BEIJING — Absent a dramatic and unforeseeable event, the 2022 Winter Olympics, like the 2008 Summer Games, will be a huge success. They will happen. Nearly two years into our global pandemic, that is no small thing. It is, in fact, a very big deal.
When these Games are done, the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the American government and the pack journalism of far too much of the U.S. media that for weeks if not months has been banging on about how bad China is — both really ought to be in for serious examination.
Does China have serious issues? Of course. But it’s incredible to witness how we go on and on about, say, human rights while simultaneously delusionally adrift with an incredible case of bizarro collective amnesia, one that apparently sparks some entitlement to superior moral standing — as if waterboarding never happened, as if Guantanamo is not still in operation. These are matters, to be clear, involving the apparatus of the American state.
Practice Tuesday at the cross-country venue at Zhangjiakou // Jewel Samad/ AFP / Getty Images
To be clear, I am resolutely glad I am American. Being American affords me the opportunity to write these sorts of columns. I am allowed to criticize my government. And, too, the go-along press, whose primary role under the First Amendment is specifically enumerated. It is to hold the government accountable. Instead of cheerleading.
China is a very different place from the United States. Different does not mean crisis. I have been to China several times since 2000 for sports events, including FINA world swimming championships in 2011 and 2018, the IAAF world track and field championships in 2015, the Youth Olympic Games in 2014. In 2000, when what is now Olympic Park was a field and the Bird’s Nest a dream, there were more bicycles on the streets than cars. In recent visits, I have used a cellphone repeatedly. Not a burner phone. Is someone listening? Who cares? I’m not that interesting. Neither is almost anyone else coming here for the 2022 Olympics, except for Mr. Putin. Given his background, he and his staff probably have that angle figured out.
Plus, let’s be real. Privacy? Do you use the internet? Are you on Facebook? There are 8 billion or so people in the world; 2.9 billion of us have a Facebook account. Do you think you’re the consumer? Three of every eight people on the globe are arguably the product.
Do you, even in these pandemic years, venture out in public? If you go to SoFi Stadium for the Super Bowl in two weeks, and you don’t think law enforcement or security aren’t using surveillance cameras or facial recognition technology, you probably also think you’re gonna be able to park on Game Day for maybe $3.
Get a grip, my fellow Americans.
With the privilege of being an American comes the responsibility of some critical thinking of our place in the world.
And some humility.
We like to think of ourselves in the United States as the shining city on the hill — a notion first articulated by John Winthrop in 1630, then revisited in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan as an expression of American exceptionalism.
As an extension of that exceptionalism, the American way far too often is to assume we should lecture to everyone else about democracy and decency, moral values and human rights. Further, we believe others want to hear us preach about these matters.
A more realistic take would show that the through note of American history — and our present, still — is violence. How far back do we want to go? The Salem witch trials? The gruesome imposition of slavery? Paul Revere? The battle at Antietam?
This is not to say that there is no grace and goodwill in the American story. Of course, our story is rich in much that is so, so good. Millions have sought to make new lives in the United States, including my forebears some 120 years ago.
All the same — at almost every turn, our nation’s story is soaked in violence.
It is perhaps central to the telling of the American story that we mythologize the story of the American West — how President Jefferson bought most of what is west of the Mississippi River from the French, how Lewis and Clark explored it and then how the wagon trains and cattle drives followed. Indeed, popular culture is dominated even now by Taylor Sheridan’s series “Yellowstone,” about sixth-generation Montana cattle rancher John Dutton (looking at you, Kevin Costner) and his 2020s plans to keep his little slice of heaven, and “1883,” the founding “prequel,” about the drive north from Texas to Montana, starring, among others Tim McGraw, Faith Hill and Sam Elliott.
Both shows reek of violence, in particular the “Yellowstone” Season 4 closer and, in a foreshadowing of what is to come, the opening minutes of “1883.” This is no surprise. As H.W. Brands, the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who is now a history professor at the University of Texas, writes in his masterful 2019 account of the American West, Dreams of El Dorado, using the June 16, 1811, destruction off Vancouver Island of the Astor merchant ship Tonquin as a launching metaphor:
The blowing up of the ship “revealed the simple but ineluctable theme of violence in the history of the American West: of humans killing one another in the struggle for control of Western resources. As time would prove, violence would the defining characteristic of the West. When the violence diminished to the background level of the rest of the country, the West would no longer be the West but simply another part of America.”
