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China, IOC feeding consumers

Amnesty International — those pesky do-gooders — are raining on the Olympic parade.
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Amnesty International — those pesky do-gooders — are raining on the Olympic parade. Monday they released a report confirming, as so many of us expected, the sun continues to rise in the east, Santa Claus is not a real person and, oh yeah, “The Chinese authorities have broken their promise to improve the country’s human rights situation and betrayed the core values of the Olympics.”

Well, duh.

As a card-carrying, left-leaning, protest-marching, social liberal, I ought to be outraged by the abuses, lies, prevarications and generally paranoid, xenophobic examples of human rights violations outlined in AI’s report. But reality check time: This is China we’re talking about.

It’s also the Olympics we’re talking about. I mean, let’s get real here. The IOC pretty much abandoned and betrayed the core values of the Olympics decades ago when they sold ’em out to the highest bidder, repudiated the quaint, old-fashioned notion of “amateur” athletics, and enshrined the very democratic practice of accepting large cash gifts in plain brown envelopes.

Who cares?

The sad — or happy, depending on how you look at it — fact is that getting upset with China for human rights abuses is a bit like getting upset with your dealer over the high price of smack. China is simply too big, too powerful and too rich for any western government to take action more damning and decisive than saying, “Tsk, tsk, guys, you really ought to be nicer to your slaves and undesirables.” Face it, we’re hooked on China and there’s no getting this monkey off our backs. In fact, we wouldn’t know what to do without the cute little fella.

“Advanced” western nations have more or less encouraged manufacturers to abandon the core values of self-sufficiency and move production to China. It has nothing whatsoever to do with boosting profits due to the fact that the Chinese workforce amounts to industrialized slave labour and the environmental protections in the country are so advanced they have to shut things down to give the illusion of having air clean enough for athletes and dignitaries to breathe. The real reason western governments aided and abetted this transfer of labour was so enlightened, freedom-loving, highly-educated western workers could stop getting their hands dirty and jump wholly into higher value-added service type jobs. It was such a selfless, considerate thing to do that legions of grateful former factory workers got down on their knees and thanked them for creating the opportunity they always secretly yearned for to give up high-paying union jobs so they could pursue their dream of becoming greeters at Wal-Mart where anxious consumers line up to buy cheap Chinese goods with familiar, if sometimes butchered, Englese labels.

Realistically we’re so hooked on Chinese-made goods we can’t really, in most instances, find any alternatives to them no matter how hard we look. The US government is so totally indebted to China it can’t afford to be outraged by any human rights abuses the country commits. The Canadian government and provincial Team Canada trade missions regularly pay homage to the Great Provider, making servile pilgrimages, hat in hand, asking politely for a slightly larger slice of pie.

China is the past and China is the future. Get over it.

With the exception of a few, stalwart individuals who lead a generally ascetic existence, protesting China’s ham-fisted disregard for the value of people as anything other than labour inputs is, in an advanced western setting, hypocritical. We’re addicted to cheap goods; we’re just too genteel to engage in outright slavery ourselves. We’ve outsourced it, along with jobs, to the lowest bidder. Beating up on China for doing what it does so well, for doing what we’ve been complicit in enabling it to do, is almost comical.

And while I won’t be sitting mesmerized in front of the television watching the opening ceremonies — or any of the competition for that matter — it won’t be in protest against China. If it’s an act of protest against anything, it’ll be a protest against the hype and sham the Olympics have become though, truth be told, I’d rather watch paint dry than waste any of the time I have left alive watching most of the sports displayed in the summer Olympics. Beach volleyball? Oh, really; get a life. Better yet, head down to Rainbow Park and play some beach volleyball.

American broadcaster, NBC, ponied up $894 million for the Beijing Olympics broadcast rights. CBC wasted $45 million of — largely — taxpayers’ dollars for the Canadian rights. Between them, we’ll be inundated with almost 6,000 hours of TV, Internet, podcast and other coverage of sports, human interest stories, jingoistic piffle and, of course, ads, ads, ads during the run of the Games. A truly plugged-in webhead could manage to waste the better part of a year in less than two weeks ogling all things Olympic as long as he could multitask his various electronic devices and violate the linear nature of time.

There’ll be coverage of the competitions, there’ll be some stories about the pollution in Beijing, stories about people who lost their homes so China could show the world what a with it, modern place the ancient city has become. The Great Wall will make an appearance and there’ll even be some stories of outrage over the government’s restrictions on press freedom. What there won’t be are stories about major newspapers or magazines or any other enablers taking a principled pass on the Olympics as a protest against either China or the IOC.

They can’t afford to. We’re hooked on the dazzle of it all so they’ve got to dish it up to us. We’re passive consumers of sport as spectacle and that is the sad irony of the legacy the IOC gave up when it sold the Olympics' soul to, largely, television.

In a world dominated by professional athletics, the Olympics and collegiate sports were the last holdouts for amateur athletes. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of amateur athletes, they were people who used to compete in sports they were pretty good at for the thrill of competition. They didn’t do it for the money, for the million-dollar payday Olympic gold has become. They didn’t spend all day every day training for the Olympics. They didn’t have legions of professional coaches, trainers, sports psychologists, physiotherapists and PR people supporting them. Hell, they even had regular jobs they had to train and compete around. Athletics was just something they did… for fun.

Kind of like most people used to do until they abandoned it for watching professional sports on TV.

If you think that’s sad, think about what an enlightened nation could do if it diverted even a fraction of the dough spent on something as meaningless as what the Olympics have become on supporting real, community-based, grassroots amateur athletics instead.

Now that’s sad.