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| Banksy got it right! |
Teacher: Do you know anything about that ancient sporting
event once known as the Olympic Games?
Student: Yes, I hear they were quite barbaric… philosophically
speaking, of course.
Teacher: Yeah, they’d become a ghetto for elitist, and other
dignitaries, who enjoyed for themselves a good party at the taxpayer’s expense.
It had soon become a debased affair, descending into a
narcissistic charade which added little value to the welfare of nations, other than, perhaps,
an ability to foment jingoism and other superficialities, such as ‘nationalistic
pride’.
Student: But wasn’t the Olympic movement originally founded
in the a-political spirit of friendly competition?
Teacher: Yes, and weren’t our governments originally founded
specifically to protect our freedoms and property rights from the omnipresent menace
of marauding hoards?
*sarcastic chuckle*
Student: Now I get it!
Teacher: As the Olympic Games grew even bigger and ever larger,
they began to lose the main focus of their original ideals. They had fast become
all about money, and status, mirroring the diseased zeitgeist of the societies and
nations who had held them in such high-esteem.
The end result was a kind of changeling-type
affair, one which in no way resembled the true values for which the games were
originally intended, and purposely founded.
Student: So, how did things get so ‘out of control’?
Teacher: “Mon-money, money, money…!” How else?
Student: Sorry, I keep forgetting about that one.
Teacher: Yes, it must be hard remembering to factor-in
something which simply is not within one’s sphere of everyday awareness?
Student: Yeah, it is hard, but I think I’m understanding the
concept a bit better now.
Teacher: The sense of entitlement many athletes had in those
days had reached absurd levels. I can remember how it was at the winter games
in Sochi…
Athletes from the rich western nations began sending back
images, and making derogatory comments online, concerning the supposed abhorrent
and farcical living conditions at the Olympic Village.
Student: And... was it so bad?
Teacher: Well, that’s relative to what one was accustomed
to.
Remember, many of the prima-donna competitors were heavily subsidised by either
corporate or state sponsors, and most of the athletes in attendance had come
from wealthy countries whose governments had virtually unlimited access to
credit.
When they finally arrived in Sochi, and found their toilet
bowl lids had been screwed on backward, or their Wi-Fi hadn’t yet been
installed to their specifications, they freaked out!
Many then proceeded to mock their gracious, yet less
prosperous host-nation, online... Disgusting it was!
Student: That sure wasn’t nice of them!
But hadn’t they also done a similar thing a few years earlier
at the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, India?
Teacher: Yes, but remember, many of these athletes were still
‘young adults’, or to put it more bluntly: spoiled brats who were being very
well paid to perform children’s activities for a living.
The good people of Russia, who had worked long hard hours to
make sure their guest’s brief stay was as comfortable as possible, had experienced
for themselves no such luxuries. These hearty labourers received little more
than a pittance as payment for their dutiful efforts, mostly for performing
tedious and often thankless work.
The online debacle served to point out to the world how
shallow many westerners had become.
Student: It’s funny, I know what you mean, but the very concept
of a professional athlete seems absurd here in Nova Avalon.
And what about the Press, hadn’t it been their job to report the
‘objective truth’, and not get involved in trite attempts at petty mockery?
Teacher: Originally yes, but you’re forgetting about the money
angle once again, and the very lucrative spinoffs of media-sensationalism.
It’s important to remember that most athletes weren’t, in any
way, an accurate representation of the societies from which they came. They
were more like anomalous caricatures spawned from the various sub-cultures
occupying the bowels of their mutant society.
Student: For example…
Teacher: Well, just look at the Snow-Boarders or Freestyle Skiers:
basically, they were just a bunch of pot-smoking suburbanite silver-spooned
adolescents, living in their rich parent’s hillside condos, leeching off their silver-lined financial
investment inheritances.
Or how about the Women’s Hockey team: A disproportionate
concentration of ferocious females possessing an abnormal amount of Johnny-testosterone.
And those Figure Skaters… or should I say: “How to farm-out a delicate
and dove-skinned pure-bred sexually ambiguous man-child for profit…” except for
the women skaters, of course!
Should I go on?
Student: My god, you’re foaming at the mouth! Why are you
getting so angry? You’re such a ‘nanny-ass bitch’! …but yeah sure, why not?
Please continue!
Teacher: OK, now let’s take the Curlers as another example: They
were simply a conglomeration of Tim-bit eating small town hicks who had nothing
better to do during the long winter months than toss heavy stones on a frozen
lake in their godforsaken rural backwater.
Oh, and let’s not forget about the Short-Track Speed Skaters:
Skinny little foam-headed arts-majors with beards, whose parents had drank way too
much during their pre-natal gestation period, yet fortunately had somehow been
born with enough speedy vitality to elude the predatory advances of their precocious priests.
Oh, and then there were the…
Student: Stop, please… I think I’ve pissed my pants.
Teacher: I’m NOT trying to be funny… what I’m telling you here
is the TRUTH!!!
Student: Maybe it is, but I’m sure you didn’t have the nerve
to say those things back in the day… did you?
Teacher: Are you kidding me? Political Correctness was like a
hammer into anvil. To speak the truth in that time we now refer to as: The
Great Forgetting, would have isolated you greatly.
No, I kept my mouth shut, just like everybody else did.
Student: Weren’t there other issues too, at the games?
Wasn’t there the threat of ’terrorism’, or ‘tooth-paste-tube nukes’, or
something like that?
Teacher: Propaganda! Masterfully designed to frighten people
into getting worked up over nothing.
Student: Money, again?
Teacher: Yeah, and also, there had been this big ‘to-do’
about some supposedly ‘anti-gay’ law that had been passed a few months before
the games began.
Student: Oh, had the Russian people been up in arms about it?
Teacher: Not really, other than perhaps your garden variety
Pussy Rioters and Femen members… No, most Russians couldn’t have given a purple
perogie one way or the other.
It was our beloved leaders and corporate-media who were
spinning that circus side-show twenty-four seven, pandering to all the special
interest and lobby groups who were breathing down their spineless jelly necks back
home.
Student: But hey, relax!
Remember: “it’s all good!”
Teacher: Good? Not really! The government institutions these
leaders supposedly represented continued to sanction torture at secret and
not-so-secret off-shore military bases, to wiretap phone lines without a
warrant, employ systemic mass-surveillance programs, unlawfully detain any ‘persons
of interest’, sometimes on suspicion alone, engage in the killing of innocent
civilians in foreign lands with their ‘double-tap’ drone strikes, or by simply flooding
resource war-zones with a toxic compounds like depleted uranium and white phospherous…
but please, don’t get me started on that subject!
Student: Hey, don't you think you're getting a little carried away here? But anyway, why not get you started on that subject?
Teacher: Because I’m liable to take my criticisms up a notch,
or THREE: Faster, Higher, and Stronger
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