Olympic Flame Out
by Anne Applebaum, Slate Magazine, USA - How utterly predictable. Even without the recent riots in Tibet, anything as ludicrous as a 130-day, 85,000-mile torch relay was going to attract a healthy dose of negative attention. Why does the thing have to go to so many cities, after all? Why does it need to go through Tibet? Why is it surrounded by track-suited thugs? Why does it travel in a customized jumbo jet? Wasn't this supposed to be a relay? And what is the symbolic significance of a battery-operated chemical flame, anyway? What does it have to do with athletes or world peace? Any ceremony of such profound inauthenticity—the Chinese are calling it the "journey of harmony"—deserves to be disharmoniously disrupted as often as possible.
Comments (1)
Despite how I might feel about the IOC giving the games to China in the first place (and the fact that we've got plenty of violations in and on behalf of the US), I'm glad that they did. I'm also glad that China designed this huge global journey for the torch, because without it, the world would never unite to protest China's human rights violations as we're seeing now.
My hope is that people who might never have been stirred to think critically about China's complicity in Darfur or oppression of Tibet will do so now, and hopefully, be inspired to action.
Posted by Sarah Mac | April 15, 2008 5:44 PM