Month: August 2012

Olympics: The Spirit of Competition

Oddly enough, after two weeks the 2012 Summer Olympics are not getting stale at our house.  There seems to be a never-ending series of Olympic Moments that stalls the reality train for yet another event that somehow turns into a television afternoon.  And these aren’t just those Chariots of Fire flashes of exalted victory and weeping defeat that the media loves so much.  They’re revelations of what young people are capable of.  What constitutes dedication and excellence?  What brings these human qualities together in the same place at the same time and drives athletic performance forward?  It’s easy to dismiss the Olympics as the gargantuan circus it has become — and I’ve done it a number of times — but that’s just the glitzy bag they’re dressed in.  There’s more to them than that.

The Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) is actually a secret code that unlocks a hidden room in our human DNA — a tidy little place where the competitive genes are stored.  Yes, that’s right: as much as contemporary North Americans wish to deny it, we are genetically programmed to be competitive.

Human beings are social animals, not unlike a troop of chimpanzees or a herd of elephants.  We travel in packs and, therefore, have a burning need to know just exactly where we fit into the hierarchy of the group.  It’s Mother Nature’s way of making certain our species survives, by insuring that the strongest genes get passed along.  Once we establish that primeval, it’s not such a big step to London 2012.  Those young people running, jumping and lifting are doing what comes naturally.  Crudely put, they are just answering a call of nature.

Here in the 21st century, there is a strange idea that we should limit a child’s exposure to competition as if it were radon (Remember that stuff?)  In fact, the “everybody gets a rainbow” philosophy has pretty much taken over in North America.  This is just bad.  It’s like punishing owls for sleeping all day.  Take a look at any schoolyard.  Those little kids figure out who the Alpha dog is pretty quickly — even though they’ve been told repeatedly they’re not supposed to do that.  They know who runs the fastest, who has the coolest backpack or who knows all the words to “Call Me Maybe.”  They don’t have to keep score.  It all comes perfectly naturally to them.  This is because, from the day we’re born until the gophers start delivering our mail, we are constantly going head to head with something.  If you don’t believe me, ask any parent about the incredible duel they had with their two-year-old.  That kid is measuring his abilities, honing his skills, detecting and tailoring his talent — so he can deal with an unforgiving world someday.  In essence, he’s competing with the world that mom and dad have created to keep him safe!  They don’t call it “The Terrible Twos” for nothing.

Instead of trying to sacrifice 5,000 generations of the human condition on the altar of some Flavour-Of-The-Week self-esteem Dr. Phil nonsense, we should be encouraging competition.  Striving for excellence is not wrong, even if you get left behind.  The Olympics clearly shows that.  Forget about the glare of the klieg lights and the stabbing “how do you feel?” microphones, and take a look at that poor bugger who’s bringing up the rear.  They never stop.  They finish — even when they know they haven’t got a hope of ever touching an Olympic medal.  And when it’s all over and they go home, they aren’t “devastated” human beings, questioning their self-worth.  They’re standing tall, three axe handles across the shoulders, proud of their accomplishment because they hung in there with the best.  Not only that, but they’ll probably start training all over again, just for another chance to try.

The Olympics might be a five ring circus.  So be it.  However, we need to bring some of that spirit of healthy competition home to our children — because, these days, when every kid gets a gold medal, everybody (including the kids) knows damn well it doesn’t mean anything.

Intolerance: A Public Service Announcement

Normally, I don’t make public service announcements — mainly because serving the public is a pain in the ass.  (That’s why so many public servants are in it for the money.)  I say “normally” because sometimes there’s such an overwhelming need for the public to be informed that even guys like me have to step into the breach.  That time is now.

For the last several years, our society has been throwing around the words “tolerance” and ‘intolerant” as if they were rice at a redneck wedding.  This promiscuous overuse has turned them (and their various incarnations) into the conversational equivalent of an advertising slogan’s tagline.  Everybody recognizes the words, but nobody really gives a damn what they mean.  Or as Inigo Montoya observed in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

For the record, “tolerance” is a noun that comes from the verb “tolerate” which according to my Oxford Paperback Dictionary (1979 edition) means (without the blah, blah, blah) “to permit– without protest or interference.”  Are you with me so far?  The same dictionary defines “intolerant” as an adjective which means “unwilling to tolerate ideas or beliefs etc. that differ from one’s own.”  Are we still good?  These two are opposites.  If one does not “tolerate” another person’s viewpoint, they are, by definition, “intolerant.”  Questions?

In practical terms, this means that, as a tolerant society, we “permit — without protest or interference” other people’s points of view.  We can disagree with them all we want, but we do not swear at them or call them names or question their right to hold that point of view.  For example, there are people in our world who approve of gay marriage.  These are regular folks who put their pants on one leg at a time and don’t eat kittens for breakfast.  They may be part of the Mauve Mafia, but I doubt it — and even if they are, that’s no excuse for name calling or any other such nonsense.  As members of a tolerant society, we must respect their right to hold their stated opinion — even if we do not respect that opinion, itself.

However, tolerance is not that easy.  There’s more to it.

As another example, there are people in our world who disapprove of gay marriage.  These are regular folks who put their pants on one leg at a time and don’t eat kittens for breakfast.  They may be part of a Right Wing Conspiracy, but I doubt it — and even if they are, that’s no excuse for name calling or any other such nonsense.  As members of a tolerant society, we must respect their right to hold their stated opinion — even if we do not respect that opinion, itself.

