympics is about, which has robbed it of substance, this means that a boycott of the Olympics is impossible. Since money drives power, the powerful aren’t going to get in the way of the Olympic financial windfall. And since individualism reigns supreme in our society, we now shy away from the idea of a boycott because it would rob the athletes of an opportunity to compete.
So maybe the answer to Jeff’s question, ‘are we too far gone’ is answered in the affirmative when we look at the Olympics. Because it’s hard to imagine the Greatest Generation placing individualism over any larger moral issue, or allowing hype and commercialism to corrode substance. And yet for our generation it’s hard to imagine anything else.
I hope when you become a famous philosopher you continue to use me as an example. It’ll be like Plato and Socrates. Maybe Socrates wasn’t even a great philosopher, maybe he was just Plato’s drinking buddy who occasionally said something that could in some way be interpreted as profound. I digress
Asking whether or not the generation of WWII would boycott the 2008 Olympics raises many other interesting questions. I agree that money has become the number one reason for continuing the Olympics and also the number one reason that any country with something to gain would never boycott them. It would be very easy for Ghana to boycott the games, whereas the major networks and corporations in the US would never allow it. There is one reason though that I think the WWII generation, transplanted into today’s society, would not boycott… 24 hour cable news.
Many people that know me know that there are 2 things I always claim to have completely changed the culture in the US. Government subsidized corn production, and 24 hour cable news. Both of these have a hand in making the US culture not care about the reasons for boycotting the 2008 Olyimpics, but I’ll only discuss the latter.
During WWII access was something that the American people did not have. Access to world events, access to the true political environment, as well as access to goods were all things that were not a part of the American culture. Access to goods has come because of globalization, but access to political and world events has increased 1000%.
Taken at face value this seems like a great thing. The more information the better right? I would say not always. Because the networks are in the business of making money they are forced to compete for ratings. They are forced to report any possible thing they can to get viewers. By constantly reporting every issue, or non-issue, the have made the US society numb to what is actually going on in the world. For example, how many civilians died in Iraq yesterday?
When society hears about the same issues over and over, talked about by 100 different people all saying that the other guy is wrong, we become indifferent. During WWII there was one voice. Yes it came from 3 networks and a handful of papers, but it was the same voice. You either agreed or you didn’t. If the China Olympics were going on when there was one network news for 30 minutes every night, and editorials in a handful of papers it may be much easier to sway the public opinion.
Unfortunately there are no more ‘great philosophers’ so at best I can aspire to be either a contestant on Jeopardy or a know-it-all bar fly slightly less annoying than Cliff Clavin from Cheers (the episode where Cliff gets on Jeopardy is genuis). Either way I will continue to sight you.
But let me disagree with you point. You imply that we are bombared with information to the point of not caring. With Iraq I think your right, as with many other issues. But when it comes to China, no one talks about it. I mean the Democrats have had over 89 debates and the combined time discussing China is like 3 minutes. No one discusses it except Jack Cafferty on CNN who is now being sued for 3.1 billion dollars, that’s one dollar per person in China, for saying that China was the same bunch of goons and thugs they were 50 years ago. The only thing crazier than sueing for that much money is the fact that he’s being sued for saying something that is absolutely true.
Anyway, I think that no one talks about China at all, which is what bugs me. And the reason we avoid the subject is because we want to buy their crap and no politician has to balls to stand up and say, ‘you know what, if we don’t stop screwing around China is going to overtake us as a superpower. So wallmart is still going to exist, but they’ll be selling American made stuff which will cost a little more. But it will mean more American jobs.’
The bottom line is we have to ‘take one for the team’ in order to deal with China and no one will tell the American public that bc we’ve become so averse to sacrifice. Meanwhile, the WW2 generation lived on rations and sent teenage girls to work in factories. So I still think the WW2 people would’ve boycotted bc their politicians wouldn’t have been afraid to ask the public to ‘take one for the team’.
Yeah. I just reread that and it didn’t really come out the way I wanted it to. It’s not that people hear about China all the time, it’s that they hear about everything all the time. “The would has gone and gotten itself in one big damn hurry.” People think they are too busy to care about all the issues they hear about on a daily basis, so they just tune out everything.
A couple things: More important than us needing somewhere to produce the cheap plastic crap America craves, American businesses see the country of China as a net pool of over one billion customers. With the American dollar falling, the housing mess, and oil continuing its joyous climb into the stratosphere, Americans aren’t spending as much money as we have during the past 15 years or so. I’d also say there are more people who might think along the lines of ‘consumerism is not the greatest thing in the entire world’ than the three of us, and American businesses know this, too. In China, it’s only been the past decade or so that people there have had these so many economic choices, and they want to be seen as a powerhouse, and for some reason, that equates to wearing Gucci and carrying around Louis Vuitton bags.
Here would be my one beef with the greatest generation, and it’s not a big one, just wondering what ya’ll think. The only bad thing you might say that the greatest generation did was nurture the ideals of our parents generation: bigger is better, you can have your cake and eat it too, etc. etc. And it makes sense, because as has been mentioned, those young men and women gave up so much- lives, jobs, possessions, more than a few fuckin’ pounds, hell, access to sugar and shortening!- that when they had kids, and the engine of the American economy kept humming after its wartime adrenaline shot, why wouldn’t they have given their kids everything they wanted? What parent doesn’t want to give their kids everything they didn’t have? The disconnect is they didn’t teach the babyboomers that they were getting all those wonderful things because their parents earned them- or maybe the greatest generation did teach them that, and the babyboomers just didn’t take the lesson to heart. Regardless, too many babyboomers consider their vastly more expansive wealth in comparison to their parents a birth right rather than a blessing. Does this make any sense? I could just be babbling.
And if the babyboomers then had us, and passed on the same ideals to many of our generation? No wonder you have kids who don’t give a damn what’s happening in China, ‘I just swim real good and real fast, and maybe that’ll help people out here.’ They got to get theirs, and mega corporations swinging huge endorsements in your face is no joke. Hardship begets appreciation for what you’ve got, ease of living begets entitlement. Maybe? Maybe not? Who knows.
The media saturation is a curse and a blessing. What would happen if there was only one news source for the past presidency? What if journalists never developed the balls to break the NSA warrentless wiretapping or other huge stories? It’s scary enough that journalists went along for the ’smoking gun’ ride in 2003, but governments are going to try to influence media all the time (see NY Times article this past Sunday on Pentagon deploying former military officials to give ‘expert analysis of going ons in Iraq, even though many of them held positions on boards hunting for U.S. government contracts, no to mention were parroting CIA prepared factoids), even more so when there is no clear cut enemy like the Nazis. That said, 24 news networks nowadays would make Edward R. Murrow blush (Anna Nicole Smith dies and that’s all we hear about for weeks?! Seriously?!).
All this makes me think of the line in Fight Club, when Brad Pitt’s character proclaims that our generation has no great conflict, no great war: ours is a spiritual struggle. Put simply, it takes spirit and gumption to not buy shit from China (and economic savvy, ’cause that shit is everywhere), to dissect media spin from all the networks, and know that you’re potentially make your kids bad citizens by giving them what they want. Now let’s go destroy a public sculpture!