Pixelectomy

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The other day I was on the phone with a buddy of mine, so I asked him if he was watching the Olympics. It was a natural enough question; he’s laid up in the hospital which means he’s got plenty of “nothing to do”. His answer surprised me, he was boycotting the Olympic coverage. So the next day I was on the phone with another friend, this time taking a break from working on the house, when I mentioned our mutial friend’s stance on the Olympic coverage. He replied that his girlfriend was doing the same thing. She wasn’t happy with what China was doing to Tibet, and this was one of her responses. Call me sheltered, but this was the first time I had heard of boycotting the Olympic coverage, and so I was in a bit of a shock. Even the online community in which I am active had not really talked much about it, which is a surprise because those guys there (myself included) will chew the fat about anything and everything, often to the point of the latin phrase “ad infinitum, ad nauseam”. As it always seems to do, shock eventually gave way to thinking, and even a bit of anger. Not at my friends, or the girlfriend’s of my friends (I like them all very much, thank you), but at the idea of boycotting the Olympic coverage on television. Here’s why. Most of you know that the Olympics started amongst the Greek Polis (city-states) about 2700 years ago. This makes it exactly as old as democracy, as this was the birthplace of both institutions. What most people do not know is that the Polis then were constantly at war with each other. Every year, after the crops were in the fields, but before the harvest (war season) these little city-states would take up their grudges with their neighbors, usually at the point of armed conflict. Not all of the Polis were democracies (Sparta being the most notable exception, was an oligarchy), but ALL of them, including these fledgling democracies, fought each other. They even developed a wonderful type of fighting in order to accomplish this with minimal loss. (as an aside, Victor Davis Hanson has a wonderful book about this subject, and it’s importance to Western Culture, called “ The Western Way of War “. It’s a great read.) So when the Olympics were first conceived, they did so with the full knowledge that warfare was common amongst the participants, and largely came about because warfare was so common. Today, we think of the Olympic ideal was to have something higher than warfare to celebrate. In greek culture this meant the human body, specifically the male body (the super-models in those day were always male) and what it alone could accomplish. But to get to this higher goal, they needed to stop fighting each other. To accomplish this, runners would be sent for each carrying an olive branch (symboling peace), and at the sight of these runners, the Polis would stop their wars, select their best athletes, and send them off to the games. But here’s the thing. Even then the Greeks knew that the Olmypic games were themselves a type of battle, albeit a peaceful one. Call it war-light, or war without blood. With rare exception, the events of the early Olympics all stemmed from martial themes, and celebrated martial prowess.

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