On Friday February 12th, 2010, the Vancouver Winter Olympics officially began. While half the sentient universe was watching the opening ceremonies on TV, I was reading a book. Even now I expect there’s some spectacle on TV, but don’t come to me asking what it is; I couldn’t care less. What follows is a bit of an explanation why I’d rather submit to a televised proctological examination from Dr. Phil than watch the Olympics.
My first encounter with a spectacle of global proportions was in Montréal during Expo ’67—Man And His World. I was only four at the time, but I have one distinct memory from the event. While riding the monorail, I pressed my hands against the doors. When the monorail stopped and the doors opened, one of the doors drew my hand into the recess and smushed it. I screamed bloody murder. My parents tell me that my hand was preternaturally flat for the rest of the day and they worried that my hand might never be right again. I have another memory, but it comes from a later time, after the official Exposition was over but before the site was dismantled. I was a little older and better able to remember what I saw. What I recall in subsequent visits to the site were the large structures, especially the American pavilion, a geodesic ball designed by Buckminster Fuller, kind of an architectural testicle getting ready to seed itself all over North America, from Ontario Place to EPCOT. It was called the biosphere and, in what seems a prophetic irony, the outer skin was destroyed by fire in 1976. What impressed me most about the exposition grounds was a feeling of emptiness. They were big and I was small. This was not a functional space. It was not designed to serve people. It was designed to be grand in the way that all alienating things are grand.
I had the same feeling when I visited the three permanent structures which were left behind after Expo 86 in Vancouver. They were big, poorly used spaces that didn’t look like they were meant for people. For a brief period, Brian Fawcett acted as Expo 86’s official architectural historian. He was fired when the person who hired him was fired, and the organizers (a questionable title for that event) decided not to fill the position, quite possibly because it would incriminate them. In an essay first published in Border/Lines, Fawcett had this to say:
The Expo Centre … resembles no other building on the planet so much as the geodesic dome at Disney’s EPCOT Centre at Florida’s Disney World. What Freschi [its architect] meant by universality, unconsciously or not, was Disney World. And more than anything else, Disney is what fueled the imagination of Expo 86, from Jim Pattison [President & CEO of Expo 86 Corporation, billionaire and born-again Christian] down to the most obscure budget gremlins. …
The Disney imagination has increasingly dominated the post-war expositions. And as its influence has grown, the expository content of the expositions has become either descriptive — as in “Wow, here’s a spectacular machine!” — or purely formal — an exposition as a celebration of exposition. … New or critical concepts are not tolerated at all. At Disney, the medium is the message, and the experience of the medium is everything. Those who object are party-poops. They may even be dangerous subversives. …
There is no pollution, no death or disease, no mental illness or stress permitted by Disney, and absolutely no tooth decay. Nobody is allowed to live out of shopping carts or in tin shacks or cardboard hovels. Such conditions reflect failure, and failure is not permitted.
Fawcett’s description of Vancouver’s last big party could apply with equal force 24 years later. All we need to do is substitute McDonald’s for Disney. Not surprisingly, Jim Pattison is still pulling the strings, although his official role is vaguer this time around.
Implicit in Fawcett’s description is the idea of control. Disney culture seeks to control the way we encounter life. Control of content means that it protects children from unpleasant facts, like illness and death and porn. Even from healthy expressions of sexuality. Control of the wider environment means that it asserts a fundamental confidence in science (the whole point of EPCOT) and an almost delusional optimism. Both forms of control were sorely challenged long before the 2010 Winter Games began. It’s unsurprising then that, after a fatality on the luge run, the whole region should be drenched in rain and the opening glitz-fest at B.C. Place should encounter technical difficulties (there was a problem with the hydraulics on one of the arms that was supposed to raise the Olympic cauldron, what one of my clever facebook friends described as a “spectacular display of erectile dysfunction.”) Meanwhile protesters have been escalating their efforts in downtown Vancouver. Note the language of one news report: police moved in “to take control of the protesters.”
