If
the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing were all
about a debutante making a strong and confident
entrance on the world stage, then the 2012 London
Olympics will have to be compared to a very old
hag putting on excessive makeup to try and conjure
up one last trick for the passing punter before
she fades away into the night permanently.
I hasten to add that this harsh view isn't
my own, but rather what I could distil from
reading the number of other articles including by
other columnists at Asia Times Online. Yes Father
Sisci, that includes you. (See Beijing
sets the bar for Olympian effort, Asia Times
Online, July 11, 2012.)
Four years ago,
there was a fair amount of optimism and an air of
expectation with respect to Beijing (see Anatomy
of an Olympic winner, Asia Times Online,
August 8, 2008). Trepidation if any
was limited to issues
such as the quality of drinking water and the
potential for elite athletes to suffer from
accidental drug exposure from the consumption of
unsafe animal products. All that though pales into
comparison compared to the amount of fear being
whipped up as we seem to have a global media
that's braced for disaster on the following
counts: a. Inadequate infrastructure b.
Strikes and stoppage threats c. Poor weather
d. Potential for acts of violence
Let
us look into these fears individually.
Will the infrastructure cope?
The first major question appears to
concern London's ability to actually stage the
games given the woeful state of its
infrastructure. I think the complaint is overall a
fair cop, having been in both Beijing and London
ahead of the respective Games. Then again, the
English have managed to prioritize traffic flows
in one of the busiest cities of the world for the
Olympics, much as this has been widely resented by
the (taxpaying) public. Especially notorious are
the "Zil lanes" meant for Olympic officials, that
have been widely panned as evocative of Soviet-era
prioritization of Communist officials over the
Proletariat. I wrote a long time ago about the
London underground rail network and won't revisit
the topic; hopefully I will not have to revisit
the tube ever again either.
The inadequacy
of Western infrastructure though is a broader
topic that goes to the root of their declining
productivity and in many cases, relevance to the
global economy. The Asian experience in building
infrastructure (see Asia's
permanent advantage, Asia Times Online,
February 27, 2010) cannot be replicated easily in
the West through ordinary budgetary experiences -
instead it would take special events such as the
Olympics to galvanize the infrastructure of
declining cities. Whether the English have
actually managed to spend their money wisely is a
matter of some debate, and we will not know the
answer to the questions until well after the
Games.
Will strikes disrupt the
Games? The second major worry is social as
much as it is political. The fact that British
society is broken socially was clearly on display
a year ago when riots broke out around the capital
(see London
riots reduce the lies of the left to ashes,
Aug 16, 2011) as youth spilled out on the streets
despite decades of mollycoddling by an indulgent
state. Those worries persist, but to them we must
add the likelihood of train drivers going on
strike, roads being blocked by striking hospital
workers and all the other jetsam from the
unaddressed aspects of the financial crisis.
Of the major worries, I would rate this
one as sufficiently uncontrollable enough to be a
problem should it fructify over the fortnight of
the Games. We already have news of striking
workers at the main airports, as well as those
manning certain key infrastructure roles. Such
folks would obviously try to maximize their
bottleneck potential at the most opportune time,
eg during the Games, with the fervent hope that an
unpopular government may come to any round of
accommodation to avoid further public opprobrium.
The fact the leader of the opposition Labour party
appears to have weighed in on the side of Union
bosses only adds fuel to this fire.
What about English
weather? There is a rich tradition of
joking about the English weather, with my
favourite being: "Of course we have summer in
England. Why, last year it was on a Wednesday".
Truth be told though, one could hardly
fault the country for their weather but then
again, it would have been remiss for the
organizers of the Olympics to have missed that
minor little detail when deciding where to stage
the games in such a manner that at least one could
be assured of enough clear days to finish the
rather tight schedules. The point is to see
whether the organizers have prepared enough
alternatives in case of weather disruptions in
particular locations or for certain sports that
may fall afoul of the weather patterns.
Or
you could do what a dear friend of mine has done,
which is to only purchase tickets for Olympic
events that involve water: rowing, sailing and so
on. After all, he reasoned, the rain shouldn't
affect those sports all that much. I didn't
exactly break it to him that outdoor water sports
are likely the worst affected by rain; to each
their own.
What about
terrorism? There is something about big
events that inevitably raises the spectre of
violence. Reacting after the horrific shooting in
Aurora (near Denver, Colorado) cinema ahead of the
new Batman film, the critic Roger Ebert
wrote:
I'm not sure there is an easy link
between movies and gun violence. I think the
link is between the violence and the publicity.
Those like James Holmes, who feel the need to
arm themselves, may also feel a deep, inchoate
insecurity and a need for validation. Whenever a
tragedy like this takes place, it is assigned
catchphrases and theme music, and the same
fragmentary TV footage of the shooter is cycled
again and again. Somewhere in the night, among
those watching, will be another angry, aggrieved
loner who is uncoiling toward
action.
I don't usually agree with the
likes of Roger Ebert on most things, but in this
case I believe he does have a point. When you boil
it all down, the Olympics offer an unparalleled
stage for loonies to vent their frustrations;
societies that do not have the ability to control
violence in a movie hall shouldn't be sitting
around worrying about violence in a global
television festival.
I simply don't have
an answer to the fears about terrorism. Like most
folks used to traveling regularly through airports
and visiting a number of cities around the world,
the subject of security is simply another one of
daily difficulties to overcome.
So
what's the real bugbear? When one removes
all the logical sources of fear, as above, we are
then left to confront greed as the primary
motivation for the media whipping up all kinds of
concerns ahead of the Olympics. Let me clarify - I
don't mean that the media are greedy, rather that
they are reacting in a whiplash fashion to the
perceived corporate greed surrounding the
Olympics.
Last week, one media outlet
published the "news" that the ordering of a
English staple bar food - "chips" or what the rest
of us would call French Fries - was banned at all
Olympic venues except McDonald's restaurants; the
only exception being the ordering of that other
English staple, fish and chips. This caused a lot
of agony amongst bloggers who plain forgot that
the restrictions applied to Olympic venues only;
and that the menu of all the food outlets in these
venues had been prescribed many months ago.
Others opined that the purveyors of fast
food, generally regarded as unhealthy, should
never have been allowed to sponsor the Games. That
is a fair point, but it does raise two subsidiary
issues: firstly the fact that foods being served
are entirely legal and secondly that sponsorship
money goes a long way for organizers to defray the
cost of Games. If on the other hand someone wanted
to stage an Olympics such as the "original" ones
in Greece many millennia ago, well then the
taxpayers would have to foot a pretty fancy bill.
All those rationalizations to one side, it
is obvious that the media are playing to the
zeitgeist particularly in Europe that has gone
"off" capitalism and in particular large companies
and banks. Thus it is that whatever other records
are broken in London, the Games may well be
remembered as the "Greed and Fear Games" for
decades to come.
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