The Olympic Question

Yes.  We did.

My understanding is that this is the point of the Olympics.  The brother/sisterhood of sport.  

Something to unite a global culture that is defined by lines of division.  Jew and Arab.  Black and White.  Christian and Muslim.  Socialist and Libertarian.  And yes, Tibetan and Chinese.

It's a naive goal, however.  Politics cannot be put aside from the Olympics, regardless of intent.  The interesting thing is that we seem to think that political tensions aren't present on smaller scales.  The drama of China's brutality towards dissent (which cannot be denied) is the main event here, but what's to say that other tensions aren't present?

Take, for example, the American Olympic team.  This is an election year, and political tensions in the US always run high.  The likelihood of the US relay team being made up of supporters of Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Nader is rather high.  That's huge tension.  Canadian teams could be made up of NDPers and Tories.  Tensions in Canadian politics are pretty high at the moment.  There could be a meltdown among the Canadian basketball team and members of the team who vote Liberal refuse to take orders from the coach who campaigned for Stephen Harper.

It's easy to rule that out as a possibility.  Which makes perfect sense, because it's unlikely.  Or perhaps it is simply understood that political tensions are to be discarded during the Olympics.  Maybe that naiveté is necessary for the Olympics to function at all.  North and South Korean athletes frequently compete as a unified Korea, despite one being democratic and the other authoritarian.

I'm generally not one for political optimism, but sometimes it's necessary to at least think that the possibility of peace among people who would normally be at each other's throats is within reach.  So cheers to you, IOC, for giving us a chance to dream that dream.

But let's look at the Olympics objectively.  They're about competition.  Pure and simple.  And teams are national.  So we have a nationalistic bent to competition now.  This is the brilliance of the Olympics.  They accomplish the goal of making us forget about geo-political strife by presenting us with a competition between nations.  Basically, the result is "Yeah, you think you're all that with your freedom and liberty, America, but we just kicked your ass in basketball!" instead of "American policies are dangerously close to imperialism, and their moral high-ground wanes more with every threat to invade another sovereign nation".

The Olympics unite us, that's for sure.  They unite us by making us regress.  Sports have a strange way of doing this.  They divert any political anguish into the shouts and screams of Maple Leafs fans.  It's actually kind of brilliant.

The issue of China's human rights violations remains.  They need to be addressed, but the issue of the Olympics is neither here nor there.  It won't go away, and it's present whether there's Olympics in Beijing or not.  If anything, holding the Olympics there shines a light on a problem that has been ignored for ages.  This outrage over the human rights crimes in China is justified, but it should have been present ages ago.  Turning a blind eye to China's human rights issues for the two or so weeks of the Olympics is wrong, no doubt.  But letting China off the hook for those same crimes permanently because it's good for the economy?  It's fairly obvious which is more worthy of protest and outrage.

Maybe this new surge of outrage towards China could be the straw that breaks the camel's back though.  One can only hope.