It’s Possible…

Posted February 24th, 2006 by Sean Williams

Some sports related stuff…

Is it possible that it’s really difficult for us to compete in something like the World Games or the Olympics, when our athletes might have terribly confused feelings about being an American in 2006? Is it possible that all the attention on the number of medals we win this Olympics, and our celebration of individual achievement over any kind of team play, is because of a fascination of both sides of the Clark Kent/Superman American identity?

I’m just asking here. Our celebration of anti-intellectualism, of easy answers, of gut-responses, of, essentially, the wholesome simpleness of Clark Kent, the bumbling simpleton who knows the difference between right and wrong because he listens to his heart and his God, could that lead to compacency? When simple unimpressive men become our superheroes, when the marginally talented but fortuitously sexual become our reigning American artists, when tactical decisions of the largest magnitude are made without nuance, then is America becoming a place where things seem to happen without reason, where ends don’t justify means, they seem to occur without means, where winning doesn’t matter?

It’s just a question, really.

There are two professional sports players, Terrel Owens and Ron Artest, both of whom caused enormous upset on their individual teams, and both of whom are some of the most talented players to play their individual sports. T.O. went most of the season without a team because he was such a problem, Ron Artest did the same. How on earth can people be surprised by this? You don’t become players of their caliber (both are considered among the very best in their sport) without an enormous amount of work and a giant genetic lottery win, why shouldn’t they expect the entirety of the world known to them to bend to their will.

In the end, the world did bend to them. They will get paid, they will get anything they want, and they are professionals. They have a job, which is playing a game, and they will get as much money as they want. We, America, were obsessed with the shenanigans surrounding both these players. I’m just asking, is it possible that we see this behavior and we feel like we’ve found an outlet for our outrage because there are white collar white guys, who also worked very hard and had a giant genetic lottery win being born into rich families with white skin, who are responsible for crimes against America and Humanity, but who’s deeds are so much harder to understand than a black guy yelling at his team-mates and wanting 10 million more than his 60 million dollar contract…

Probaly not. This probably doesn’t mean anything, it’s a stupid question, really.

But when we wrestle something like the Olympics to feature LUGE… I’m sorry, I have interrupt here. These people are going down an ice pipe on a sled? I mean, I’m not sure what the math is, but couldn’t you just weigh a whole bunch of people, do the algorithm for gravity and weight vs. drag and then just put the person with the optimum weight on a sled and send them down? Or, why even a person, can’t they just count the right number of sand bags, put a flag for each country, and see what happens…?

Sorry.

When we wrestle the Olympics into featuring something like snowboarding, and then our woman doesn’t win the gold because she’s hotdogging… Jesus Christ, I don’t even know what the hell people are talking about. We didn’t win as many medals as the Germans because someone was better at skiing to a place, then riding a bike to a lake where he had to ice-fish or some damn thing, I can’t even figure out which of these things is a sport and what makes someone good at it. (I mean, in Golf, if you say “closest to the pin buys lunch”, I get that, but is there really a scoring system for dancing? Man, if you got Squeek from Baseketball out there doing pelic thrusts, I’d vote for him.)

Anyone who calls this Olympics a dissapointment is a jackass. The Olympics are the Olympics, it’s a celebration of international competition among amateurs, or at least it should be. If you watched the women’s figure skating and were upset by the outcome because Sasha Cohen didn’t win… Japan won it’s first winter Gold medal EVER, and Japan won it’s ONLY MEDAL last night of this entire Olympics. And the woman who skated was perfect and breath-taking.

Is it possible, I’m just asking, but is it possible that since we think it’s okay to hold people without reason in foreign prisons and torture them there, even though we claim the bill of rights is inalienable, that a man can rise to the highest positions of power in the government and in business based on their family names, even though we claim we live in a meritocracy, that we can wage war on other countries based solely on their ethnic makeup and their ability to be conquered, despite the fact that our country was founded on religious freedom and the idea that all men are created equal, that maybe some of this has something to do with our disappointment in not winning every single event that we compete in?

Probably not. It’s a hell of a stretch. I’m sure the Romans in the 4th Century probably thought the Turks and the Huns were their equal in sport. It didn’t stop the inevitable, though.

There. I promised myself I’d write today.