Torching the Olympics
Not being a regular tv watcher (well, hardly ever, by most people's standards), I thought it was a joke, the first time I ran across a "news" anchor's "clever" aside about some fireworks being faked. But only just now I heard another, fuller reference, from a source I trust, NPR's Daniel Shorr, commenting on the CG faking of the Olympic fireworks; the (I knew about this one) dead-mike singing trick the Party Leadership pulled, to spare world viewers the unfortunate knowlege that a lovely child singer in The Modern China could have (gasp) crooked teeth; and some other computer graphics tricks meant to show the New China in a good light-- Wait, was that it -- did they use a green-screen, to turn their grey skies blue? (apologies to Maria Muldar)
But my reaction to this news was not what you might expect. You may think that I froze in outrage, my coffee cup trembling unseen before my twitching lips, before crashing back to the abused faux-wood formica tabletop in fury. The other patrons look up from their papers, un-noticed by my glazed eyes. How DARE they pervert the spirit of the Olympics like this--
But no, it wasn't that way at all. Instead, a quiet satisfaction suffused my mind. The Olympics had to die sometime, and this is as good a time as any.
Oh, now YOU'RE the one with the attitude problem. Let me explain.
There are websites that will inform you what hosting the Olympics has done, to the unfortunate cities who won bidding for the privilege. Montreal is just now paying off their incurred debt, and that was how long ago? (No I won't look it up for you; I'm on a roll, here.) The current one, the Beijing edition, cost around forty Billiooo,ooo,ooon dollars to put on, handily eclipsing the last record, Athens in 2004, at 8.5 Billiooo,ooo,ooon dollars spent-slash-borrowed.
Not only this, but the supposedly amature athletes involved have also had to up the ante, if they want to stay in competition. In these latter days, Olympic athletes are defacto freaks of nature, who can ignore their own physical limits to the extent that weightlifters can turn their joints inside out, in pursuit of their art. Call it the agony of de-elbow.
So why am I not outraged? Simply because it is time in our evolution as human beings, for such self-centered displays to die out; and the Olympics is showing us the way. It seems that performance is now to be in the mind (or computer) of the beholder; which is a great point to call a time out in the race to the ultimate spectacle. And ask ourselves if we have more important things to do, than compete ruthlessly with each other to whittle away the last possible hundredth of a second time, for the 100 yard sprint-swim or whatever.
I'm a firm believer in fractal scales; as above, so below, and vice versa. Olympic competitors' physical feats are carving ever-closer "records" out of an ever-tighter human performance envelope; battling not only the other athletes in their events, but ever-harsher enforcement of the IOC's nature-based performance ethic. Athletic performance now runs so close to ultimate human physical limitations that serious, even debilitating injury is not uncommon, in athletes trying to push through their personal performance walls.
The same dynamic seems to work in the larger-scale competitions between cities to host the games. Those cities now go into debt for decades for the "privilege" of hosting the games, and afterward are saddled with magnificent and costly sports complexes that have no place in the normal lives of their citizenry, but don't really lend themselves to conversion into community gardens. Whether large- or small-scale, competitive escalation seems to run up against the fundamental limits you'd expect: it gets more and more expensive and difficult to wring ever-smaller margins of advantage from the pursuit in question; whether it be swimming, or building the next state-of-the-art Olympic swimming pool.
And now China, the latest escalation in the world-focus battle called Hosting The Games, resorts to tech-drugging to fit the role they've decided they must take on in the world.
I can't be the only one thinking that the games might as well take place in cyberspace from now on.
Physical reality is just sOoo expensive, for events of this sort. Let the world's gaming nerds compete for the privilege of hosting the games, and every four years the winners can present the algorithmic results of their last four years of work on a sports extravaganza. I guarantee it will be a good show; probably as good as this year's, maybe better. And it will give tech dweebs, a rising demographic, a reason to care, when O-Fever hits our networks, in the quadrenial cycle. After a few of those cycles, in the hands of game designers, no one will be able to tell reality from fantasy, and the current trend will be complete.
The winners of the current Olympic contests are trained to a 'T', but you and I know that in modern times the choice between the top competitors is as often due to a chance factor, as it is to actual ability or mental focus. The normal human physical performance envelope may be limited, and chance adds only so much potential excitement; but there is no currently known limit to the concentration powers of a gaming nerd. We need to leave mundain reality-based reality behind us on the rusting physical tracks, and stride boldly into the great grey-matter frontier, where the virtual tracks are always shiny and new.
Okay, I know that fans and the competitors themselves will likely view it differently. But with so much depending on (face it) chance, who can really care which particular "winner" carries off the gold? Unless, of course, it's less about performance, and more about national boosterism (did I say that out loud?).
More to the point, can we AFFORD to care about such silly things? The world is neck-deep in situations that need our devoted attention NOW, and all we can do is worry about which of three guys is going to get his fingernail on a pressure plate a fraction of a second before another guy does?
Get a grip!
BTW, China just called, and wants me to tell you that it's unharmonious, saying such things. They're sending a van and thugs to pick me up, and they want everyone else to mind their own business from now on, and quit talking about this. Quit putting China down. It's disrespectful, don't ya know, to point out that someone is cheating. China is different (yawn)... wha?
Seems reality is as passe in China as it is in the Bush administration and the CIA.
(And look: I finished this diatribe without once pointing out, how China's state thugs are keeping the scads of democracy and free-tibet protestors clear of the world's television screens. I'm so proud of myself; I think it's a record!)