Dodging The Five Ring Circus

I've never liked the Olympics, even the 2012 ones where the logo looks like Lisa Simpson giving someone fellatio.

Back when Free To Air Television was the only media option, I ensconced myself in libraries and cinemas and made a game of how long I could prevent the Five Ring Circus from pinging my radar. I averted my eyes from newspaper headlines and tv screens in shop windows, isolated myself aurally with a transistor radio and earphone (they didn't have double ear-buds in those days), and dodged the memes like Neo limbo-dancing away from bullets.

Later, it became easier. VHS tapes were available from the late 1980s and living in Glebe New South Wales I was close to a video warehouse which, in the days before shops sold VHS movies, flogged ex-rental tapes for $5 and $10 a pop. I eased myself through several Olympics fortnights with Roadshow and Syme Video flicks like Radioactive Dreams, Get Crazy, Eating Raoul and Goodbye Paradise.

That worked until the millennium. I went to work in a call centre for a cable tv company and it became impossible to avoid the silliness. Screens in my line of sight showed people running around in circles, swimming, chucking things and jumping over stuff. My co-workers went bugfuck crazy about all this exercise that other people were doing.

They would say 'we' won a gold medal, as if in some way they contributed to the efforts of some guy on a push bike eight hundred kilometres away. They called the guy a hero in spite of the fact that all he did was go round and round in circles marginally better than people from other countries.

It was an epiphany for me that people could be so deluded.

All I can compare it to is the realisation I had in 1998 while visiting the USA. It was there that I discovered that millions of people actually took religion seriously. I was shocked and horrified that my fellow homo sapiens sapiens could carry the fairytales of childhood into their adult lives. That was scary. Like realising that werewolves exist.

But I digress. Let's look at the Olympic weirdness a little more closely.

In a World where the big problems and threats require intensive international cooperation, a festival is arranged which is almost engineered to divide people along national lines.

When Baron de Coubertin invented the modern Olympics, nations weren't invited. Individual athletes were. Of course, nationalism did rear it's wall-eyed and ugly head. Around the same time that the Olympic Torch Relay started. What a wonderful thing, lighting a symbolic flame in Greece and carrying it to the Five Ring Circus. A solid media event, a chance for the average punter to get involved. One of the best publicity stunts ever, it began at a very interesting time in human history which also marks the start of the association between the Olympics and Nationalism. Bit of a pity that it was invented by the Nazis in 1936.

(I wonder if they've ever carried the Olympic Torch through Israel.)

TV network coverage of this debacle enhances nationalism. The same organisations that have dumbed down the national conversations on politics, climate change, marriage equality and economics further turn the screws with the shrieking, Middle Aged White Men (MAWMs) they get to commentate on the Olympics.

As a middle aged white man, every MAWM I see on Australian commercial television disgusts and embarrasses me. As a flawed and fallible MAWM who is trying each day to be a better, more compassionate person, to see MAWMs who are lauded for being smug, anti-intellectual jingoistic pricks with monstrous senses of entitlement is disheartening.

And let's dismiss another piece of bullshit. Athletes aren't heroes, brave or particularly admirable. They are selfish, cosseted princesses who get educations without HECS fees, free overseas travel and are worshipped without achieving anything real. Also, in a lot of ways, they can be embarassing.

In my job, when I work hard and well and achieve things, it benefits others as much as myself. I fix problems that help people live their lives. I do it 38 hours per week, 48 weeks of the year and am paid modest amounts for doing so. I enjoy my job because it helps others and, with a few exceptions, I am treated with respect.

In my other endeavours: the podcasts and radio work I do, I share interesting things with people. I make them aware of cool movies they might not be aware of, give them some (hopefully) interesting background information on the film, the people who made it and what it says about the times in which it was made. I share a passion for the history of movies and what they can tell us about who we were and who we are and how we have changed in between. It costs me money and time to do those things but I do them with a great sense of joy and satisfaction.

I was over fifty before I started to use podcasting and was given the opportunity to do radio. I found my niche and my passion later in life, which I find really cool.

When I podcast or do radio, it isn't about me. It's about the people who listen. Yes, I get kudos and feedback and the regard of my peers (just a little bit) but the pleasure is in the giving.

This is the opposite of professional sport. It's about the money and the idolatry, mostly about the money. The sponsorships that enable athletes to avoid real work, the lucrative advertising revenue, the ghostwritten autobiographies and public appearances. The circus that perpetuates the cash flow.

So what if homes and business have to be moved so that the World can have a two week entertainment event? So what if missile launchers are placed on top of blocks of flats and kids are kept awake by the constant buzzing of Blackhawk and Apache helicopters? So what if ordinary people have to go through security checkpoints to get to work and home? As long as the money flows for the pigs at the trough, it's okay. The mindless punters have another spectacle to reinforce their prejudices.

The world needs another fortnight that celebrates brawn over brain. We really don't have enough of that sort of thing.