Aaaah yes, summertime. The endless repeats on TV and the news as the sheeple are lulled into the false sense of security that all is well in the world. Nothing new ever happens until the new school year starts up again and along with it a nagging need for distraction. Returning from my yearly summertime hiatus away from these fine internets, I’m pleased to report that the status quo has been maintained once again, making it possible for us to enjoy our vacation time. Having landed on my feet again here in sunny Spain, browsing the news from the past month is eerily similar to leafing through the TV guide lineup of summer reruns making it so much easier to understand the circular nature of news. A top ten for y’all:

1) End of the financial crisis. That’s right it’s over. At least in Canada where the governor of the Bank of Canada declared, “We’re on track for the recovery both in Canada and globally“. The Canadians are looking at a 1.3% rise in GDP this quarter. It’s hard not to agree when the reason we got into that mess were the actions of banks and non-bank (at the time) entities such as Goldman Sachs. All must be good when they declare profits of $3.44 billion this quarter, while others such as HSBC and Barclays pull in over £6 billion in six months. Aaah, feel so much better again. No weapons of mass destruction here. And the bonuses are because bank employees are like footballers and movie stars. What’s that you say? Nothing has changed structurally to make the problem go away, and in fact conditioned have improved for those same institutions to make even more money because they have less competition and more government leeway to do crazy stuff like this? And there not even sorry? My dad says housing prices are going up again on the west coast, so all must be ok.

2) The death of US health care reform, sold as the only hope to pay for the bailout of the above crisis. Well, the parallel to the tactic used in the 90’s to derail the last big push is far too obvious, the disinformation too painful. Really, many Americans equate a socialized health care system with eugenics.

3) The Clinton-era flashback above leads straight to North Korea. Kim Jong-Il is crazy! No?? Again, sorry, Really? Is it necessary to make the news so transparently circular? Bill coulda bombed them in ‘93, didn’t, now he negotiates for the release of reporters. Ah yes, the old rewarding children for bad behaviour gambit. Lucky America likes bombing other countries.

4) The world is still safer due to western help in Afghanistan. Did I say change the channel? This rerun is boring. Well, it’s not as big as Iraq anymore but while the new NATO boss pushes for more European help most Americans - oops, there I go again, US bashing - of the world are still blissfully unaware of the ease with which this could have been avoided. Books not bombs. Everyone should just head up to Mongolia to check this out to remember what war and hegemony used to be all about

5) Mongolia to the Chinese. What’s that, Chinese are being executed. Is it Tiananmen? No, Uighurs, well away from Beijing. They’re Muslims and not as pretty as those Iranian girls, so who really cares I guess?!

6) Political unrest in Latin America. Honduras this time. Yes, I know, America once again in a no-win situation. Do something, don’t. Hmmm, how did they get there?

7) The G8 is still in charge of guiding the world towards a better future (?!), with or without Italy apparently.

Myanmar, Aung San Su Kyi on trial. Probably seems old hat even to her, having been in jail off and on for over 20 years now. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1991, after having won elections the previous year for which the military threw her in jail, is this time accused of having a man swim out to the island where she was held to warn her that “her life was in danger“. In a country that moves their capital to avoid scutiny, anything can happen. A most bizarro world we live in, the junta can just keep her in jail indefinitely, until she becomes “Nelson Mandela figure” at which time, well, something will happen. What the?

9) Planes still crash, celebrities die. Look it up. It happens. Oh yeah, plus hot weather plus no water equals fire! Whether you’re in Spain, BC, California or Australia. Wait a minute, it could be anywhere! I’m I the only one to notice the pattern here, and the fact (yes, fact) that these events are not only getting more common, but also more intense. Heck, even Camrose, just north of my home town of Edmonton, got into the news due to freak storms trying to kill country music fans. A small increase in the intensity of common storms and POW!

10) Wacked out nationalists like to blow people up. Back to back ETA bombs to celebrate 50 years of killing innocent people. OK, so I like Spain, but really, why the regional nationalism? It’s really messed up. Right up there with religion and right wing fanatics in my book of things I dislike. I love the Basques and Paxaran, spent a lot of time up there, they are a different people, but killing people never solved anything. One could argue that they have too much autonomy, or too little (as in their own country). The merry-go-round will keep going until we run out of tickets. Replace Basque with Palestinian or Kurd minus the rights and you get the circular, interchangeable picture.

I know, I know, I’ve missed a bunch. Life, the news is a kaleidoscope of events, all twirling to form an image one snap shot at a time, one vantage point at a time. But really, do I care that there are cops in Massachusetts who still hate black guys but love beer? That the last communists lost out in Moldova? It was just twitter practice for the non election in Iran. And yes, there’s a lot more to say about the death spiral in American politics, but who cares anymore, it’ll either be Palin or Obama in 2012! So what if Saakashvili could still light a fuse under Russia or if there are Russian subs sitting off New York? Makes one long for the days when technology would just wipe us all out. Or, it makes one look forward to Labour Day, fall, autumn when the real fun starts. Global food riots, woohooo!

With just a couple days until the opening ceremonies in Beijing of the 26th Olympiad, you can’t help but get the feeling that the press really want to find something wrong with China´s “coming out party”. The last few days have seen a slew of negative headlines: Olympic Sport: Blocking the Internet, Olympic Protests Over Beijing Evictions; Beijing pollution may force new crackdown for Olympics (I like that one, the writer must have got a bonus for getting the reader to link Tibet with pollution!); Olympics: The Violence Has Started Already in Beijing and on Borders. I have just one question for all these finger pointers: really what did you expect when you combine the IOC (International Olympic Committee) with China?

