London 2012

Perhaps sounding something of a note of contrarianism, Anne Applebaum argues in The Washington Post that compared to the Beijing Olympic games, those in London "will be a lot less sinister, a lot less damaging and a lot more fun." (She forgets to mention: Buttloads more expensive to attend.)

Let the Games Begin

I love the Summer Olympics. My track and field background certainly plays a role in my devotion to the quadrennial games, as this is the one time every four years when the jumpers and throwers and runners take center stage. NBC is planning about a billion hours of coverage, and I plan to watch a million of those hours over the next fortnight or so.

One curiousity that even casual viewers will have is how NBC and its several component stations will address the China question. Will NBC remain largely mum, making the fatuous (and demonstrably false) claim that politics have no place in the Olympics? Will any athletes use the medal stand, starting blocks, or any other platform to speak out against China's human rights abuses? Will China shoot itself in the foot by proving its critics' point?

And then there is the much-discussed issue of air quality. Everything you have heard is true. The air is nasty in China. When I was in Beijing a couple of years ago the smog was ubiquitous. On my last day, however, a mucous-thick yellow haze draped the city so that on the way to the airport early in the morning visibility was near impossible. Barring great luck, expect this environmental worry to be a legitimate question, especially when outdoor endurance events are in play.

My guess is that the main theme we'll see the most over the next couple of weeks will involve that precarious line between cultural exploration and cultural streotype. There will be myriad stories and images exploiting the differences between China and the West that will inevitably hint at the idea of ther inscrutable Chinese. And this is understandable -- China is very different from what most of us know. But how this is handled will be telling. There will be very real transportation and language issues for athlete and spectator alike. And China is fascinating. But this sort of endeavor is fraught with landmines. The line between caricature and picture is finer than most think.

Here are a few links that caught my eye this morning: Bob Ryan's column in The Boston Globe is, as should be expected, fine. The New York Times has a blog, Rings, covering all things Olympics (and here is an interesting interview on odd Olympic events with NYT sports magazine Play's John Tayman). The Washington Post scours its archives and samples excerpts from more than a century of opinions on the Olympics. The Council on Foreign Relations spotlights how the Games are part of a larger plan to augment China's peculiar brand of authoritarian capitalism. Here is an article from South Africa's Mail & Guardian discussing the "spectacle and controversy" that will be these games.

Enjoy the Games, USA! USA! Etc.

Two Reviews

Two pieces in the newest Times Literary Supplement caught my eye. Mark Mazower, whose book Dark Continent is one of my favorites on modern European history, reviews Bernard Wasserstein's Barbarism And Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time, and John Keay has an essay on three books on China's cities, especially Beijing.

To Go or Not To Go: The Olympic Dilemma

There are no easy solutions to the dilemma of what to do about the Olympics in Beijing. The solution, of course, would be not to award the Olympics to totalitarian states in the first place, but that toothpaste has long since been squeezed and is not going back in the tube. And ending the Olympics hardly seems like a likely or even viable possibility. None of the options that remain are ideal.

Those who argue that the Olympics is no place for politics have no conception that the Olympics have always been politicized if not political. Nearly every Olympics since at least 1936 has been fraught with politics, whether overt or covert. Wishing something does not make it so, and this includes the dream of an Olympics free of the dirty realities of politics. And the irony, of course, is that those who most would screech about not attending the Olympics are those who would also screech about meeting face to face or otherwise engaging with dictators or dictatorships.

I am torn. We don't want to reward China's noxious human rights record, and there is no doubting that any country that attends the Beijing games will be rewarding China in publicity, in tourism, and in legitimacy. One can argue that the Olympics are not the place to make this stand, and I respect that, but no one can seriously pretend that China does not benefit in myriad ways from hosting these games. The country will put its best face forward, and most observers will not know the difference because they will be steered clear of the hutongs, local dissent will have long since been crushed and most anything that does not re-enforce the image China wants to portray will be whitewashed and censored, and once the games actually commence, international protest will resemble an echo chamber. On the home front, any debate about China will mostly be about scoring points and using the issue as a political cudgel rather than constructing an ideal policy.

Perhaps it is the athlete in me that realizes too that while they are a tiny constituency, the athletes for whom Beijing represents the culmination of a dream deserve consideration. For better or for worse, the Olympics are the apex of global athletic competition for the majority (or at least a huge plurality) of athletes in the majority of sports. I hate the idea of taking away one of these opportunities from them that comes only every four years. Compared to the geopolitical questions involved this may be small beer, silly even, but once a jock, always a jock.

One hope I have is that the media will not sanitize the context in which the games will be played and thus will make the best of the situation. the problem with this is that the majority of media members sent to Beijing will be sportswriters whose mandate is not politics, and whose views most of us do not, in the majority of cases, care about. Jay Mariotti, as just one example among many, is a dullard when it comes to his bailiwick of sports. Do you really want his take on global politics? Nonetheless, if NBC and the news networks keep their eye on what China is and what it is not, which is to say, if they are willing to peel away the veneer that China will skillfully present, perhaps daylight really will prove to be the best disinfectant.