Grand international events can only be pronounced a success if the pundits doing the pronouncing are in a state of denial. Here is a list of the things that the pundits have to deny and, as you might expect, all have something to do with control:
Denial #1: The IOC really does give a shit about its stated fundamental principle of “promoting peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
In fact, the IOC stopped giving a shit about human dignity the day it discovered that it could fund its budget by controlling the Olympic brand and selling broadcasting rights. As a result, the Olympics are funded entirely by the host city, but the host is denied two major opportunities to recover costs. In the case of Vancouver, which had the misfortune of winning its bid before the economy crashed, the initial budget was set at $660 million. Even a year ago, the Vancouver Sun reported that the final bill would be ten times that amount (i.e. $200 for every Canadian citizen), including $2 bn for a trade and convention centre, another $2 bn for a highway to Whistler, and a whopping $900 million for security which will finance the largest military presence in Western Canada since World War II. Lucky for Vancouver, it won’t have to pay all the costs. Some of it gets borne by provincial and federal governments. Nevertheless, cost overruns raise the question: what happens to future municipal budgets now that Vancouver has to cope with carrying a substantial debt load? To pay interest, cuts will have to be made. Who will be the losers? As Douglas Haddow notes in the Guardian: the Vancouver and British Columbian governments have hinted at what’s to come by canceling 2400 surgeries, laying off 233 government employees, 800 teachers and recommending the closure of 14 schools.
But what about the impact on poverty and homelessness? The Christian Science Monitor notes that in both Atlanta (1996) and Sidney (2000) the homeless were forcibly removed from visible areas of those cities. In December, B.C. passed the euphemistically named Assistance to Shelter Act which would empower Vancouver police to conduct sweeps. As fences went up to implement Vancouver’s transportation plan, those living under the Georgia Viaduct were subject to arrest if they refused to leave. The experience from Expo 86 was that, because the cost of accommodation rose dramatically, single room occupancy hotels evicted their low income tenants causing a spike in the homeless population. Coupled with police power to conduct sweeps, that produces a precarious situation for the marginalized.
And what about censorship and freedom of expression? One of the more bizarre news items coming from Vancouver relates to Vancouver Public Library employees who received instructions to conceal logos and names of companies which were not official Olympic sponsors. Dismay is understandable—librarians are historically the guardians of both free speech and the free interplay of ideas. See the B.C. Civil Liberties Associations Censorship Gallery for locations and info about other examples of “suggested” and “corrected” speech. [Archived here.] Brad Cran, poet laureate for Vancouver, has declined an invitation to appear at the Olympics because of concerns about the requirement that he say only nice things. He regards his role as “prophetic” and has something to say about equality and the fact that fourteen female ski jumpers were not allowed to compete.
So much for dignity.
Denial #2: Even if there are cost overruns, Vancouver will retain many of the benefits of those expenditures and—through the magic of trickle-down economics—all the citizens (including the homeless) will be better off.
The only thing trickling down in Vancouver right now is rainfall from the ski slopes. Canadians tried to comfort themselves with this lie once before in order to justify the massive cost overruns during the Montréal Olympics in 1976. At left is one of the commemorative postage stamps issued to celebrate the event. It shows athletes carrying a flag inside Montréal’s Olympic Stadium—one of Canada’s great white elephants. The initial cost was projected at $134 million. The final price tag? $1.61 bn. The debt was not retired until 2006, 30 years after the Olympic games were over.
Jim Pattison believes so much in the trickle down theory that he’s skipped town in the middle of the event he helped to organize so he and 300 executives from the Jim Pattison Group can hold a big Canadian corporate pow-wow in—uh—Seattle. I guess America needs our money more than we do. This is illustrative of the smoke-and-mirrors game that people play with the “trickle down” metaphor. The event doesn’t pour capital into Vancouver. It’s structured to siphon capital out of Vancouver. The only thing it pours into Vancouver is debt and giant empty shells which will loom against the city’s skyline for years to come as a lingering reminder or our collective folly. The sponsors, including lead sponsor McDonald’s, aren’t there to improve the quality of life for Vancouver. They’re primary purpose is to earn money and lots of it. As a multinational corporation, McDonald’s has no local commitments and the money goes where it will. The justification follows the same form of argument that big Canadian mining companies like Barrick and Goldcorp have been using for years to sell their projects to communities in developing countries. Sure, in the short term it pumps cash into the local economy, but in the long term, after the mines are closed and the mining companies have gone home with their profits, the local residents are left to bear unlivable burdens.
At the opening ceremonies, k.d. lang sang Leonard Cohen’s much-loved Hallelujah. She should have sung another of his classic tunes: Everybody Knows. Everybody knows the deal is rotten.
