Tonight, Internet, I saw a Visa commercial starring Morgan Freeman’s voice, extolling the nigh-celestial virtues of the magnificent human triumph of spirit that is the Olympics. In it, he suggests that the Olympics — my Olympics, unfortunately — will “bring everyone everywhere together.”
I think that’s what he says.
I could be wrong — just flying off the handle again, as with the Intrawest news. (I made a spelling error or two there as well — will have to go back and correct it…)
But then again, I really don’t think I am wrong, or flying off the handle…
…Because this really has reached the level of brutal self-parody now, hasn’t it? Christ, I feel like I’m watching Bob Roberts — or should that be Touched By An Angel? I mean what is it, this Olympics thing? Tonight I have written, erased, rewritten and re-erased more words than I care to think about, trying to get to The Place Of Okay about Morgan Freeman coming along to stick his thumb in my eye about how much I should be on my knees in REVERENT AWE before the mighty O…and it’s still not working. I told you before about how every asshole with a J-school certificate from the local community colleges around here tried to prove that the Olympics is a democratizing force while the Beijing Olympics were going on…never have so many of the unqualified preached to the converted so self-servingly! And I think I told you, too, about our Attorney-General swearing up and down that every single economist in the world agrees hosting the Olympics is a Good Thing…
What I am saying is: it’s getting very uncomfortable around here. There’s a spirit of coercion in the air.
So where you might see Morgan Freeman collecting a paycheque, what I see is something different.
I see them coming at me again.
Recently, our beloved provincial government allowed as how it might be a good idea to get a law in place that allows the Vancouver Police to take homeless people off the streets in bad weather. And of course, we’re not stupid. But we don’t talk a whole lot about that.
We KNOW where it’s coming from. And I mean know: I mean there’s no doubt. Everybody knows. So nobody says it. Well, who would they say it to? Why would they bother?
Who could they find, who isn’t already 100% aware of it?
The problem is interesting, though: because the short form of the reason why we’ve got so many people living on the street here, is that we’ve systematically removed every other place for them to be. It’s taken, oh, about twenty-five years or so to do it…but we did it, folks! And now the local paper runs fascinatingly pointless series about “How To Fix The Downtown East Side”…because we may be a small city, but we’ve got people shooting up outside the police station, so ha ha take that, Detroit…!
…When of course everyone already knows how to “fix” it, and we don’t talk about that either.
God, I really wish I knew what they do about homeless people and winter in Winnipeg, you know? I mean that place is cold: if you’re sleeping rough in Winnipeg in the winter, you’re in a Jack London story I think…it isn’t notional, it isn’t probable, you’re pretty much going to die. Am I right, Winnipeggers, Winnipegosians, whatever you’re calling yourselves this week?
So, how do you guys deal with it?
In Vancouver, we don’t do much. There are shelters, but not enough of them; I’ve seen people I pretty much knew were going to die from the cold in winter, the needle in summer, and pretty much in jig time too if they didn’t catch some sort of break or other…and I don’t have any idea what happened to most of them…
I figure you guys must do more: sort of like that story about Churchill I heard, about how no one’s allowed to lock their front doors because, fuck, what if someone was walking down the street and ran into a fucking polar bear? If the house nearest to them has locked their front door, they’re dead, end of story, that’s all, lights out. Right?
But, sorry, I guess we weren’t talking about polar bears. We were talking about the Olympics, and how it’s turning my heart to sugar, my soul to rainbows, and my brains to shit…
Or anyway apparently that’s the plan…
Except that another thing everybody knows about, is that the Olympics isn’t really any good for any of the shit they say it’s good for. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I’ll treasure those memories of when I loved watching the Olympics for as long as I live — when I was a kid I thought they were very meaningful, and then even when I got old enough to see that the fruit was more than half-rotten I still liked watching them…I have friends who’ve been Olympic athletes, friends who’ve been Olympic broadcasters, I think the Olympics is a great idea in fact…!
But it’s only as that idea, that it’s any fucking good for anything under the sun anyway. And that idea’s not this one, any longer. It’s pretty plain. I swear, the vague nondenominational piety that Visa and Morgan Freeman squeeze into this thing like the filling into a Twinkie is insulting on religious grounds as well as nutritional ones…any way you slice it, either they’re trying to give you religion you don’t have, or they’re cheapening the religion you’ve got, and you know just as an aside, you know what the Olympics is really, really not? It’s not that WWI story about Christmas and the soccer game with the helmet, and then they all go back to shooting one another. Really, it isn’t that. That’s how they sell it, but that’s not what it is. There’s no divine grace in the Olympics, no miracles, no redemption…well, what would be the point of having the damn thing if there was? There is no piety in the Olympics, it isn’t a fucking church!
