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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