Mack Sneers at the Olympic Torch

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

All Hail the Holy Flashlight

The idea of thousands and thousands of obedientiaries rising in the dark, processing to a public place, and waiting for hours in order to cheer a bit of fire on the end of a stick is just plain weird.  Calling the occasion the Spirit of the Olympics or perhaps the Spirit of Ahura Mazda doesn’t change the reality that honoring oxidation is a curious practice

Perhaps people would be more progressive by standing along the road to cheer for a flashlight.

Once upon a time Englishmen interrupted their work in the fields to greet a procession of pilgrims walking to Canterbury to worship God at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket.  Now the English interrupt their televised footer matches to admire a flame-procession that enjoys no connection with the worship even of Olympic Zeus; it was invented by the Nazis as a mindless razzle-dazzle to keep the masses busy yelping in unison.

Eventually the flame is borne to the place of worship where, before more thousands of the faithful, someone uses it to light off a big cauldron in a purely secular liturgy invented by some dress designer or cinema director.  If the cauldron were used to brew up a pot of tea one could plead some utility in the mummery, but as it is the cauldron only flames and boils and bubbles as a religious focal point for Zeus’ games.  It just burns, day and night, not helping with the first cup of tea, and the wide-eyed and gape-mouthed ooh and ahh at it as a symbol of, like, you know, World Spirit of, like, Somethingness.

Why?  Because they’ve been told to, and they obey. 

Photographs and films of the Olympics prior to 1936 show the international games as a charming, amateurish celebration of youth, health, and joyful competition.  People in clothing wholly free of advertising sat in wooden bleachers and applauded young people competing in a variety of track and field events on rough ground and badly graveled circuits.

Not until the Berlin Games did politics and regimentation completely reduce the games from “ceremonies of innocence” (oblique allusion to Yeats) to an exercise in mob-obedience to old men in vulgar uniforms.  The games of the 1950s and 1960s compounded a false concept of national pride (does the winning left-handed synchronized pool-cue vaulter really validate the excellence of his or her home country?) with the closed loop of organized greed through the licensing of images, slogans, logos, beer, potato chips, and made-in-China clothing.

The Olympics are no longer about the young athletes and their excellence.  Indeed, they are sometimes maltreated by their coaches and their nations. 

Further, the Olympic flame appears to be polluting the air with the grey ashes of anti-Semitism recycled from 1936.  It’s not pretty.

Amateur sport is good and healthy and right.  What is wrong is the collective of huge, chanting crowds of the clone-minded worshipping a really big tiki-torch during phony rituals that complete the cultural gap between Doctor No’s secret control room and Samson and Delilah in SuperDooperColor and ColossoVision. 

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