The Owelympics

I have not been a fan of the Olympics since the very first drug scandal that I can remember.  I was quite young but the memory is still vivid of a panel announcement about some Eastern European athlete being stripped of his medal because he was taking something you might want to give your horse instead. Later, when I was old enough to know more immediately, I watched Ben Johnson streak across the finish line in less than 10 seconds.  I was in a bar in New York City with a woman I was dating at the time.  ”Wow, what an accomplishment!”, she exclaimed, when Johnson tore up the track.  ”I bet you he’s juiced”, I replied.

She was incredulous.  How could I have denigrated one of the finest accomplishments in sport?  Well, it was easy.  I grew up in an era of the real athlete: Muhammed Ali, Bobby Orr, Arthur Ashe…  You couldn’t get these men to take aspirin, nevermind Dianabol.

The scandals that succeeded ‘The Johnson Affair’ were papered over:  Linford Christie and that donkey’s ass, Carl Lewis, tested positive (but only Johnson was stripped of medals and records).

Regardless, have you heard anyone in the local or even national media cover doping and the Olympics?  Doping still happens, with alarming frequency.  You just don’t hear about it much, because concealment has become so fluid and easy.  What message are we sending to our young?  Doping has become so prevalent that it’s okay if you shoot your ass up with some Winstrol?  There should be widespread coverage on the dangers and death sentence of drugs in sport.

And then, what about the financial cost of the Olympics to this once great province?  Gordon Campbell’s shameful govt is delivering this two-week festival of androids and advertisers, on the backs of the poor, the sick, the needy, the elderly, the ambulance service, school children, the arts community, the healthcare system, after school sports programs, at-risk families, autistics, the addicted…it DISGUSTS me.  I’m all for the Olympics, but it’s the last thing we needed now, despite a less than vibrant economy.  Even if we were flush, there would still be a whole slew of issues (and they remain) that should be getting our attention:  More specifically, the Premier’s attention.

Well,the other night while I was switching between Tony’s new glasses (that look notoriously like the ones worn by Gordon Campbell) and Pamela’s eyebrows, now permanently botoxed into one position, it struck me that not a word, not one, has been uttered about the likelihood of a massive debt at the end of this ‘sporting’ event.  Not a word.  You can still find ample accommodation both in Whistler and, miracle of miracles, in downtown Vancouver for the games.  Ticket sales are so poor that entire swaths are being bought up by the province and the City of Vancouver (which should NEVER have happened), the security estimate has now officially surpassed the one billion mark, but not a word about our impending wallop at the debt counter.  Nothing.

What gets me more than anything about this whole Olympic fraud, perhaps, is that the media are so busy being bought, they can’t even pretend to be impartial.

CTV have shamelessly bought into this nightmare because they think they can knock off Global at six (that’s nuts, it’ll never happen) and Global even had some of its own reporters running in the torch relay-completely inappropriate. But at the national level, too, how do you cover the real story of the Olympics if you’re Fluffer-in-Chief?

Not to mention that, locally, the so-called party of the people, Vision Vancouver, who control council, lay down like plump old dogs when the thought police came along and stopped law-abiding citizens from freedom of expression.  You can’t put up a sign in your UBC dormitory window, in polite protest, saying (appropriately) ‘The 2010 Olympics Suck!”, for fear the RCMP may come by and start searching for evidence that you’re a member of the bloody Taliban.  What have we become?  Shades of Tiananmen Square anyone?  All we’re missing are the beatings, the rest is all there.  And you can thank Gordon Campbell for initiating the stifling of free speech and Gregor Robertson for being a pathetic push-over.

But back to the media…whose job it is the seek the truth.

Where is our objectivity?  Where is the public’s right to know?

Let me share with you a quote from a CNN congressional correspondent, named Jennifer Yellin.  This was her quote, verbatim, after the travesty of how the United States entered the Iraq War (Note to Reader:  I fully support the war.  I just wish they had entered it with the entire truth and not piecemeal, half-baked “evidence”)

The quote by Yellin, made me think that some honest reporter in this province, or country, might say the same thing after the 2010 Olympics are finally discovered to be the disaster they really are.

This is how she explained the media’s inability to do their job.

“The press corps was under enormous pressure from government officials and corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation…..”

So….the media in this province, in particular, are under immense pressure by govt officials and corporate executives (mostly close to the Premier) to make sure that the Olympics’ coverage is consistent with the bullshit being shoveled by two levels of govt (Vancouver and Victoria).

That’s the story, my darlings, that’s the story, and you can file this one away and read it again in May when some of the larger bills start to arrive.

Watch what happens…

Alas, objective journalism has given way to opinion journalism (in the case of the Olympics, it’s ‘Bought Journalism’ to keep the advertisers “happy”, at least those that can still pay)…

And objectivity can’t be left to you, because that would interfere, if, Heaven forbid, the truth were to emerge.

Besides, it would impede the Premier’s monumental monumentality.

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