Courtesy of Michele and Garrulitis in response to this article.
NEW YORK — American athletes have been warned not to wave the U.S. flag during their medal celebrations at this summer's Olympic Games in Athens, for fear of provoking crowd hostility and harming the country's already-battered public image. The spectacle of victorious athletes grabbing a national flag and parading it around the stadium is a familiar part of international sporting competition, but U.S. Olympic officials have ordered their 550-strong team to exercise restraint and avoid any jingoistic behavior. The plan is part of a charm offensive aimed at repairing the country's international reputation after the deepening crisis in Iraq and damaging revelations of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison. "American athletes find themselves in extraordinary circumstances in Athens in relation to the world as we know it right now," said Mike Moran, a veteran former spokesman for the United States Olympic Committee who has been retained as a consultant to advise athletes how to behave. "Regardless of whether there is anti-American sentiment in Athens or not, the world watches Americans a lot now in terms of how they behave and our culture. What I am trying to do with the athletes and coaches is to suggest to them that they consider how the normal things they do at an event, including the Olympics, might be viewed as confrontational or insulting or cause embarrassment."Forgive me for sounding like a jingo, but who in the name of God cares what the rest of the world thinks about us. God, it's so effing juvenile. Why on earth should we mount a "charm offensive" for people who are never going to be impressed with us, no matter what we do or what we say? Are we, as a country, really so damn needy that it's essential for everyone to like us? Apparently, the USOC thinks so. Hence "the charm offensive." Don't wave the flag around, don't jump up and down and hoot and holler and be obnoxious about your victory. Don't piss anyone off, and then maybe people will like you. Working under the Dennis Miller's theorem that "life is just tall grade school," let's apply the lessons of grade school to this problem. Grade school lesson #1: people will never like you because you want them to like you. They will either like you or they won't. Simple fact o' life.
I was not a popular kid. Shocking, I know. I spent years
trying to get people to like me. I cried. I bent over backwards to
please the Gods of popularity. I wondered and wondered what I could do
to get people to like me. I worked at it and nothing ever came of it.
You know what finally worked? Just being myself and the attitude that
anyone who didn't like it could go hang. It's a brutal lesson to learn,
because you think it's your fault that people despise you and snicker
about you behind your back. You think that you should be able to change
people's impressions. The hard truth says otherwise: most of the time
it's not your fault. Yes, there are the moments when you are an ass and
you deserve the ridicule that you recieve, but those are far and few in
between when you're an unpopular kid. Trust me on this one. The amount
of ridicule I received never equalled the times I was an ass. Although,
it sure as hell didn't feel like it at the time. It always felt like I
deserved it.
What the situation essentially boils down to is that you are trying to
leap the insurmountable wall of other people's incorrect assumptions
and you will never get there. Not even if you're the school pole
vaulting champion. You will always knock down the bar and you will hit
the mat...hard. You eventually learn that you have absolute absolutely
no control over what anyone thinks of you. You just don't. Does this
give you license to act like an ass? No. But it doesn't mean that
you're automatically an idiot because someone says you are, either. I
am not a needy individual, nor do I think my fellow citizens on the
USOC should be so damn needy as to hire a consultant to teach athletes
not to flaunt their patriotism because they just want people to like
Americans.
Commenters over at Michele's place and on other blogs have said that we
should just boycott the Olympics altogether. No. This is the wrong
thing to do. We should go. Why? Because, like the UN, the idea behind
the Olympics is worthy of paying homage to.
According to the Olympic Charter,
established by Pierre de Coubertin, the goal of the Olympic Movement is
to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating
youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in
the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit
of friendship, solidarity and fair play.
Never mind the practicalities, the ideals
are what has made humanity so damn good, and are also what has made the
Olympics something to watch and wonder about for reasons other than the
sporting events. It's one of those "big ideas" that changed the world.
Noting that discrimination and mutual understanding, solidarity and
fair play should be a part of international sport is a big idea.
America is a part of the Western world. We are a democracy. The ideals
of the Olympic games are modeled in democracy, not totalitarianism. Not
fascism. Not communism. Democracy. Our values are a part of
what makes the Olympic ideal something to be aspired to. If American
athletes should attend the games with bowed heads, apologetic hearts,
while whispering a prayer that they don't offend someone with their
ideals, what does that say about how highly we value ourselves and by
that right, our ideals? It says, in essence, that our ideals suck. That
we're sorry for having them. That, to me, is just wrong.