The Guilt Olympics

By Keith A. Owens

I’m getting really tired of feeling guilty about watching the Olympics. And I’m trying to dodge the apparent fact that this says as much about me as it does about the increasingly disturbing side stories that continue to leak every two years whenever the Olympics (Summer, Winter, Summer, Winter) are set to begin.

And it always seems to be some version of the same story; [INSERT YOUR TROUBLED COUNTRY HERE] has spent roughly a triple gazillion dollars and agreed to the sale of an estimated 2,000 of the country’s newborn male children to win the nod of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to be blessed with the ‘privilege’ (????) of hosting the Olympic Games. These countries are usually led by dictators or some freedom-munching political party that is not required to respond to the will – let alone the needs – of its people. Which means it does whatever it wants and the hell with the people. Because in dictatorships, the people are kind of like Lays Potato Chips; you can always make more.

The second half of the story that seems to always leak out is that after the Olympics have left town, the incredibly O My God Can You Believe How Beautiful Olympic facilities (stadiums, skating tracks, Olympic villages, whatever) are rarely if ever used again and they fall into disrepair and pretty much rot away. And those of us such as myself who are Olympic fanatics shake our heads and wish desperately that someone would do something which, of course, never happens. And then…

Silence.

Until the next Olympics.

This year the 2022 Winter Olympic Games are being held in China, which was earning quite a bit of press prior to the pandemic as it worked overtime to squeeze the life out of Hong Kong once Hong Kong was relinquished by the British Crown making it no longer a British colony. But according to History.com, this wasn’t quite according to the agreement:

“At midnight on July 1, 1997, Hong Kong returned to Chinese control after a century and a half of British colonial rule. The handover was meant to establish a “one country, two systems” relationship between China and Hong Kong that would last until 2047, with Hong Kong existing as a special administrative region.”

Yeah…wellllllll….no. I mean, the intentions may have been good for about the first five minutes or so. But then the Communist Party decided that the charade was over, they were Big and Mighty, Hong Kong was not, and it was time to whip Hong Kong into line so they could cower and keep their mouths shut along with the rest of the folks. Remind them that they weren’t British or even white, they were Chinese after all. And this is where it gets kind of thorny because colonialism isn’t exactly something to be venerated and loved. Colonialism was basically white people establishing themselves as lords and lordettes over and above whatever non-white folks they had managed to beat into submission.

But over time, somehow, that arrangement kinda worked out for Hong Kong and folks there were really able to flourish and generally enjoy life without having that Big Red Boot on their neck all the time. Many residents of Hong Kong got the hell out of Hong Kong practically the day after colonialism ended because they knew mainland China and the Communist Party couldn’t be trusted to keep their word, not even if Hong Kong had proven potential to make them a ton of money through free enterprise.

Anyway, the screws kept getting turned tighter on Hong Kong until there were numerous protests and uprisings, and that still hasn’t quite settled down.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in China as the Olympics got closer, there came the story of the oppressed Uyghur people, nearly two million of whom are being kept in detention camps because of who they are – and who they aren’t. And then there’s Peng Shuai, an international tennis star who had the nerve to accuse a Chinese bigwig of sexual assault before being hastily erased from the scenery and promptly reprogrammed before being allowed to make a publicly approved and scrubbed video where she happily proclaimed that all was well, all is well, nothing to see here, my bad.

Thomas Bach, the IOC chair, apparently made arrangements to have lunch or some meal with Shuai, but no news has leaked out about if that ever happened or what did happen if it happened. Bach just wants everybody to shut up, eat ‘em and grin so he can have his damn Olympics and cash his check(s). Oh, and in this morning’s New York Times, he’s quoted as saying he won’t request an inquiry into Peng’s allegations unless she asks him to because, after all, “it’s her life.”

Or not.

Anyway. Happy viewing…