Goodness, the Olympics are on and what do I end up watching? I watch a movie about a guy who barely made the cut and did pretty badly to make a spectacle of himself. I've really not followed the Olympics this time and I feel a secret guilt about it, but there's only so much Beach Volleyball and Swimming I can take. I've seen snippets of other events but I'm just finding it hard to get into it this time around.
'Eddie The Eagle' is a feel-good comedy that is built from the template of 'Cool Runnings'. Eddie the Eagle himself has said he likes the film but only 5% of what happened in it are true. So, it's basically 95% a crock, and it plays like that too. The cool coach that teaches Eddie just enough to get in to the competition played by Hugh Jackman? complete bollocks. The backstory of the coach? Complete bollocks. Otherwise the story is a beat-by-beat re-run of 'Cool Runnings' except it's a hopeless Englishman instead of 4 Jamaicans in the snow, and Eddie finishes his event but he's utterly below standard so even the moral victory of it is suspect.
Now, the Olympics have changed the rules so there won't ever be an Eddie The Eagles style competitor. It raises the question as to whether that is still in the spirit of Coubertin's original ideas about Olympic Games. Today it is undeniably an exercise in elitism so it's hard to say to the common person in any given country they should be enthused about all this sport. In a sense, Eddie The Eagle himself and the rule he spawned combined, is the reductio ad absurdum of Coubertin's ideal that the point wasn't winning or losing but the struggle. The modern Games as we know them certainly puts a lie to that one. It is about elite athletes winning and losing.
Of course, it was bleeding obvious by the way our media carries on about our swimmers.
Sports Nationalism Is Actually Boring
This business of spending taxpayers' money on athletes to bring back gold medals is a bit on the nose. There's a certain level whereby if an athlete wants to become elite and perform at the Olympics, they're really doing it for themselves. They're not doing it for their country, really. Certainly not in the same way that soldiers go and fight under a flag do it. Is all this fuss really necessary? Is there any reason on God' Green Earth that Australia needs even one more medal of any colour?
When I think about the summer Olympic gold medals won by Australia, the two that pop into mind are old ones. John Sieben snuck by for gold in LA '84. That same year Dean Lukin won a gold in weight lifting - mainly because the Soviets boycotted the LA Games, and so his major rivals were entirely absent. Both of them sort of were serendipitous, which underlies the notion that Olympic Gold medals are thus precious because fate is so random. When it gets down to Winter Games gold medals, the mot memorable will always be Steve Bradbury, mainly because his win illustrates exactly how fickle and wanton fortunes of the Games can be.
In none of these cases were our national profile raised any higher, none of these cases really added to GDP or contributed to the betterment of mankind. It had about a couple days' worth of good feeling and that was it. The wins - watched from afar - were more akin to going to a really good rock concert. The buzz wears off pretty quickly and memories of Olympics past are pretty ordinary things next to other televised-memory-merchandise. We spend millions on it and then divide up the spending with numbers medals won. I'm here to tell you it's just not doing it for me. I'd really rather they spent that money on health and education. Really. If it's so damn important to our society, sports funding is one area of the government I'd be entirely happy to privatise. Sport is important, but no that important. There's something truly demented about where we've come to with our engagement with sport.
Madness Masquerading As Politics
This has got to be the theme of 2016 - and I'm not talking about Donald Trump. It's our own Senator Malcolm Roberts, he of the second One Nation ticket into the senate.
We've elected Norman Gunston to the Senate.
How did it come to this? We're not a nation of complete nongs. We're a nation who made a hero, across several generations of children, of a physicist who's trademark line was a four-word advertisement for science.
"Why is it so?" Julius Sumner Miller would ask, and we relied on science to provide the answer. Even Mrs Marsh tapped the boffin in us, with her chalk dipped in dye celebrating the benefits of fluoride. "It does get in!" said the kids, believing the evidence of their own eyes.
Oh no it doesn't, would be Malcolm Roberts' reply, perhaps with a triumphant assertion that teeth aren't made of chalk. And to the question "Why is it so?", he might reply, as he did on Q&A: it's a NASA stitch-up.
Roberts: "First of all, that the data has been corrupted and we know…"
Cox: "What do you mean by 'corrupted'? What do you mean?"
Roberts: "Been manipulated…"
Cox: "By who?"
Roberts: "By NASA."
Cox: "NASA?!"
The audience erupted in laughter, as Cox pressed: "This is quite serious" - before Jones tried to restore decorum.
"We have to hear what is being said here," Jones admonished. "It is all very well to laugh but we have to hear what is being said."
Actually, it was hearing what was said that was the problem, as panellist Lily Serna, a mathematician, noted: "First of all, I cannot believe we're having this conversation." Discussing the scientific consensus on climate change, she told Roberts: "You don't ask your architect to read your medical charts just as you don't ask your accountant to perform surgery on you."Good Grief Charlie Brown. I guess it's important to expose the man for exactly what he is, a wilful nutjob who indulges in conspiracy theories in order not to face reality. That we have elected such a fantasist to the Parliament is truly astounding. As if a portion of the population - 77 votes, apparently - is infected by a particularly powerful strain of stupid, and somehow their views had to be reflected in the polity.
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