Olympic Bowel Movement

Before there was a Wide World of Sports, or an ESPN or the internet, seeing a downhill ski race or a swimming competition or track and field events on television was a rare joy.  


Even today, seeing a high hurdles race is a novelty and fun, and in that sense, the Olympics, like other international sporting competitions constitutes a welcome dash of variety in an otherwise monotonous entertainment universe.


On the other hand, the monetization of the games, the relentless drive to make the games and the competition yield up big bucks has cheesed up  the games, at least for me. Where once amateurs swam, ran, rode, shot, leaped for the "pure" joy of competition, now all the athletes train year round and are paid to do their sports. It's not really the athletes making money doing what they do so well, it's the lame attempts to dumb down the experience by the sponsors and the directors of the show--they've got to throw in the jingoistic commentary about how the Americans are likely to do in this event, as if that's what we should really care about--will an American win?


Still, it's exciting to see anyone who is really good at anything do that thing, and I can watch the show to see the athletes perform and turn off the sound.


The whole idea of an Olympic "movement" is pretty absurd now.  It may have once been seen as a way to get past war and to a sportsmanlike, high character way of competing on an international stage without people shooting each other.


But all that got poisoned fairly quickly, as Hitler tried to turn the 1936 games into a demonstration the supremacy of the Aryan race. You may say it didn't turn out that way because of a man named Jesse Owens, but that's not the way Hitler spun it. Even Jimmy Carter used the games as a way of making a political statement, a principled statement, but he injected politics into the games.


And then there was the Munich massacre. 


In more recent years, the major point of the games seems to be to make money for someone--for the host country, for the sponsors. It's not all that much different from a Barnum and Bailey circus. And since Cesar, government leaders have known about the political value of bread and circus. Now the Olympics has become  a joint government/ private commerce escapade, with governments paying to arrange police protection as the "Olympic torch" is carried through streets, like some sort of Barnum and Bailey's stunt.


And woe be to anyone who objects to this stunt--as the Bong Hits for Jesus kid discovered when he attempted to satirize the whole experience of his being pushed out of school as the torch was borne by,  and his case wound up before the US Supreme Court, which of course thought it was reprehensible this child should object to this brazenly crass display of commercialized nationalism. The school principal was irate at the spoiling of her big moment in complicity, and she stormed across the street and ripped down the kid's offending banner: Bong Hits for Jesus. The United States government upheld her action as perfectly reasonable, and in fact necessary, to maintain order by brainwashing her students in the ways of government glorification of this commercial enterprise called the Olympics.


The other thing I hate about the Olympics is the sheer imbalance, the bullying aspect of it. We have countries like Barbados and Cameroon competing against behemoths like the United States and it's like rooting for Notre Dame or Penn State against Gettysburg College or Swarthmore in football. And the television networks start adding up medal totals and they run the flags up the flagpole so we can pound our chests about an American, one of 300 million, an athlete who has trained in million dollar facilities, with paid coaches,  having defeated some poor kid from Ethiopia and the American is standing, swelled chested,  above him on a platform, just to rub in the fact that USA is #1. We are the dominant dogs.


What a bunch of blow hard Goliath worshipers we have become.  
But, then again, we're #1!


Well, not us exactly, but our professional Hessians are #1, our alter egos are #1, which makes us feel all self important and proud, because, after all, we paid for them.