Hell, I’m not even religious, man!
Which is why I really resent that in my city, piety about the Olympics is as compulsory as piety in church. Privately nobody believes; publicly everyone has to make a great show. “Bring everyone, everywhere, together”? Jesus Christ, I’ve never heard lying so shameless, Visa And Morgan Freeman! Seriously, how the fuck do you sleep at night?
How is what my provincial government wants to do any different from what the Chinese government wanted to do?
Oh, you better believe we don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about it because everybody already knows. And you may think that sounds like some basic off-the-rack teenage turtleneck denouncing of the Man, if you like…hey, because you’d be right! That is what it sounds like! That’s exactly what it sounds like!
Just, not what it is. Because it isn’t off-the-rack at all, it’s hand-tailored, every thread and stitch of it. And so I’m not writing this to convince anybody of anything they don’t already believe.
No.
I’m only writing this to tell somebody out there, anybody who would like to know, really, or who hasn’t heard…that, Jesus, but you really do feel it, eh? This ground I’m walking over, it’s intensely compromised, I did not expect it to be this way but it really is…it really is. And I’m implicated in it, whether I like it or not. For my city — for other cities it may be different — this is a hell of a testing ground. The Star Tribe is coming to earth here, touching down in my little window on the wilderness just a couple of months from now…and we are not a very big city, we are not a very old city, we are not a very ready city, for this kind of exposure to the world’s bitter, changing winds, and something fairly wicked this way coming. Morgan Freeman and Visa are busy telling me, through their late night ionospheric transmissions, that not only will it be great and good, but it’ll be my ticket to be part of Glory, to be a part of the ennobling of the human spirit…but I swear to God this is already the WORST Hollywood movie of that type that I have EVER SEEN, and in the end I may have to eat it, but I don’t have to smile about it, and I refuse to be softened up about it. And I kind of wonder if the CBC will even bother playing “The Bishops’ Wife” this Christmas…
Because, well…
It’d seem a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t it?
MAN, I’ve always loved the Olympics. Especially the Winter Olympics. But that was before I knew that in order to love it I also had to believe that it will bring everyone, everywhere, together.
And it won’t. And they shouldn’t say it will.
And I’m really pissed at Morgan Freeman right now.
And I guess that’s my story.
This pretty much sums up my feelings about sport in general – it seems to be something where everyone is expected to be part of the great joyous happy group, and yet I’m sat there just not caring about sport at all. As a result, my apathy gets turned to outright hatred just by the constant pressure to conform that all sport seems to encourage…
Oh, it ate my reply!
Hold on.
One of the things I disagree strenuously with Noam Chomsky about — just about the only thing I disagree strenuously with him about, which I suppose oughtta send up a red flag — is sports.
I don’t think he understands their social benefit, which is in other words their social cause: what they’re sublimating. He thinks it’s combat, or conformity: I think it’s cogency — three hundred years of social alienation, no wonder it makes a million trillion dollars when it’s televised, no wonder fans have strange identification-attachments to players. Or to teams. Also, a certain…um, “revengeful realism”? “Screw you, I sprung up out of the ground here, I AM this place!” I think you could call classism a driver, too…not sure if I agree, but you could.
Andrew, your own preferred “fun exertion” modes? And don’tsay “correcting people who are wrong on the Internet”, you know as well as I do that’s Kurt Busiek’s line…
The only things I do for fun that require any effort at all, really, are writing, composing and political campaigning (and the latter is far less fun than an obligation).
And I’m sure that *is* a social benefit – to anyone who feels included. To those who don’t it’s a further mark of outsider status…
Oh, must go to bed — but more on this later, I have a whole theory…
Yeah Andrew really doesn’t do exertion for fun. He doesn’t even have to run for the bus any more.
