Say what you please about China’s Olympics — or rather, don’t — the Beijing Games are a place of steely schmaltz, where nothing goes wrong, ever.
They are the place where the organizing committee explained of the ordinary Chinese: “Everybody is happy. That is a fact.”
They are the place where the buses run so on time that you suspect time is pegged to the buses, not the other way round.
They are the place where yesterday’s lead story from the state news agency was puffed with the words “the Olympic moments that touch your heart and purify your soul belong to those who are fighting destiny, triumphing over adversity or proving to the world that love can be as deep as ocean.”
It’s a bit like stepping into one of those inspirational posters with kittens that traditionally adorn the walls of dental surgery waiting rooms. You know something unpleasant is happening not far away, but it’s oddly easy to zone out contemplating the fluffy little feline.
Two weeks after the Games began, though, and this simulated reality is becoming a little rich for the blood. It’s basically like The Matrix, but with less cool clothes. And nothing makes you wish you hadn’t taken the red pill like seeing volunteers, corralled into filling empty seats at a venue, unfurling a banner reading “Nothing can stop the power of China.”
By crikey, they need to work on their bannercraft. You just yearn for the sort of sentiment that can adorn the flags at England away games. “Don’t go into labor, Hayley” — that sort of thing.
For all their slick management and the great sporting display, it should be said that China’s Games have been spectacularly, creepily humorless. There has been not one iota of good natured fun-poking in the national media, not a single comedy montage on the 18 state TV channels dedicated to reverential coverage of China’s big moment. Nothing has been allowed to interfere with the official line. The effect is oddly static, as though the people’s joy is being handed to them like a stone tablet, instead of being a democratized, roots-up explosion.
“Chinese fall hard for sportsmanship, heroism at Olympics,” begins one of the daily 437 hard-hitting exposes of national delight.
“Thirty years after China’s reform and opening up to the outside world, the Chinese have merged into the world,” we are informed in another, “by hosting the Games with all their heart, cheering for all the players, sharing their laughters [sic] and tears and idolizing the world’s common heroes.”
OK. I think that’s finally, finally enough Kool-Aid.
In fact, all of a sudden, as we prepare to turn the corner into the next Olympiad, Britain is starting to look like the perfect contrasting destination for the old torch. These Games have provided static thrills, but how much richer the Olympics will be for taking place in a city of irreverence and cynicism, as well as enthusiasm — a Shangri-la of institutionalized press officer-baiting, as opposed to somewhere you can’t ask a simple question about a couple of disappeared grandmothers without being accused of being ungrateful guests.
We may not have 2,000 perfectly synchronized drummers, but we’ve got a nation of cussed folk dancing to their own beats. If Beijing’s Games were a state’s Olympics then London’s ought to be a democracy’s — the chance to humanize them a bit more.
And if humanizing the Games sounds like a euphemism for cocking up a few organizational aspects of them, then so be it. Assuming we remember to keep it lit, the torch is heading towards the land of a thousand potential snafus, which will all be hopelessly overplayed by the wretched media and cackled at in pubs afterwards. At least people will be laughing to defuse the tension. There’ll be nightly TV comedy shows, hopefully along the lines of Roy Slaven and HG Nelson’s brilliant Sydney effort The Dream. Two weeks inside the Beijing Matrix and you just ache to see people mocking the official mascots or launching rival ones with anger-management issues.
What we’ll need to nip in the bud, though, are initiatives like yesterday’s effort from British Airways, which wins the prize for Stupidest Press Release of the Olympics. BA have broken off from losing your bags to conduct a survey which has concluded that “the nation’s feeling of Britishness when watching Britain compete has soared by almost a third since the start of the Olympics,” and some boffin called Peter Marsh goes on record to say: “We cannot underestimate the value of an occasion such as the Olympics to the social cohesion of our nation.”
Strong words Peter — and unintentionally accurate, unless you really did mean to say underestimate instead of overestimate.
Let’s see much, much less of this as London becomes the Olympic city, and begins its endearingly misguided attempt to launder the Olympic brand. One of the things Beijing has reminded us is that corporations and governments just get this stuff all wrong, and you can’t synthesize euphoria convincingly. Much better if we just relax and let the chaos begin. Play to our strengths and all that.
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