a grammar

in which I realize I’m sort of a believer in the Olympic spirit, actually

I wrote a while back about cliches: how we’re suspicious of them, how we have good reason to be, and how we still come to points in our lives where we uncover the point of them for ourselves. (You could read at least a few hundred pages of David Foster Wallace on this and related points.) Well: the Olympics are one such cliche, no question. And right now, especially Canada-wise, you can read plenty of meaningful debate about how they’re run, who they benefit, and whether or not the whole thing is kind of just a capitalistic scam.

Weirdly enough, the Olympics were one of the things I had in mind when talking about cliches the first time — though not so much the winter ones, which involve far too much equipment and landscaping to work right. (You could practically describe “winter” as a Eurocentric concept.)

The Olympic spirit is a grand and complex construction. Those of us in the U.S. are usually inducted into its ways before the age of 10. We know the Olympic narrative, the narrative of international sports. We know the rote language and rote television packages that are used to build it. The spirit of peace and internationalism and good sportsmanship. The casting of the athletes as noble individuals transcending the details of where they come from. People from nations that are at war with one another coming together and competing in a spirit of respect. Long-shot competitors from tiny nations with pocket-sized GDPs, standing up on the world stage and saying we’re in this. Even if they come in last — good for them. Clap more for the Jamaican bobsled team, walking its sled across the finish, than whoever wins. Clap more for the Iraqi sprinter who made it here in the first place. Set aside your international chauvinism. Every one of these athletes is just a person with a story who works hard and has come here, bravely and humbly, to be part of a dream, a dream about the human spirit! We are on some greater, nobler plane than the everyday muck of nations and politics and iniquity.

Yeah, yeah. And of course, at some point after being inducted into this narrative, you’re bound to begin noticing that it’s fairly mythical. The Olympics are a massive international business dominated by pretty much the kinds of people you’d expect to dominate a massive international business. There is muck and politics and iniquity involved in every decision those people make. The competitions are dominated by nations with the best resources for training and equipping their talent. Sometimes the talent doesn’t even have much choice in the matter. The host nation pumps out money, sanitizes its cities, and pushes back at its own citizens in an effort to manage its image or promote tourism. They do the equivalent of buying new furniture to impress guests even though the plumbing doesn’t work. And pretending to rise above war and nationalism and inequality does not actually make those things vanish. The Olympic-dream speeches from the newscasters reveal themselves as tacky and tiresome, more showbiz than reality — plus, after a while, deadly boring. And why do we clap for the Iraqi sprinter as if she’s overcome some vague, mysterious hardship we’re thoroughly uninvolved in? Isn’t this whole Olympic narrative sort of a dream we’ve made up to make ourselves feel better?

Well yeah: of course it is. That’s sort of the point. That’s how ideals work, isn’t it? They’re a way of practicing for things we can’t actually do yet. The point is that we agree, periodically, to invest in these values, to force ourselves to believe in them, to teach our children how to believe in them. Do that many people disagree that the values are basically positive ones? And here you get to sit in front of a television with your kids and show them how to believe in those values, with newscasters helpfully attempting to articulate them for you, and athletes helpfully attempting to live them out. And those kids can go on to think hard about reality and understand the reasons to be cynical or critical about this endeavor, but at least they’ll have some experience of what the ideals are, which is probably important.

All of which puts me in the strange position of tending to agree with criticisms of the whole Olympic enterprise, but not coming anywhere near being able to think there’s anything hollow about the games themselves. Here in the U.S., at least, they seem to change people remarkably — for a few weeks, every few years, you suddenly get Americans all eagerly participating in a narrative about internationalism! (It helps that Olympic competition is actually a good fit with a rugged-individualist view of the world.) Sometimes lip service is less “lip service” and more practice — learning to repeat the things we value.

Either that or I just love any event that’s ever scarred me with John Tesh gushing creepily about a “Belorussian Swan.”