Sports is a big thing that Andrew and I clash on. I can understand his animosity, thanks to the personification of sports — bullying jackasses, by all accounts — in his schooldays. But I’ve always had such a love for baseball, and I’m falling fast for cricket, and someone close to me still gets a fire in his eyes when he talks about rugby even though he believes his playing days to be 20 years behind him… and I think there’s a lot to love, even for us non-jocks (both that guy and I are at least as much of the geek persuasion as we’d ever be of the jock). But I hope I at least don’t alienate people who don’t like sports; it’s a minority interest in my circles and yet I like to think I’m at least as tolerable about it as the rest of them are when they go on about proportional representation, Doctor Who scriptwriters, knitting in the round, the overuse of autotune in modern pop recordings…
Even comics.
The Olympics, in terms of what they promise, are a funny thing. I’ve been involved in urban regenerations in both public and private capacities in Ireland and abroad for about a decade now and find myself, in light of the collapse of the property market (and all associated creative industries) here in Ireland, thinking of moving on again for a few years. With Vancouver and London as the prime candidates (for entirely different reasons): each of course with Olympics headed their way, a not entirely coincidental fact.
The London case (and I wonder what Andrew Hickey’s views are on this, though it is possible i’ve missed them on his site- i tend to lurk on a number of these blogs but can’t remember ever posting before so hello and thanks, etc.)intrigues me. I’ve been present at many urban design symposia there over the last few years and can’t say that i have been convinced by the loaves and fishes promises that have been made on the games’ behalf. The only serious voice of dissent that i have come across is Iain Sinclair, but i’ve not yet finished reading his Hackney book so i won’t attempt to summarise, instead i’d recommend searching internets for some of his comments from the last year or two).
I can take or leave the games myself but i always worry about the extents to which cities prostrate themselves before them. Other than Barcelona, which did manage the whole thing in a way that was benficial to a citywide regeneration, they seem normally to pass though leaving a legacy of massive marooned stadia etc on their outskirts, with giant road infrastructure to serve the now vanished crowds (I’m thinking specifically of Sydney where many, though not all, of the developments sit like Acme Anvils in an otherwise sane urban environment).
So Vancouver, which has long intrigued me personally, intrigues me in an entirely different way now based on your post. It’s a compact city so there would be the chance that it might be handled after a European model (which I’d stress is not me coming here and launching an Old WOrld/ New World argument- the different spatial models in their urban form is a fact) but the homeless law you refer to above is kind of scary, isn’t it?
We had a short lived version of something similar here in Dublin in the lead up to our 2002 elections (date might be off) where suddenly all of the wino’s along routes where a politician was due to canvass that day werescooped up in the morning and sent into shelters for a few days. Zero tolerance i think they called it, didn’t last beyond on the election result. It’s safe to assume the same will happen round your way i think, they’ll be let back blinking into the daylight once the cameras pass.
Oh- that went badly off topic…all apologies. I look forward to the theory.
We’ve just missed out on the 2016 Games (well, Chicago did, but that’d spill over up my ways in Wisconsin, and they were gonna make Madison the cycling hub, and what a mess that might’ve been).
I feel a little bad being relieved about the whole thing. I don’t have any real attachment to the Olympics, but I know people who were really excited about the possibility of a Summer Games in the Midwest. I’m sure I’d hate having that same pseudoreligious awe crammed down my throat as well, but would I have put up with it for the sake of the people hungry for that Olympic myth?
I wish I had more to add right now, but I don’t. Needless to say I’m in 100% agreement with the post. It’s strange how we all gloss over when the mythic reality clashes with what we know to be true. For Vancouverites it’s a daily occurrence to. Especially when you live or work anywhere near the Downtown East-side (as I do).
I only have a somewhat petulant, gut reaction to offer with regard to the Olympics: Fuck them, I’m not drinking the Koo-aid.
Also: I used to live in Winnipeg. What they did was…actually…provide…housing. Obviously, the elements and the smaller population make this easier to manage.
Like, if a regular part of city workers’ jobs is shovelling frozen corpses into sanitation trucks, there’s gonna be an outcry!
