Discuss: Looking Away from Beauty

Once again, Rebecca Solnit “connects a few dots” for us in an insightful and heart felt way.  How can “politics” ever be separated from the “facts on the ground,” except in some sanitized, bipolar fashion.  Yes, China is all of the above and the world needs to be reminded again and again in a nonviolent way that their choices are wrong.  The Olympic’s, as a world wide tradition, bear an even greater responsibility to the truth of it all.  Sadly, it doesn’t begin to live up to its potential to help the world move towards balance.  These China hosted Olympics are a case in point. The “beauty” (one defintition) of the athletes and events is marred by the fakeness of the mask, the stories within the story.  Thank you Rebecca for shedding a bit more light on the subject.

Unfortunately, we live in a glass house and so must begin by throwing stones at our own edifice.  The US has sponsored Israel’s occupation of Palestine for more than 40 years now. It’s a brutal occupation, with upwards of 60,000 dead (killed, actually) Palestinians over the decades. All so Israel can be bigger. The US is presently making war on both Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the behest of Israel, may soon commence bombing of Iran, a nation that has not invaded another since AD650. So while we must make the plight of Darfurians and Tibetans known, we must also decry our governments enabling of the world’s last occupation and Apartheid rule.

How about we just enjoy the Games for what they are and quit being so judgemental, micro analytical and self righteous for once in our otherwise dull lives ?

Speak for yourself, Regis. You go ahead and enjoy the games, OK?

I’m very happy to have this commentary, even though it states the obvious. I hope others will add some ideas about what people might begin to do to transform future Olympic “games” into something less inhuman.

“The Olympics present the one opportunity our flawed species has to celebrate our being in a pure, natural and unfettered manner.”

The ONE opportunity? There are countless opportunities to celebrate our being. We just need to get into the habit of creating them ourselves. We don’t have to wait for governments/corporations to do it for us

Unfettered? Pure and natural? The Olympic frenzy is more like a giant ad agency’s dream, a huge outdoor nationalistic agit prop drama. Whole cities scramble to hide their homeless, their pollution messes, their violent politics, painting on the heavy make-up of “purity”, “naturalness”, to encourage spending, to sell a prettier image of themselves to the watching world, to seel more “officially sponsored” products, to rake in more tourist dollars.

  “Unfettered” means free. What is free about an event that punishes people for trying to represent more than just which national grop they belong to?
Do we have to shut down our sense of fairness and moral intelligence to be great athletes? Do we have to shut out
reality in order to enjoy watching a sporting event?
    Actually, most of the time most of us ARE shutting out the harsh reality of human life on this planet. That urge is understandable. But what we in fact need MORE of, is staying present, and turning toward beauty that is not afraid of truth.

As we give our time and attention to international competitions…we often get suckered into exaggerated nationalism, a prime breeding-ground for more local and global conflict.
The games don’t need to go away, they just need to take place in the Real World, not inside a Disneyeque Olympic Village where prisons, weapons and spewing factories are not screened behind Computer Graphic trees and smiling faces.
    The Olympic games did not/will not replace war. If only that were true. This world would look a lot different, if gaming trumped territory-grabbing and murder, starting right after the Olympics first opened up to broadcast media around the planet…with a speech by Adolf Hitler.

It’s great that the games are in Beijing. Politically - both in terms of human rights and the environment - it should function as a real eye-opener for the world. Beijing and China are a glimpse deep into what the 21st century will likely be for almost all of us. It’s not going to be pretty, but we need to see it and know it, just so we don’t go gentle into that good night.

Having participated in the Olympics, I was on the U.S. Olympic snowboard team in 1998, I couldn’t agree more with this article. “1000 hour advertisement,” says it all for me. Since I’m no where near as eloquent as Rebecca, I’ve never been able to relay this to people without coming off as being bitter because I didn’t win.
Since snowboarding was a relatively young sport, the joy of it for me was being part of a truly global team: The World Pro Snowboard Team. For years I traveled and trained with athletes from 9 different countries. When the Olympics came into the picture, we were forced into U.S. Team uniforms with Visa patches on them and given instructions on how to act if and when we made it to the podium. When they told us, “It doesn’t hurt to shed a tear when you receive your medal.” it became clear to me that we were being primed for nothing more than a television show. I love sports and being an athlete. But the commercialism of the Olympics, as well as the nationalism, has always rubbed me the wrong way.