After violence and sex, it is athletic prowess, when combined with primitive nationalism, that is unbeatable as the winning ingredient for bread and circus spectacles. The lesson of the Genocide Games for China and GE/NBC and other sponsoring corporations is clear. Authoritarian capitalism is the future, finally putting the nail into the lie that private wealth accumulation by a state-controlling oligarchy is somehow democratic. Bush, Putin, Berlusconi and the other gangster bosses ruling the globe can rest easy. The global peasantry is easily manipulated by pretty-shiny gold baubles, canned dramas, steroidal wonders, and prepubescent mutants. The people of Tibet, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, not to mention the vast majority of Chinese? Well, fuck them, Michael Phelps* is swimming!
My favorite stories out of the “Games” so far, after the bogus fakery of the opening charade, is that there are officially sanctioned cheers for the audience, and that, while the state there lavishes billions on producing medal-winners in a system of conscripted child labor, they starve recreational facilities for most Chinese.
*It is instructive of our present moment that Phelps looks like a jarhead -- slang for a pupal Marine, shorn of his humanity to kill -- while Mark Spitz was a hippie in comparison.
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