Colink, don’t worry about any Old World/New World arguments over here: make ‘em if you’ve got ‘em, I’d love to hear ‘em! North Americans don’t have a whole lot to be chauvinistic about, I think…
The proposed “sweep up the trash” law is scary, but of course what’s scariest about it is that it’s hardly an unprecedented governmental tactic…anti-Suharto student protestors were pre-emptively rounded up before our APEC conference a few years ago, etc…tasers and tear-gas and all that stuff, we haz it, and it’s a shameful disgrace that very often it’s just business-as-usual…
Of course our Olympics plan were promoted the same way a whole lot of Olympics plans are: we’ve learned from other host cities’ mistakes, we’re going green etc. (by the way, Morgan, have you checked out that godawful wind turbine on the top of Grouse Mountain yet? Jesus, wind farms…I mean obviously we’ve got lots of wind around here, but we’ve also got a LOT of seems-to-me-obvious factors that suggest having lots of wind isn’t enough to make wind farms a no-brainer…really, shouldn’t we be looking a lot more seriously at tidal generators? But dear GOD our government’s incompetent, I mean even for a B.C. government they’re setting new records), it’ll all come in under budget and there’ll be lots of social housing…
…But in some senses what Vancouver is, is a little town ringed about with behemoth corporate interests: just like the rest of B.C., the money arises mainly from throughput of materials, and thus the whole place is pretty thoroughly greenwashed. Displacing costs onto municipalities is a way of life here, for the bigger governments and their business partners, I mean it is a way of life…and our compactness is something we’ve rarely reckoned with responsibly. I think the presumption was that we were indeed going to follow a more “European” model, but in these parts we also tend to figure that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing half-assed, so…
But do come! Come while it’s still got most of its virtues…
By the way, speaking of Sydney, does anyone else remember “The Games”, an Australian series starring John Clarke (sp.?) that satirized the doings of their Organizing Committee?
And, ah, the big theory of sports…
Well, like I was saying, though it’s perhaps a fine line between sublimation and overpressure release valve, I tend to come down on the side of sports as a social good…or perhaps I should say, a psychological good. Maybe it’s mostly illusory and coercive, but it isn’t all illusory and coercive, and it isn’t even all “social glue”, as our annoyingly ever-growing national mythology about hockey constantly, witlessly suggests…
…Why do you all know, that I am old enough to remember a time when people did not constantly declare that hockey is what really holds this nation together?! SIMPLER TIMES…
…Although it is a social something, sure enough. I think more a lubricant than a glue, even though my love of the game really began with peer-group activities in high school…still, if there’s one thing about it that’s real, it’s that it represents reality: a temporary suspension of ambiguity and ambivalence. Well, that’s why sporting events are broadcast live, because if you don’t see that player score that goal or make that save in at least what can pass very closely for real time, then the greater part of your feeling of involvement will be dissipated…and of course seeing the thing live, as an actual extant happening, an information-rich direct sensory involvement, is where most people suddenly “get it”.
So, it’s artificial, and yet it’s got a “truth” to it regardless…the same truth we usually find in fiction. There’s the guy ragging the puck, on the actual ice, in the actual moment, and what he’s doing may be sort of absurd but at least it’s clear, and as an observer you’re implicated in his basically-meritocratic (though nonetheless powerfully luck-flavoured) success or failure. Sporting events are all attempts to find extra time and space in the state of confinement: confinement of the clock, the rules, and the method. So, in my opinion at least, it comes by that part of its emblematic heft pretty honestly! In a sense, it’s functionally aligned with the experience of work, of simple labour: and it’s not for nothing that hockey’s a “lunchbucket” sport, a sometimes fucking embarrassingly folksy, “down-to-earth” occupation. Of course the hockey example is culturally-specific, it isn’t NBA basketball or Premier League soccer and it’s not readily transposable with them in terms of what symbolic social reinforcements it carries on its back; but that’s not to say nothing can be generalized from it — it isn’t just circuses, just pure distraction! But as well as being a relief from social pressures, that is a displacement from one (frustrated) persona into another (hopefully less-frustrated) one…it’s also an analogic reminder that we’re entitled to hope our endeavours will produce BIG and GRATIFYING successes…as big and as gratifying, indeed, as the disgustingly overblown war-scented pantomime thank-you-Jesus nationalistic rah-rah bullshit success-ceremony that really, honestly turns me off too…
…Because, essentially, I’m a snob!
Because I like the game, and not all the coarser social uses it gets turned to. So in this sense I’m a very casual sports fan, but also at the same time an inordinately committed one — and in the greater mass of sports fans, even Vancouver Canucks fans (!), I’m most definitely an outsider too.
Except, you know…when we win.
But then when we win, the rest of ‘em don’t know I’m cheering my own psychological vitalization, rather than their social one. And it is possible to find other sports fans who like it for the same reasons I like it, and then when we win there is a shared social benefit between us…
Hmm…
Well, I guess this isn’t much of a theory…
Tell you what, I’ll come back to it!
Next time, I’m going all the way!