Some Old Baggage, and Olympics

I have an aversion to witnessing live coverage of the Olympics and in fact any sports coverage overall. I don’t watch sports news with pleasure, although I intellectually consider sport a noble endeavour. My heart always burns up with annoyance that athletes achieve incessant recognition, while others, who are perhaps more deserving, don’t. It is not fair.

So much attention on a national scale is paid to the physical endeavours. In fact growing up, authority figures seemed not to have any value for my particular greatnesses as a creative person—in art, drama, performance, and visualization of elaborate scenarios pertaining to those fields—though they will, patronizingly, allow me to perform when my talent begs for such an outlet of expression: Lip Sync competitions, Scouting for Talent, et cetera, none of which had an artist-development program attached thereto.

What do athletes DO to change the course of history? Can their participation in games stop genocide? Can their world records end hunger? Can their careers and trophies increase the economic robustness of their respective nations? What does the world benefit from ‘the love of the game’? And what do sportsmen really do to encourage their fans to live in peace with fellow men, no matter their nationality or club allegiance? What is the point of sport, besides personal fitness, in the wider world? Is it really responsible in this badly under-evolved world, to simply be a sportsman, uninvolved with intelligently addressing the passions, often life-threatening, galvanized by sport? How do their life-altering (for them) experiences really touch the lives and minds of their average countrymen?

And why is it that they get the chance to represent their countries on a world scale, more than I do, I who do now and have always tried to have a vision that goes beyond the ability to run 100 m in a couple of seconds? How can it be that Olympic sport, which comes around but once every four years, has more of an influence on the world’s psyches than music or drama, which are used to accentuate sporting events worldwide, which people listen to daily and around the clock with super-religious frequency? Why do they get to put on country colours and be told by their country’s leaders that they have made a difference in the world, even be given national money for training and glory, whilst budding original artists, poets and songwriters, Bob Marleys and Miriam Makebas, are scoffed off as wannabes, rather than as a cadre of unique national ambassadors capable of changing mindsets throughout the world?

I am deeply displeased that no one in authority ever seems to notice the unfair disparity of respect accorded to excellence in fields other than sport or academia, but especially to the field of sport.

No one in authority bothered to attempt a campaign demonstrating the equal value that creative endeavours such as drama, literature or art contributed to civilization in a fundamental (not ornamental or decorative) way. It is not fair to be valued less, on a national and international scale, and to be treated as less than someone who is simply better endowed physically, or more inclined to physical exertion than myself. I know that my talent is world-class; but how can I prove it to people busy applauding El Guerrouj or Michael Jordan? So what can I do? Withdraw my eyes, my attention, my conscious and vocal support—just as has been done to me.

At the time of this writing, August 13^th 2008, American actor and comedian Bernie Mac is not yet cold in his grave, having died at age 50, on 9^th August 2008, of complications arising from pneumonia. No one is likely to offer him a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize. Yet I consider Bernie Mac to be a singular agent for genocide prevention and the peace prerogative in his own native country, the United States of America. His situation comedy show, named after himself, was devoted (as far as I could see) to dealing with the question of ethnic identity in the context of human identity in the United States. Not only did it tackle this question in terms of ‘race’ relations but also economic attitudes, appropriate impetus for litigation of one’s neighbours of whatever colour, cultural attitudes to masculinity and femininity, and simple family issues such as fertility and privacy between siblings.

As far as I am concerned Bernie Mac was a kind of new Bill Cosby, for a new generation of young African Americans and Caucasian Americans, showing what wonders could be done with a little humour and both kinds of ethnic identity (wrt black-white dichotomy), not just one, in a free nation, with opportunities for education, affluence, and the emancipation demonstrated by ethnic versatility. It seemed to me he tried to demystify, on television, the 'other'ness of Black Americans to white ones, and vice versa.

No worldwide crowd will congratulate his family for his achievements—and far less the American entertainment industry and economy for facilitating such achievements. They will insist that Bernie Mac was a puppet and goon for American materialism, based on the supposed opulence of his fictitious house; they will say that he was a sellout in some parts of Black America; and yet again they will say that he added no intellectual depth to the persons of his ethnicity in the minds of White Americans looking. But I, as a person who appreciates the rigors of drama, loves story, and is extremely sensitive to racial and simple human inter-group tensions, I know his heroic worth.

Where is his gold medal?

I know they say money makes the world go around, so the reason why Olympics is so big even tho it's just sports, is money-related. But I really don't buy that. How much more money could you make by hosting Olympics for inventors and philosophers, people whose ideas form the currency that informs civilization? It's all about attitude, perception, and again...evolution. The human brain is still very animal, very caveman like. It is much more stimulated by what is visually exciting than by what is abstract. But why do we have to encourage that? No mother would keep lifting her baby knowing that it had to learn to walk. Why do we still encourage masses of our species to keep creeping intellectually? It's great to achieve, to struggle, to win, yes. But why is worldwide acclaim given only consciously to sport???

I always said I wanted to be a dancesport athlete if I would enter Olympics for anything. I won't hold my breath waiting for them to make room for that, never mind that music, more than any javelin throwing or sprint race, has vastly increased in volume and quality over the hundreds of thousands of years since the Olympics came into being. I know that they have their agenda. I'll have mine. Don't expect my life to stop because of the Olympics (as it currently is). Olympics can kiss my brown bubbly ass.