Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apartments
Classifieds
Shopping
The guy with the fire extinguisher, that’s the one I loved. It was London and the Olympic torch was in town, and so the protesters were out, the Save Darfur and Free Tibet people, and one man came packing a fire extinguisher, intent on dousing the torch.
He missed. And 37 people were arrested. And then the torch went to Paris, where there were more protests, and then it went to San Francisco, where there were more, and people started talking boycott, at least of the opening ceremonies …
And, wow, it’s 1980 all over again. Or 1936, for that matter.
According to Jeremy Schaap’s stellar chronicle of that year, “Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics,” the United States came within three votes of boycotting what was clearly to be a show pony for Hitler’s sick regime.
Thank God we didn’t.
Thank God, because if we had, Jesse Owens would never have had the chance to so publicly expose the Nazi liturgy for the sham it was. It was a lesson lost on America 44 years later, when we chose to boycott the Moscow Games over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
Now we’re the ones in Afghanistan. And the people we armed to fight the Soviets for us … well, they’re the ones trying to kill us.
The Soviet Union, meanwhile, is only a memory, done in by an economy that started to crumble in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan’s defense spending and the very invasion of Afghanistan we were protesting in 1980. It wound up being the Soviets’ death knell, a bottomless quagmire that sucked the very marrow from its bones.
The boycott, meanwhile, accomplished nothing but to ensure the Eastern Bloc would sit out L.A. four years later. As the Afghans could tell you, what goes around comes around.
And so, yes, if you want to punish China for its suppression of freedoms and arming of genocidal regimes, go right ahead and bang the drums for a boycott. But understand that what goes around does come around. Understand that you accomplish nothing but the slow death of the modern Olympics, with retaliatory boycott after retaliatory boycott until the whole thing collapses beneath the weight of its own hypocrisy.
By all means, scream to the rooftops about Darfur and Tibet and the lingering specter of Tiananmen Square, because the Chinese have bought that, and so has the International Olympic Committee. If IOC chairman Jacques Rogge is bleating now that the Olympics are in “chaos,” he’s got no one but himself to blame. If you’re going to reward the games to thugs, you deserve to get mugged.
A boycott, on the other hand …
Well, that makes even less sense than it did in 1980, for the simple reason that it’s not 1980 anymore. The global economy has made us all co-dependents now, for one thing. And so it’s only smart politics for President Bush to stiff-arm the boycott-the-opening-ceremonies question.
Besides … if we start pointing the finger at China for Tibet and Tiananmen, how quickly do you suppose they’ll point it right back at us for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay?
It might not equate for us. But it will for them.
Look, if the leaders of the free world want to make some symbolic gesture by boycotting the opening ceremonies, fine. But publicly humiliating China won’t get it to free Tibet or stop selling arms to the Sudanese. All it will do is make the Chinese – even those who might privately oppose their government’s repressive policies – close ranks.
A boycott?
Forget it. Go. Show ’em up where it counts, on the track, in the pool, on the basketball court. Flood the country with camera crews and inquiring minds. Remind the world of Tibet and Darfur and Tiananmen every night on the evening news.
Every nation wants the Olympics because it wants to showcase itself. Fine. Let the showcasing begin.
