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Sunday, August 1, 2021

COVID Chronicles XX – The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the “Time In Between”

 




We thought that the pandemic had come to an end and was winding down.  Or, more precisely, we hoped that was the case while fearing that we were, in fact, not there yet.  The 2020 Olympics - put off until 2021 - loomed as the moment when the world would celebrate a return to normalcy after the “games” had been put off for a year.  But the “games” – a euphemism that implies something fun, lighthearted, gay and childish – rely on fans in the stands waving national flags and cheers and celebrations to maintain that façade – and they have been strangely absent.  Early on it seemed that Jill Biden and Francois Mitterand seemed to be the only fans actually at the games, underscoring the games geopolitical and elitist background and function.  The heat and exhaustion caused by scheduling in the tropical summer underscored the economic foundation in American Television as a prime driving force.  And the presence of a spate of new sports – from skateboarding to surfing to karate underscores a seemingly desperate desire to captivate any and all audiences and to bring even the renegades under the umbrella of the IOC.

I grew up loving the Olympics.  Essentially the only time that my mother and grandmother would watch sports on TV (though my grandmother did take me to see Ernie Banks play for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field when I was very young), there was a sense of togetherness both as a family and as a nation as we watched the US team compete against others.  The politics was played out in front of our eyes as the Eastern Bloc Countries would mark down our athletes best performances and our judges would retaliate, and the low scores would get thrown out and somehow it seemed that, generally, the best athletes would somehow be given the medal.

Of course, what was on display were the cultural differences – and our culture was held up on our TVs as the best.  Our approach to sport was based on the myth that kids would play what they want and the good ones would rise to the top as naturally as cream rises to the top of milk.  Our culture, we told ourselves, values freedom and competition and those who compete in the games are our young meritocratic nobility.  The Olympics – and other forces – spawned legions of soccer Moms (and Dads) (I was one of the latter) sitting in sling chairs, rooting on their children on weekends and – for the select few – driving them around the country to compete with other selected ones to fight for college scholarships and/or to toil, largely in anonymity, and, for those who had the greatest gifts and toiled the hardest, they would be rewarded with trips to far off places and the accolades and cheers of family, friends, and country.

Their culture, by contrast, was painted as the heavy handed state identifying talented youths and shipping them off to sports camps to be used as propaganda hounds.  Shot full of performance enhancing drugs, these half human half cyborg monsters would compete against our lovely lads and lasses in a contest of good versus evil – so that we could root for our kids – with their compelling back stories told in detail – and feel justified in our otherwise unseemly haul of medals.

The truth (whatever that might be) is, of course, much more complex.  The narrative I have related above continues to be spun, with the Russian and Chinese political machines as the bad guys and their athletes the hapless victims of the relentless drive of authoritarian regimes trying to pretend that their system is superior when they are clearly cheating in order to achieve a competitive advantage, while we have wholesomeness and light on our side.

Of course, we are also a waning super power, at least in some areas.  Our pursuit of leisure is now being mirrored by people in multiple countries, especially as the middle class spreads (like a virus?) from our own country to others.  And the prisoners of that system – the kids who are sent away to tennis “schools” - toil away at sports that they are adept at, but engage in with wildly varying passion.  And there are kids who are talented and privileged enough to devote a considerable amount of time to pursuing areas that may eventuate in competing on the world stage.  And the sheer variety of sport (How many ways can we use to propel an object with a racquet or a paddle?  How many ways can we come up with to advance an object towards a goal line with rules that determine how this particular way of doing that is different from this other way?  How many ways can we come up with to celebrate the manifold ways we can twist our bodies through space?) is both staggering and somehow reflective of our desire to create order out of a world that once presented infinite challenges to our ability to survive.

But the truth of the matter is that our ability to survive hinges now not so much on our ability to navigate space and forcing an object over a goal line as it does, perhaps, on limiting and capping our desire to do the very things that have propelled us to this place of unimaginable wealth.  We are wildly successful at managing the challenges as they were constructed in their old form.  We can kill the wild beast, grow the needed crops, and utilize the resources to create an economy that, at least for some of the population, affords the leisure for athletic, but also artistic and intellectual pursuits and especially the latter fuels our ability to achieve new levels of success.  But our doing this without limit is, ironically, now what imperils us.  And our failure to individually and collectively rein in our striving to overcome, to achieve, to have and consume more is likely to be our downfall.

Individually, we don’t want to impose discipline on our actions.  We don’t want to wear masks or to take shots that will protect us – but that also remind us that we are dependent on others.  Somehow it is better to depend on them when we become sick because we have not taken what has been offered to protect ourselves from complete dependency.  Collectively, we feel threatened that, if our economy does not continue to expand, we won’t have the necessary capital to attend to our needs.

Failing, however, to curtail our actions leads us to have a communal celebration of what we have individually accomplished – we build huge stadia that stand largely empty and hold only the select few to observe our triumphs.  Collectively, we may well drive ourselves off a cliff clad in what we believe will be a suit of armor that will insulate us from the perils that building that suit has caused. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not stating this from a position of being above it all.  I have toiled throughout my life to achieve my own certainly more limited Olympian heights.  I have followed the received wisdom of how to construct a life – how to build a base for my family to thrive – and how to dedicate myself to helping others achieve the same goals.  I have not, like my sister, opted to live in a tiny house, close to the land, using minimal resources to survive.  I have a large carbon footprint.

I am struggling with the overarching message of the Olympics as much as anyone else – I deeply believe that my investment in my individual well-being will be good for all.  And I don’t think that the Elon Musks, or the Henry Fords, or the Henry the VIII’s of this world have or had an evil plan to subdue us or knew the costs of working our way out of being at the mercy of the natural world that can be cold and unforgiving and that will, in the end, be the death of us all.  But we are increasingly conscious of the costs of maintaining what has become more clearly visible as an illusory narrative.

Closer to home, I will be back in a classroom in two weeks.  At this moment, the plan is for me and for my students who are vaccinated to be unmasked – and those who are not vaccinated to wear masks.  Students will be required to attend class in person.  There will be no zoom alternative.

Of course, this week the CDC has acknowledge both breakthrough cases – people who are vaccinated are seeming to be increasingly vulnerable, especially to the delta variant – and that vaccinated people, even when they are not infected themselves – can be carriers.  I don’t want to teach behind a mask.  I don’t want to teach over Zoom – especially to a mix of people in person and on screen.  And I don’t want my students to continue to experience a surreal college world – where they are there virtually in person.  Aargh.

This second summer of COVID is beginning to look more and more like an all too brief intermission in a very long playing and very dark drama.  Perhaps we need to have the denial of our interconnectedness pointed out to us again and again and again….

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For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

  

   

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