Paradise Preoccupied

Okay, I’ll admit that the male swimmers bring to my conflicted mind images of substance that has flash written all over them in what could be whipped cream, but it’s not the athletes that are my issue today … although I suspect some may be eventually.

This story about the little girl with the beautiful voice shunted aside for the pretty little doll who lip synced the song that stirred hearts during the opening ceremonies has me fuming. Add that to the admission that some of the flash … the real flashy flash of fireworks … were fake, computer-generated for the world TV viewing audience, and I’m taken back to 1989 when I visited China just three weeks before the sit-in started in Tiananmen Square. You remember? The one that showed without any doubt the brutal, ugly foot of the Chinese government on the throat of human rights.

At the time, Beijing was preparing to host the Asia Games, and construction was going on everywhere. Huge apartment complexes had been built for TV skyline shots, but every one of them was nothing more than a shell lit like a movie set to give the impression that they were real and habitable homes of real Chinese. Totally fake and just for the cameras.

That was China almost 20 years ago, and no matter how loudly or often shouts of “It’s all so different now!” come around, I don’t buy it, and I resent the hell out of the fact that a country that is responsible for making the lives of millions of people in the world a misery is getting so many Brownie points for the illusion they have so carefully cultivated.

What’s next? How much of the news in the future will feature revelations that will turn medals into bottle tops and have broken records start sounding like broken records with repeated refrains of “doping scandal” popping up as technology catches up or people start revealing real events?

And if anyone tells me that sports and politics are two separate things … especially where the Olympics are involved … I swear I’ll clobber them with a baseball bat and call it a game, not a maneuver or a consequence.