#107 GATHERING ABOUT
WHY WE GATHER ABOUT AND WATCH
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
G
ood ideas go bad after a time.
Even great ideas no longer seem so relevant as circumstances change, as if the greatness of the moment has reached the limit of effectiveness, and the world built around the idea must move on and be replaced by better thoughts.
Change inevitably takes place despite the presence of constants that link moments together for the world to witness.
The summer months are what most people wait for through the other recuring seasons. People muster the blistering cold by looking forward to those warm days under the sun tending to the golden sweep of the endless canola fields.
People find through the daily trial and error what they do best as individuals and how those personal attributes fit into the community around them.
The rising sweep of the right and the oppositional ideas present within that political movement have collected a bit of cache. The political right offers alternatives to ideas that have inevitably gone sideways, even with the most benevolent of motivations, in the most extreme situations, after many years of entrenchment, in some instances having morphed into utter madness.
Humanity continually moves forward with these embedded limits in ideas.
Europe operates within a democratic socialist system that from time to time looks more like an unsuccessful experiment that took root after the extreme right fascists had caused so much destruction and hatred.
Democratic socialism takes different shapes and sizes depending on the jurisdiction.
America did not want any part of that, building a system based on interpretations about individuality, shifting the emphasis in society away from government involvement.
People have to learn to survive in a challenging, often brutal environment with minimal outside intervention in America.
One unrecognizable offshoot is organized labour that limits the depth and breadth of capitalism to do what the capitalist wants to do as owners of the means of production. Without unions, a long time ago now, a great disparity persisted between owners and workers.
But that’s about as organized as people are allowed to be in America, apart from organizing around the only two political parties in the democratic political system – and oh yeah, and for assembly at play, such as at spectacular sporting events and cultural showcases.
The rise of the right in Europe is different from the increasing populism taking hold in America. The Labour Party recently unseated the Conservatives in England for other reasons yet unknown. But these political movements grew toward power out of the same human disaffection.
Making things happen for society may be difficult, but people inevitably get the sense that something is wrong. And people do come to know when they are getting ripped off.
The government cannot deny food shortages to the people cued up in the bread lines for hours under a dark rainy sky.
The homeless cannot be talked out of that fact that there exists a housing shortage – or that everything is simply too expensive to live anywhere else but the street.
The tax payor recognizes the increasing financial burden, even if delayed from a month to month payment, undeniably at least once a year at tax time.
Regardless of tyrant or democrat, despot or populist in charge, when the individual and community stop working together as one, no one can deny that change is needed to begin the move forward again.
Government must govern for the entire population. But time and time again the political majority has not governed so completely – creating disaffection with those left behind. In time, sometimes one election, other times a decade or more, the disaffected move into majority status and usher in sweeping change.
Why change takes so long varies.
People need distractions. And without a doubt, global spectacles often delay change by providing a momentary infusion of transnational euphoria.
But you know, life itself can be a great distraction. That daily routine that becomes a numb blur – masked with a feeling of hopelessness that the bitter passing of hours will not improve the human condition anymore.
Life is good for many people, but many, many more people are becoming increasingly marginalized, financially and culturally as the world continues to change at an accelerated pace seldom seen before – often leaving results behind in the rear view mirror, but only randomly and often so chaotically as to not make much sense of anything anymore.
Everything seems so normal though, now and again. The world continues to host great spectacles meant to bring humanity together, but more often than not serving as just a brief diversion, in the grander scheme of matters, from the difficult work ahead.
The Olympic Games can be the great equalizer, if you can get there through the vigorous vetting process to compete.
And television has democratized the great human spectacles such as the Olympics.
Athleticism creates a natural attraction that can be trusted. The champion is the champion, for the moment anyway, regardless of background and ancestry.
That one human task is measured on the merits. And that final result is all that matters in the moment, 20 fold the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment achieved than in completing an art project or completing the final cut of an epic film for theatrical release.
The Olympic venue as a showcase for that athleticism mirrors the great art of humanism that exists at that particular moment in human history.
Nothing compares to the Olympics in terms of pure spectacle of humanism, other than perhaps the Oscars as a significant cultural event.
Politics, even democratic capitalist politics, too often muddles everything up in the competing interests. At least in sports, a clear winner emerges like a science or mathematics, with verifiable results. The winner was simply faster, better, stronger, at that moment.
The first Olympics occurred in ancient Greece from 776 BC to 385 AD. People would kind of drop in, disrobe and join the event to show off their athleticism as part of the Olympic Games.
Greece under various names and different geographic shapes and forms was a dominant society, along side the Egyptians and the Persians. Few other civilizations out influenced the Greeks, and the Olympians knew as such, with their earthly gods and other worldly rituals.
Great change would eventually come to the ancient world, with the Grecian formula of individual rights and community obligation eventually finding so little relevance as to lose their land borders for centuries.
The first Modern Olympics occurred in Greece in 1896. Greece had been reborn as a nation state from the shards of ancient empire in 1832. The Greeks had always been there, separate and apart from the Ottoman Turks, the world just had to redraw a border for them, after a war of independence, as the Empires around the world collapsed, giving rise to the rule of nation states.
The empires had made their impact though and moved humanity forward, after creating a spirit of transnationalism that brought people together more and more for common pursuits, other than for war.
People all around the world began to be motivated by the thought of great global spectacles with the first universal exposition held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, England in 1851.
What everyone knew about the world was often initially limited to what was discovered at the world’s fair.
The popularity of these events quickly spread with advances in media, such as photography and film, and then ultimately radio and television, and now with the digital on-line world.
By 1936, the Olympic host was using the spectacle as a national showcase – if not to influence the world order, then to at least inspire citizens to do more and do better.
American sprinter Jesse Owens would illustrate the vulnerability of the host’s hubris and the fallacy of commonly relied upon eugenic theories at those Olympics.
The Olympic showcase would also be used to define the acceptable world order, by banning South Africa because of white minority rule and Russia because of the war on Ukraine.
These players play well together. And those players do not.
For the athletes, the Olympics is the final milestone in an athletic career that began as a child, beginning to walk early perhaps or walking later but stronger than others. Often there is no rhyme or reason as to how they got there at the Olympics, other than hard work, talent no doubt, and a bit of luck.
The world watches though, as if the spectacle were a benchmark, and everyone wants to see for themselves the present state in which humanity finds itself.
Play ultimately creates good character, dispelling myths about body, gender and race, and politics, and even stranger ideas and thoughts not yet mentioned, for the whole world to witness.
Olympics in Athens 1896 by Michael Llewellyn Smith, London: Profile Books Ltd, 2004
Understanding the Olympics, 2nd Edition, by John Horne and Garry Whannel, London: Routledge, 2012.
Not the Triumph but the Struggle, by Amy Bass, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.