So much for trickling down.
Denial #3: The Olympics are good for amateur sport.
Once upon a time, the Olympics was an amateur sporting event. If you’ve seen Chariots of Fire, you may recall how the use of a professional coach stirred up controversy for Harold Abrahams during the 1924 Olympics. That was all part of a gradual erosion of the founding principles. The greatest pressure came from former Soviet Bloc countries where athletes met the formal requirements of “amateur” but participated in state-funded training programs that allowed them to perform at a professional level. Meanwhile Western athletes used trust laws to pretend they weren’t receiving compensation (via corporate endorsements). The result was much the same as in the Soviet Bloc countries. Athletes met formal requirements but were de facto professionals. Now the IOC has discarded the fictions. Elite athletes like Sidney Crosby join the competition and the results are sometimes so lopsided they’re embarrassing.
Since the Olympics are no longer an amateur sporting event, the only way they can be good for amateur sport is if we regard them as somehow embedded in a larger infrastructure that nurtures sport for all ages and abilities. It becomes a celebration of something we all are involved in. Hmm. Anybody know any other good jokes?
In Canada, the only way governments can think to support amateur sport is to put on a blindfold and throw money in the air. Or even more ludicrous, set up a lottery to fund elite sport through regressive taxation. What the hell do we need a lottery for? We’re tax-payers. The government is already taking our money. Short-term thinking prevails. How many medals can we win at the 2010 Winter Games? There is little commitment to long-term goals like the reduction of obesity in young people and the huge health-care savings that would come from an overall rise in physical fitness.
My personal experience in amateur sport (Trampoline & Tumbling) suggests that aspiring athletes have to rely almost exclusively on privately funded infrastructure supported by substantial volunteerism (parents of athletes). Public funding supports regulatory bodies like Gymnastics Canada and its provincial counterparts. But these bodies could never create anything resembling an infrastructure without private support. In other words, while there are many aspects of life in Canada which benefit from socialized programming, amateur sport isn’t one of them.
So much for amateur sport.
Denial #4: The kind of nationalism fostered by really big shows is relevant and healthy.
Consider these words:
The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn’t separate, but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. He also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That’s why the Olympic Flame should never die.
Now consider that the man who uttered those words was Adolph Hitler at the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Prior to the games, police made sweeps of the city streets to remove Gypsies, and the Nazi propaganda machine cranked out images attesting to the athletic superiority of the Aryan race. See the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website for a good photo/narrative account of the Berlin Games. While Canada’s consumerist ideology may seem benign by comparison, it’s still worth examining the similarities in rhetoric and practices. Nazi Germany was the culmination of 19th century romantic ideals that found expression through nationalist movements. Surely we’ve changed since then. Surely we’ve learned from our mistakes.
A full decade into our third millennium, nationalism has become an insupportable fiction. It’s an administrative convenience, but nothing worthy of our heartfelt loyalty. Consider the athletes. Members of the American hockey team play professionally for Canadian NHL teams. And Canadians like Sidney Crosby play for American teams. Japanese figure skaters train with Canadian coaches and Canadian downhill skiers train in the Italian Alps. All of them win sponsorships from Corporations for whom national boundaries are meaningless. And news reportage reaches the entire world instantly.
I’m not suggesting that we should abandon our local identities. Each one of us needs a local identity to survive. But, perhaps more than any other nation, Canada illustrates how useless nationality is in establishing that sense of local identity. A person from Vancouver is very different than a person from Iqaluit, or from St. John’s, or from Québec City or from Flin Flon. Canada succeeds as a federalist state because people from each of these places can maintain a hybrid identity. We do the same thing beyond Canadian borders too. Most of us maintain affiliations with the U.S. or with countries we may have come from. Most of us have connections with friends and family and associates all around the world.
So why do our politicians continue to impose a propagandist gloss on the achievements of Olympic athletes? If a medal is to redound to the credit of a nation, then it must be earned by the entire nation. It must be earned by treating with respect even its most marginalized citizens, by nurturing and inspiring millions of children who, though they never reach a podium themselves, nevertheless learn value in honouring the whole person in body, mind and spirit, and they are earned by ensuring that events like these become a legacy rather than a burden.
So much for nationalism.