Climb Mount Olympus
The Olympics are over. I thought they went well and that it was worthwhile
Politics and Games: Was Beijing 2008 a Mistake? - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News:. The world survived, and by-and-large the drama was contained to people running very fast, swimming very fast or jumping great lengths into the air. All of which is in the Olympic charter. For me, watching NBC, it was the usual bittersweet experience. Once again I didn't catch a glimpse of any sailing events. I saw rowing the second Saturday, I liked it when the Chinese women's four-crew won a gold. They looked so happy. I watched lots of Beach Volley Ball. NBC though insists on filling its programming with warm treacle moments of adversity overcome. They increasing are going to that well too often. They couldn't cover an event without telling a story couldn't tell a story without telling a sentimental one. Their numbers may show the public wants this, but then somebodies numbers once showed them that Louis C-K needed his own TV show. We all know how that went. In twenty or more years of watching the Olympics one thing that has stayed with me was not an athletic thing but a simple montage of the production team and crew, with David Bowie's 'Heroes' as background, that the network put together and aired in a quiet waning hours of the summer games in South Korea. There was no Seoul moment from the Bob this time. It all seemed rather flat. For China, watching the world, the games went very well
A Victory for China. I certainly noted that Beijing was an elegant and modern metropolis, when the sun was out and you could see it. Several commentators observed that these were games that meant more to the host than they did the contestants. Most people seemed aware of the meta contest that was occurring. For China to wrestle the world into accepting China on China's terms.
The question of the hour is what direction for China now?
News Analysis - After Glow of Games, What Next for China? - News Analysis - NYTimes.com More slow cautious top down reform. Or as some see it, this has been a validation of centralized mass control. The perspective from China's leadership hierarchy is that China has always been this way. But they overestimate their importance to ordinary lives.
Francis Fukuyama, no less, weighed in on this in last Sunday's Washington Post. New beginings from the End of History They Can Only Go So Far. Fukuyama's mission is the tough job of keeping history ended. All ideology especially with any blush of revolutionary ferver will be apt to see in itself perfection fulfilled, and insist that change cease. From there to repress or deny human modality and innovation of political form. He makes two basic statements in this piece. In this season of rising authoritarian rule: All autocracies are different in their own way. Well yes I suppose. Autocracies timocracies plutocracies, aristocracies democracies theocracies, there is a list of sorts. We are not seeing a single phenomenon he tries to say, but in the procesess and means of political containment, their arrangement of priviledge, they have their similarities. Perhaps realizing this he qualifies this with a distinction. In brief: Weak parasitical = Bad. Strong coherant = not so bad. What he is really doing here is setting up an apology for the new style of ordered and closed governance as long as lip service is paid to abstract freedom, the Beijing Consensus. That the people have their expression through consumption. That Democracy is best understood as a goal driven enterprise. Judged from someone's angle of satisfaction. Measurable materiality not mere autonomy. I tend to think of markets as like Internal Combustion Engines. A thing having a real world limit to 'thermal' efficiency, never rising above a certain and significantly less than full percentage, and only when cared for and tuned constantly. I am aware that it is a discredititable impiety to bring such a doubting gaze on the Free Market.
The truest moment of the affair, the Olympics, came in the moment when two elderly women found themselves threatened with imprisonment for having the audacity to request not once but twice audience for a grievance. Question Authority and get re-educated
How educational is a Chinese re-education camp? - By Jacob Leibenluft - Slate Magazine:. China's leaders understand and fear the strength and spirit of their people. Perhaps it is well they know this much. This success of these games amid so much random and churning energy as they had in their town this fortnight ought to be seen as a signal that they can let go a little and things will be allright.
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