Indeed, this is us. It is no secret within the IOC that some number of members and their families are terrified, literally filled with unshakeable unease, at the notion of walking down American streets. Even Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills — marked in recent weeks by smash-and-grab robberies. We are perhaps inured to it. Or in willful denial. Or is that horrifyingly desensitized? What has changed since nine-plus years ago, when 20 6-and 7-year-olds were shot and killed at school in Newtown, Connecticut? It would make for a separate column entirely about how our cities are awash in firearms. From Chicago this past weekend, according to police: 18 people were shot, four fatally, in gun violence. In New York, thousands lined the streets of Manhattan to mourn 22-year-old police officer Jason Rivera, killed January 21 by a suspect while responding to a domestic dispute in Harlem. Rivera’s partner, Wilbert Mora, 27, also died of his wounds days after the attack. In Los Angeles, at least 80 handguns and shotguns were among the items stolen during widely publicized thefts from cargo trains near downtown, and authorities are trying to find out whether one of the weapons was used to kill a 34-year-old man identified by police as a member of a gang called Metro 13.
Internationally, there’s this: over the past 60 or so years the United States has prosecuted one military campaign after another, with literally millions dead.
This is not intended to serve as a reprise of the victories of World War II, or how the Allies defeated Hitler or saved the West. Nor is it an examination of the three years of active conflict on the Korean peninsula.
Since?
To quote Edwin Starr — and, in one of his best covers, Bruce Springsteen — from the 1970 protest song, ‘War’:
Oh, war it's an enemy to all mankind
The thought of war blows my mind
War has caused unrest
Within the younger generation
Induction then destruction
Who wants to die?
The current president has ordered a so-called ‘diplomatic boycott’ of these Beijing Games?
It’s a wonder other nations don’t protest us, time and again, as wanton and generational — perhaps irredeemable — agents of militaristic destruction, at home and around Planet Earth.
The list of all U.S. military engagements since, say, the 1960s is far too long to detail here. It’s enough to review several, and to ask which is the more constant, the Olympics every four (or two) years or the expression of American violence?
The 1968 and 1972 Games were carried on while the United States prosecuted a war in Southeast Asia in which millions were killed. The war ended, finally, in 1975.
1983 — the year before the LA Games, we invaded Grenada, citing the increased threat of Soviet and Cuban influence.
1989-90 — between the Seoul and Barcelona Games, President Bush 41 ordered troops to Panama to capture Gen. Manuel Noriega. Hundreds die.
1991 — Operation Desert Storm.
1993-95 — Bosnia. Between the time that Atlanta was awarded the Summer Games, 1990, and staged them, 1996, the United States and NATO conducted operations that were resolved with the Dayton Agreement in 1995. Worth noting: site of the 1984 Winter Games, Sarajevo.
2001 — after the 9/11 attacks, the United States invades Afghanistan on Oct. 7 that year. The U.S. stays in Afghanistan through summer 2021 — through multiple editions of the Games, Summer and Winter, then abruptly pulls out, leaving millions of Afghans, in particular girls and women, to the Taliban. Human rights?
The last U.S. drone strike in Kabul before American troops withdrew? August 29, 2021: a mistake that killed 10 civilians. Seven of the 10: children.
In December, it was announced that no U.S. military personnel would face any kind of punishment for that mistake, the chief Pentagon spokesman declaring: “What we saw here was a breakdown in process, and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership.”
How do you think those words sound in certain if not many precincts overseas? Seven dead children? For what? Because of what? A “breakdown in process”?
2003-2011 — the war in Iraq, spanning Games in Athens, Torino, Beijing and Vancouver. This war was launched under false pretenses. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
To be clear: the United States, until the pullout from Kabul, had been at war for the past 20 years.
As for our record when it comes to living the best of our democratic values?
The presidential election of 2000: the candidate who would a few years later send the country to war under false pretenses was all but elected by a divided Supreme Court after a bitterly contested vote that involved, among other things, hanging chads.
The presidential election of 2020: millions still believe the loser had the election stolen, and the loser keeps perpetuating this lie — even though there is not a shred of evidence to that effect.
On January 6, 2021, a mob largely in support of this loser invaded the United States Capitol, the first time it had been breached since the British burned it in 1814 as part of the War of 1812. The record has yet to delineate with specificity the peril the institutions of the United States truly faced that day, and the role of certain leading personalities.
As Friday’s opening ceremony of these Beijing Games draws near, it is worth reiterating, again and again, that China has its problems. Big ones. But so, too, do we.
The entire point of an Olympic Games is for humanity to come together — to celebrate the best in each other.
Not, as far too many in the United States have been doing with an air of unfounded moral superiority, to launch into judgmental righteousness.
That’s unseemly.
We all live in a world in which the pandemic has proven a great equalizer. China has sought to contain it with a controversial strategy. We assuredly have found no such means — nearly 900,000 people dead and counting, roughly one in every 330 people in our United States — and the virus has made it clear that we are all, in the end, the same.
We are all human beings, trying to find a way, together, on our fragile blue planet. That means less violence all around. Starting with our words.