The Column

Olympic Fever

Why the world should watch the Beijing games

I have a poster that through the years I've carried from squalid college room to squalid college room to squalid Chicago apartment room. It's a photograph from the 1968 Olympics when two black American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their gloved fists and lowered their heads during the National Anthem in protest of their country's abysmal treatment of African-Americans.

Smith and Carlos won the Gold and Bronze medals, respectively. The third man in the picture, and the Silver medalist, was an Australian named Peter Norman, and the story goes that when Carlos forgot his glove for the protest he and Smith had planned (and you'd think that would've been kind of an important detail), Norman gave him his, saying, "Every man is born equal and should be treated that way." The three men became lifelong friends, and when Norman died two years ago from a heart attack, Carlos and Smith flew to Australia to serve as pallbearers at his funeral. This is one of my favorite sports stories ever, and it's one of the most moving, powerful photographs I've ever seen.

Again and again the Olympic Games have been used as a forum to raise some of the world's most important political issues. Forty years after those three sprinters proved that courage doesn't have a skin color, we have this sticky ethical quagmire when it comes to China hosting the Olympics in Beijing.

As the games draw near, the protests, the passion, and the anger have begun to flare. The Olympic flame has been attacked by demonstrators in nearly every country it passes through. The governments of the United Kingdom and Germany have announced they will skip the opening ceremonies. Talk of boycotts has grown.

In case you haven't been paying attention, here's why:

China is a dysfunctional authoritarian-capitalist fuckmare.

The list of nasty, awful shit that you can lay at the feet of the Chinese government is too long to fully document here, and frankly, I don't have six months and 700,000 words to dedicate to this column. The NBA playoffs just started.

What I can tell you is that China's rapid industrialization has come at the expense of its sweatshop citizenry and an environment so fouled that Beijing had to take half its cars off the roads so Olympic athletes could, you know, breathe properly while exerting themselves.

The "communist" government doesn't deserve so kind a label, and any notion of egalitarianism is utterly laughable. Instead, China has become a bizarre economic behemoth intent on keeping its currency devalued, its wages abysmal, and its influence spreading like a bad rash.

It has frequently and aggressively oppressed its citizens in Tibet, even as the de facto Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, has bent over backwards to assure China that he is not a separatist and wants only a fair measure of autonomy for the people of Tibet. The Chinese government frequently rattles its saber over Taiwan, a speck of an island that's about as worth starting World War III over as my backyard with its three broken lawn chairs and water-logged beer-pong table. China treats its own citizens horrendously, executes the most people of any country in the world, forces abortions upon its women, and quashes free expression with ruthless zeal.

Oh, yeah: And it's the proud sponsor of a slow-rolling genocide in the Sudan that has claimed the lives of over 400,000 people, not to mention caused the rape, mutilation, and displacement of millions.

And this is just scraping the flotsam off the surface. If we really reached into the barrel, if we really dug our hands into this shit and started connecting the dots between oil and energy and militarism and mass-production of cheap goods and human rights and repression and nuclear proliferation—whoo boy, then we could really have us a good time.

One of my dumber liberal friends said to me: "Yeah, but how do we have any moral authority to criticize China? Look at us in Iraq. Look at us with our own human rights issues."

Okay, dumb liberal friend: Dick Cheney doesn't have the moral authority to criticize China. I, however, do—as I have never in my life started a blood-drenched sectarian civil war (yet). Also, I'm not so sure that if a guy is sawing off the head of a puppy, he doesn't have the right to turn to the guy to his left, who is sawing the head off a baby and say, "Yo, dude, what the hell are you doing? That's messed up."

So the question is not whether the Chinese government is a sniveling, money-crazed, power-mad group of thugs. The question is: What's to be done about it in the context of the Olympics?

The International Olympic Committee deserves much of the blame for awarding the games to China in the first place. What did they think was going to happen? That China would suddenly clean up its act because it had to build a big new shiny stadium? Anne Applebaum pointed out in her Slate column how awesomely well that worked with Nazi Germany. Hosting the games acts as a form of recognition from the international community, and the IOC gave it to Hitler in 1936 (but at least nothing else bad happened after that!).

But it's too late to cry over spilt milk, so what's anyone supposed to do about this mess?

Applebaum advocates the effectiveness of a boycott, and certainly the heads of major governments not showing up to the opening ceremonies has a certain satisfying "Fuck You" element to it. How about a boycott of Olympic sponsors? An effective boycott of the twelve major Olympic sponsors would be awesome were it not so impractical (although, if you're interested, you can see the full list here). Good luck boycotting the likes of General Electric, though, which likely has a product or subsidiary in three out of every five items you touch, read, watch, or date. My current love interest is actually a GE product (not to mention totally baller hot).

The way I see it, that leaves one possibility: Attention and Scrutiny.

The Olympic Games offer an unprecedented chance for journalists, political leaders, and regular citizens in countries around the world to highlight, dredge up, and finger madly every rotten thing China has under its roof.

For instance, a group of Olympic athletes—forbidden from political demonstration in the Olympic Village by an arcane little piece of bullshit called Rule 51—have formed Team Darfur to highlight the atrocities taking place in the region of Sudan. Unfortunately, their website has precious little to say about China's involvement and its ties to Sudanese oil, which I'd bet money is the work of some scumbag PR rep advising them not to ruffle too many feathers. Still, it's better than nothing, and you can't blame athletes, most of whom have toiled away in obscurity for years, to want a shot at their life's dream.

The best the world can offer under the circumstances is a healthy dose of non-violent demonstration, civil disobedience, and unchecked verbal rage (this last one is always my favorite) and hope that as the world turns its eyes to Beijing, the full beast behind China's machine will be revealed—a vile mixture of greed and arrogance and power-lust. If you want to learn more, I'd suggest Olympic Watch , a group that's been working for years to draw attention to the sins of the Chinese government.

What I'm truly hoping for is that as the games progress this summer, the world will be treated to a moment that can rival Carlos and Smith's display in '68; something that will force China's hand, or at least turn the international community on its most abhorrent practices. I know I'll be watching: Angry, engraged, and likely curled up on my couch with a bowl of popcorn and my GE-produced vacuum cleaner/girlfriend.