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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