I MISS THE OLYMPICS ALREADY

Your business is to fix his attention on the stream…[of immediate sense experiences]. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters


Look. Listen. Something makes me suspect, that while 1942 was, despite the slow turning of the tide, a year of fear, complication, and confusion that would make cryptic crossword clue writers blush if they weren’t so busy trying to rip the bottom out of the German Wolf-pack, which was, at a jolly good pace, sinking nearly 100 merchant ships a month to the tune of 3 million plus tons in the first six months of the year, Clive Staples Lewis, were he alive today, would look longingly back to the days when wrestling with the devil and His slightly incompetent degenerates was the greatest of his worries. Ah yes, to sit in the Oxford study and wag his chin with Tolkien over a briar pipe or two and the latest updates on the wireless of Satan’s Teutonic maneuvers.

Nevertheless, that was then and this is now, and the good professor can do little to circumvent the handicap of his death to comment on these transparently evil times, leaving us instead to ponder the letters of good old uncle Screwtape and his pronouncements on human nature. And so as far as life goes, the question of what is real is, alarmingly and unfortunately, now, depending on who’s pontificating, more or less important than ever. To wit the Chinese Olympics were not really real.

Let me keep this short and painless, the Chinese—inventors of all things grand, gunpowder, fireworks, and Confucius, and no things bad, water torture, those small, choking hazard parts in Kmart toys, and American Chinese food—masterfully reinvented reality with only a little help from those mandarins of fair play at the IOC, in what consensus appears to be was the greatest show on earth since P.T. Barnum and another bunch of juiced up freaks without a cause rolled into the nearest backwater and set up shop. Yes, a fake singer, opening ceremonies replete with digital arts, and pristine free speech protest zones all unfolded with the meticulous precision that we thought only a crazed ex-Navy Seal and a bunch of Hollywood union busters could concoct when regular actors had the temerity to think that TV existed for them. Real indeed.

Now, for that poor, ugly misfit with the crooked teeth and the perfect voice, have no fear: there’s nothing that a little re-educational labour camp won’t fix. And fireworks are never that great anyway unless someone’s drunken father blows off his hand and at least part of his face. And anyone who expected that protest had any place at this, the most non-political of events, the Olympics, really had no business anywhere near a newspaper, much less a piece of complicated electronic machinery like a television. So let’s concede that the Chinese Olympics were a masterful success, and the East is now truly the West, only better, because we all fixed our eyes on the stream, and damn near fell all over ourselves trying to wade into it like a wide-eyed bunch of deadheads rushing into the Ganges, proclaiming it to the be the greatest event ever, at least since Gerry jammed out that one long noodle somewhere in the bowels of Giant Stadium, while cops surreptitiously kneecapped the stragglers in the parking lot and greybeards in clam diggers and those stupid velcro tiga sandals over wool socks molested teenage girls behind the porta potties. But I digress. The point that is sorely missing is that the Chinese have masterfully snatched our ideas about what is real from us and held it up for the world to see.

This Olympic presentation had nothing to do with Western perception or reality. After all, any state that can spend $40 billion, bulldoze the homes of tens of thousands, co-opt 300,000 volunteer spies and induce people to cut their lawns with nail scissors is hardly concerned about what we think. No, no. These Olympics were firmly for the benefit of the 1/6th of the world’s population living in China. It was a tour-de-force proclaiming to every Chinese citizen that the state is alive and well and if the IOC and America and all those other do-gooders can’t change that, well…stay the fuck out of Tiananmen Square and don’t bother coming to the party unless you’ve learned the official chants and practiced the state approved cheerleading moves.

As for arriving in the West, after all, when everything’s said and done, China will still be filled with Chinese people, and no matter how stunning the display, if you turn it over and inspect the bottom, you’ll find that ubiquitous tag, made in China. And this does not bode well for China’s arrival. For, anyone who thinks that the British, French, American or any other westerner on the street will actually welcome the Chinese into the little club, has a serious reality impairment. Let’s face it. The shadow of the British Empire, though wafer thin and tattered, is still cast over the greater part of the white world, and as a result, somewhere deep in our hearts, the Chinese are not ‘true white men’, and therefore not to be trusted. But I suspect the Party knows this, and quite rightly doesn’t care. They don’t need to be admitted into the club, after all. China hasn’t arrived because it was already here. We are the ones who need to arrive.

The truth is that, regardless of our platitudes about democracy and rights and fair play and reality, we are as dirty as the other pigs at the trough, and the trough is already owned and stocked by a bunch of savvy reality producers who don’t care if you’re white, black, or yellow, as long as you keep eating. There’s always room for one more. And so the state power in China knows what we should know, if we could see past the stream of sensory images: it doesn’t really matter what we think. Real life has always been either something that happens for us and not anyone else, or something we fervently wish would happen to someone else and not us. Either way, the gross reality of the Chinese Olympics is that if we don’t start asking ourselves what is real, we may soon discover that the fix is in for more than just the Olympics and in the end all that we thought golden has actually always been nothing more than tin.