All too human…or not human enough?

Sorry to be a curmudgeon today, but I don’t think I can stomach another round of the Olympics. The Olympics are as useless and wasteful as the Space Shuttle, and surrounded by just as much hype and nonsense.

This came to mind when one of the world’s worst commercials hit CNN lately. It was melodramatic mush, featuring athletes doing supposedly heroic things in slow-motion as soap opera music played in the background. Then comes the pompous tag line: “Celebrate Humanity.”

Celebrate humanity? Sports are just fine with me. But am I supposed to feel like part of a profound, global, spiritual awakening of some sort by sitting on the couch, eating a cheese-dog, and watching a foot race on television? Oh yes, the mere prospect of such an event makes my heart overflow with…
…with bile.

Folks in Saipan are too sensible to get caught up in Olympic hysteria. We seem to be content to be living our own small lives out here on the sleepy periphery, but I guess a lot of people–or entire societies–are so bored that banalities like the Olympics seem exciting.

Here’s what I mean. I didn’t even know where the Olympics will be held so while I was pouring out my honey-sweet prose for this column I ran a search on the web. And, no kidding, here’s the first material I encountered, which is a news item posted by Yahoo.

“Astronaut Andy Thomas holds a replica of an Olympic torch for the 2000 games in Sydney, Australia, at the Kennedy Space Centre Monday.”

Wow! A real-life REPLICA of an Olympic torch! Be still my heart. I can’t take all the excitement. Held by an astronaut, no less! That makes my Space Shuttle comparison pretty darned accurate. Maybe the Space Shuttle and the Olympics will be combined like a corporate merger, since they can leverage their worthlessness and maybe corner the market on it.

And here we go: “A replica of the torch which will light the Sydney Olympic cauldron was packed on board the space shuttle Atlantis for a lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday.”

Celebrate humanity? If I was a reporter covering the famine in Ethiopia, I’d have to explain this to the starving inhabitants. “Billions of dollars in American tax money are used to send junk into space, which is a celebration of humanity. The money spent is enough to feed your entire country for the next 45 years, but we’d
rather spend it on the Space Shuttle and Olympics so big, fat Americans have something to watch on TV.”

I’m no bleeding heart, but I can’t be the only one to watch some CNN and catch the juxtaposition of indulgent Olympic ads and horrifying footage of the (latest) Ethiopian famine.

Celebrate humanity? I don’t know just which humanity it is that they’re celebrating. Some people must be regarded as more human, and more worthy of celebrating, than others.