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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
In that regard, I can't help feeling that the timing of this year's Olympics is propitious. For under the leadership of George W. Bush, America has basically said a giant "screw you" to the world. We have done whatever we wanted and run roughshod over everyone who got in the way, simply because we could. And the world, in response, has turned away from us. The goodwill and admiration the world once felt toward America has been squandered. Never has the Ugly American been so loathed.
But the Bush era is ending, and America has a chance to rejoin the world. Not as the "hyperpower" that smashes whomever and whatever it wants, but as a friendly, humble and confident neighbor of the other countries that inhabit this planet. We have a chance to embrace good sportsmanship at a global level. And it is fitting that this opportunity arrives at the same moment as the Olympics. For despite all their faults, the Olympics are a United Nations of the spirit. They're as close as we get on Earth to international brotherhood.
This may sound a bit grandiose. After all, the Olympics are only a glorified sporting event, and Olympians, the fabled "youth of the world" who are summoned at each Closing Ceremony to compete in four years, are just athletes. Moreover, for all their universalist aspirations, the games are profoundly nationalistic and tribal. Why should we remove the Olympics from the fallen world of politics? The modern games have been going on for more than a century, and during that time the youth of the world have spent much more time massacring each other under various flags than competing peacefully.
That's all true. And yet, the Olympics are inspiring, even if you don't care much about sports. And there's something about the Olympics that can, should and must transcend politics.
The Olympics are the greatest stage in the world for one particular type of human achievement: athletics. Athletics are not humankind's only achievement, but they are an important and primal one. For human beings are animals. We have bodies. And learning to master our bodies, training them, disciplining them, is literally written in our DNA. Yes, the urge to metaphorize sports can be taken much too far -- I'll probably be comparing the Ping-Pong tournament to the denouement of "The Brothers Karamazov" next week. But still, there is a thread that connects the great athlete with the great artist, the great thinker or the great human being. The ancient Greeks, who invented the Olympics, had a word for that unifying quality. They called it "arete": excellence. When you see the runners come around the first turn in the 400 meters, in all their glorious physical perfection, minds and wills honed down to one goal, how can you not rejoice at the sheer beauty of the sight -- and in all the different things our marvelous species can do?
At least symbolically, the Olympics honor athletes, and athletics, in a deeper and more appropriate way than any other sporting event does. America and most Western nations put their professional athletes on absurd pedestals, showering them with vast wealth and fame and even expecting them to be "role models" for children, a task most of them are singularly ill-equipped to perform. Of course, the Olympics are not immune to the forces of spectacular capitalism: Winning gold at the Olympics makes an athlete an instant celebrity, and often rich as well. And the ideal of Olympic amateurism has long been a joke. But nonetheless, the Olympics are a completely different kind of athletic event than any other. Winning at the Olympics is still its own reward, one that has much less to do with money than with glory.
As for politics, of course they will never go away. Politics hangs over every Olympics, but perhaps more over these games than any since the 1936 "Nazi Olympics" in Berlin. For these Olympics are being hosted by China, a nation whose political ambiguities are of an almost metaphysical order. You have only to shift your perspective slightly to regard the whole "Olympic spirit" thing as a pernicious and sentimental myth, a fig leaf covering up the truly important issues, whether those be the Chinese regime's human rights violations, its oppression of Tibet, its heavy-handed censorship, or any of its other myriad faults.
Those issues are real, and it would seem absurd to argue that a sporting event is more important than they are. It would be equally absurd to deny that the Chinese regime is using the games to burnish its image and advance its domestic and international agendas.
There's a push-back: Who's to say that hosting the Olympics won't change China for the better? But ultimately, politics isn't what the Olympics are about -- and that's OK. After all, a world in which you can never escape politics would be a horrifying one. We need a holiday from them, a time when we declare a truce.