That’s the way tolerance really works, folks: the bus goes all the way around the park.  And I’m not merely talking about gay marriage; that’s just an issue that is currently trending and screamingly obvious.  Honestly, I don’t care one way or the other.  Since I’m not getting any gay marriage proposal these days, it doesn’t affect me.

However, in the 21st century, there seems to be a quaint idea that tolerance is the exclusive property of the liberal left.  It’s the buzzword that’s code for a particular array of ideas.  The argument is that an enlightened society has certain values that are universally accepted and contradictions need not apply.  Liberal ideas like gay marriage, corporate greed, gender insensitivity and all the other usual suspects from the politically correct movement.  It’s amazing to me that reasonably intelligent people are wandering around this world, saying things like “I hate those bastards: they’re so intolerant.”  Or, my personal favourite: “We cannot allow that group to speak because they represent intolerance.”  Huh?  Of course, the great irony is, that in our society, the last batch of folks who were so arrogant about dictating the one and only path to human salvation was the Medieval Catholic Church — twenty minutes before da Vinci and his buddies turned on the Renaissance.

So this is a public service announcement:  Tolerance is a two-way street and if you don’t want history to judge you as a jackass, show a little tolerance when somebody expresses an opinion you don’t like.

Anti-Americanism: The Changing of the Guard

As the Olympic Games continue and China and the United States duke it out for world supremacy in training and nutrition (nudge-nudge/wink-wink) something amazing is going on.  Ever so slightly, ever so carefully, the world is shifting its attitude away from blatant anti-Americanism.  It’s not a tectonic shift, by any means; just a subtle hint now and again.  Make no mistake, hating America is still the world’s #1 leisure activity, but every once in a while, at these Games at least, they’re not the ad infinitum root of all evil they’ve been accused of for more than half a century.

Anti-Americanism was born in the mid 60s when an entire stratum of pampered young people (with incredible buying power) went on a five-year temper tantrum.  They were pissed because, for the first time in their lives, they couldn’t get their own way.  Unfortunately, their sheer numbers and economic impact turned what was ordinary youthful discontent into a cultural revolution.  Half-educated, they were unable to distinguish between theoretical Marxism and the real thing and thus saw capitalist America as the big bad bogeyman.  America, run by the veterans of a simpler time, never understood the situation and exacerbated it by stumbling around the rice paddies of Southeast Asia in an idiot attempt to contain communism.  By the time Vietnam’s General Giap unleashed The Tet Offensive in 1968, America had squandered most of the prestige it had accumulated from World War II.   Richard Nixon and Watergate finished it off.

Today, three generations later, anti-Americanism is a worldwide institution.  All political, spiritual and economic arguments end when America gets the blame.  They are responsible for Global Warming, Globalization and every other global godawful anything that happens to wander by, including poverty, famine and Justin Bieber.  Hell cannot hold half their nastiness, and their stupidity is beyond the ability of Charles Darwin to figure out.  American leaders are schizophrenic in their cunning, both dumb as the proverbial box of rocks and capable of creating any number of complex and nefarious conspiracies.  These plots are conducted by the shadowy and “omnipotent” CIA and are intricate in their planning, massive in their scope and have never (at the time of this writing) worked.  They are usually discovered, after the fact, by a dedicated team of sceptics, operating from the relative comfort of their parents’ basements.

Popular wisdom has it that America has both faked the moon landing and destroyed the ozone layer.  The greedy bastards have sent their corporate lackeys out into the world to destroy all indigenous cultures and to fast-food the fitness out of innocent children.  They have alien technology they won’t share and a cultural bankruptcy they’re forcing on the rest of us.  They are gun-happy cowboys who like nothing better than buggering up everything they touch.  In short, when America wakes up, Satan hides under the sofa.

The weirdest thing about anti-Americanism is, though, even in our uber-sensitive world, it’s not seen as bigotry, prejudice or even ignorance.  It is so ingrained in the world’s thinking that nobody even questions it.  Many people don’t even admit it exists.  The most common statement to that end is, “I’m not anti-American … but” and then the speaker launches into an anti-American tirade worthy of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher combined.  Like prejudice everywhere, it doesn’t matter what bigots say before they get to the “but.”  It’s what comes after the qualifier that counts.

Of course, up until recent history, America has been a catchall for a lot of people’s dissatisfaction.  They get the flak because, for the last sixty years or so, they’ve always been front and centre.  They may not be omnipotent, but they’ve certainly been omnipresent.  And that’s what’s changing in our little world.  Slowly but surely, China is reaching its fingers into the international community, and they’re discovering that there’s a whole lot more to being a world power than selling toasters to Italians.  Many people have gone from looking at China through a telescope to putting it under the microscope.  China has already played the racist card (a time-honoured tradition, pioneered by the Japanese) a couple of times to deflect criticism, but that’s not going to last forever.  As more and more people discover China — up close and personal — there will be criticism.  It’s inevitable.  After all, there is no Chinese utopia – any more than there was an American one.  However, for now, it’s interesting to watch the world tiptoeing around the coming Chinese Colossus and hearing a collective American sigh of relief as the spotlight shifts across the Pacific.