On July 13th, 2001, Beijing beat out rival bids from Osaka, Toronto, Istanbul and Paris in voting to become the host city for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Controversy was assured from the get go, as the bids from Toronto and Paris were both considered superior, but as then IOC head Juan Antonio Samuranch was eager for the games to go to China, that’s where they went. It was clear that China’s human rights record was going to be carefully scrutinized as the EU immediately issued this resolution.

Maybe what was needed was a new Olympic motto, citius, altius, fortius- swifter, higher, stronger- just doesn’t seem to fit anymore. Maybe something along the lines of politics, argentum, facinarose -politics, money, scandal. When was the turning point for this once pure sporting event? For years competition was limited to amateurs, but this era ended in 1971 when the IOC allowed athletes to receive compensation for time away from work while training. As well, athletes were permitted to receive sponsorship from national organizations, sports organizations, and private businesses. Of course this still didn’t allow western athletes to compete with eastern bloc nations and by 1986 professionals were granted permission to compete, leading to the 1992 “Dream Team” in Barcelona. Or was it the jingoism of the 1936 Berlin games where Hitler wanted to show the world the dominance of the Aryan race only to be humiliated by the achievements of Jesse Owens. Strange to think, but these were also the games where the Olympic torch relay was introduced, Hitler’s still causing problems today as the Chinese found out to their surprise.

Few will remember that the Seoul games of 1988 were awarded to an authoritarian regime in 1981. A regime that had killed 500, or as many as 2000, democracy protesters just the year before. South Korea was one of the little dragons economically, but it was still behind culturally and politically. They, like China today, hoped that the games would showcase the Korean economic miracle to the world and legitimize the regime. The crackdown spurred resistance from opposition parties and the sports world contemplated moving the Olympics to another venue as most major cities had been turned into war zones by June 1987. The IOC issued an ultimatum saying that if the riots weren’t stopped, the games would be moved. In the end Chun Doo-hwan’s government was forced into allowing free elections.

Politics have never been far away from the Olympics. From boycotts to terrorist attacks, nations and groups have tried using the games as a means of furthering their political agendas. The Melbourne games of ‘56 were boycotted by the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland in protest of the Soviets crushing the Hungarian democracy uprising. While Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon stayed home that same year too, protesting against the Suez crisis. Neither event had anything to do with Australia. Similarly, 20 African nations boycotted the Montreal games in 1976 because the IOC refused to ban New Zealand, something the African nations wanted because the All-Blacks had recently played in apartheid-sponsored South Africa. This was completely unrelated to either Montreal or the Olympics. So why hasn’t anyone boycotted the Beijing games over human rights abuses or the Tibetan occupation, issues directly related to the Chinese government. Or how about their support of the government in Sudan and Zimbabwe? Hell, even Dubya will be making the first appearance of an American president at a games held outside the US. There can be only one answer, money.

Since the fall of the Berlin wall, there hasn’t been a single Olympic boycott. The 80’s saw tons in Moscow and Los Angeles. Those same Los Angeles games in 1984 also showed the world how much money was to be made, it even became the first Olympic games to make money, bringing in $215 million and earning organizing president Peter Ueberroth the Time Man of the Year award. The mayor of Montreal was infamously quoted as saying the Olympics “can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby”. Montreal is still paying the debt left by those games. By the time the Beijing games begin, China will have spent $40 billion on new venues and infrastructure. GE’s NBC paid $1.5 billion for the exclusive rights to broadcast the Turin and Beijing games and will more than make that back. The price tag just to become a global Olympic partner is around $70 million for a winter/summer package, then of course there are the actual advertis
ing costs. I’m sure they all got a little worried a few months back when it looked like the torch relay protests were actually going to have an effect on the public.

Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin coined the modern Olympic Creed in 1908, displayed on the scoreboard at opening ceremonies: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.” However, today the first thing we will learn each day from the Olympics will be the medal count. Will China win more gold medal than the US? On the days that this isn’t the leading story, it will be that an athlete was caught using illegal substances. Of course athletes used alcohol, strychnine, cocaine and other substances to ease the pain and give them an edge in the past - the famously male, female athletes of the eastern bloc nations weren’t natural - but it wasn’t until Ben Johnson was caught in the ‘88 Seoul Olympics that it became clear that almost everyone was doping. One of my favourite SNL skits called for a separate “All Drug Olympics“, not really such a bad idea. (By the way, can anybody tell me why I can’t watch Hulu outside of the US, I can’t see the skit?!)

Once it became clear to the world that the IOC was awarding games based on bribes, they tried to fix things with a few cosmetic changes to the awarding rules. China on the other hand is even bigger than the Olympics, so their change appears far more subtle . Take the Sudan. In 2004 Chinese president HuJintao referred to Chinese aid to Khartoum as “free of political conditionality”. Yet since then China pressed for Sudan’s acceptance of a UN-AU peacekeeping force and removed Sudan from Beijing’s preferred trade-status list. While in Burma, following the violent crackdown against Buddhist monks, China cut arms sales and played a critical role in getting aid workers into the country after the typhoon. Perhaps we won’t see voters lining up to elect the next government in Beijing, but it will be interesting to see whether or not the Beijing Olympics will prove to be the coming out party that many countries have enjoyed as hosts, from St. Louis in 1904, to 1964 in Tokyo and Seoul in 1988. For once I agree with Dubya, he should attend the games. There is one things for sure, he won’t see any doves being released at these games.