It's the Olympics!
August 8, 2008
DURING THE opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics - a spectacular energy-guzzling affair, with fireworks and light displays and state of the art special effects – two old women knocked on the door of my apartment to ensure that I wasn’t using the air conditioner and thereby diverting vital electricity away from the Birds Nest Stadium.
I shooed them away. I then turned on my air conditioners, activated every electric and electronic device and opened all the doors of my fridge in the hope that such tiny gestures of ill-will could make the Olympic lights go out.
There will be 20,000 journalists here to report on the grandiloquent and suspiciously fascistic Olympic Games of 2008. A significant minority of that total will presumably consist of TV reporters and presenters, forced to feign enthusiasm in clay pigeon shooting or the 20-kilometre walk. Also, no doubt, there will be a large number of print journalists hanging around Beijing’s bars and cafes and jotting down quotes from the staff about what the Olympic Games means to them, which will then be used to produce some spurious colour piece about China’s patriotic youth, its “army of bachelors,” its huge population or the rapid transformation of its economy.
As far as I am concerned, I wish I could hide away in a small cave for the next three weeks or so in order to spare myself from the grotesque outpourings of patriotic pride and fervour, and from the very notion that the Olympics provides a way of “bringing nations together”. I want to avoid the possibility of having to extract symbolic meaning from minor sporting triumphs. I don’t want to be forced to look for the cracks in the well-constructed façade of harmony and enthusiasm that the government has constantly sought to enforce over the last few months. I would prefer not to have to pass any security checkpoints or inspections on the offchance that I might be planning to blow up this absurd and obscene piece of pointless and extravagant grandiosity.
I should, of course, be trying to position myself in what is likely to be an event of historical importance. I ought to be thinking about how it will look, decades later, when I come to describe my experiences of Beijing 2008, and the only thing I can say is that I watched Star Trek.
