When the Olympics were going on when I was a teenager, my friends and I would gather to watch figure skating in winter and gymnastics in summer. Mostly, as with anything during adolescence, it held a romantic attraction for us. In skating, we liked to see the sequins and the skirts and the death-defying spins of couples impossibly paired and destined for heartbreak. In gymnastics, we pined after the guys on the pommel horse and their resin-covered hands and longed to be petite little girls whose developing bodies were forever locked in amber. We spent quite a long time imitating these heroines -- in fact, I broke my wrist for the first time ice-skating, while pretending to be Peggy Fleming in front of a friend.
Somewhere between junior high and college, the Olympics lost their allure for me and became something only athletes watched. And it took some time, but I also began to experience that sense of what the Spanish call "vergüenza ajena" -- a kind of embarrassment one encounters on behalf of someone else. The chants of "USA, USA" make me cringe. So do the wearing of flags, whether they be American or those of another nation. And all the opening ceremonies showcasing the supposed harmony of the world, complete with native dances and costumes -- like a UNICEF Christmas card -- belie what the Olympics is really about: a kind of athletic nation-building extravaganza. Certainly, a great deal of the Olympics is still about superior athletic achievement and what the human body is capable of. But inevitably, no matter where the Olympics are held, we must encounter an "Olympic controversy."
This year, in London, the U.S. newschannel NBC has already gotten into the fray by editing out a ceremony commemorating the 7/7 terrorist bombings and instead, pasting in an interview between Ryan Seacrest and swimmer Michael Phelps (see British coverage of the story here and American here). As The Guardian reports, "NBC. . . chose to broadcast the entire ceremony on a time-delay to maximise primetime advertising revenue..." While revenue may be part of the story, the larger issue is memory and victimhood.
This year, in London, the U.S. newschannel NBC has already gotten into the fray by editing out a ceremony commemorating the 7/7 terrorist bombings and instead, pasting in an interview between Ryan Seacrest and swimmer Michael Phelps (see British coverage of the story here and American here). As The Guardian reports, "NBC. . . chose to broadcast the entire ceremony on a time-delay to maximise primetime advertising revenue..." While revenue may be part of the story, the larger issue is memory and victimhood.
Maybe, part of the problem is precisely that! What the U.S. needs less of is programs tailored to its own viewing preferences and more opportunities for engaging with the rest of the world. If a British TV channel had edited out a tribute to victims of 9-11, we most certainly would have voiced our outrage. The bottom line is that politics matters when it's our politics. Victims matter when they're our victims. 9-11 is the terrorist attack, and all others fall beneath it. Editing out something even as apparently minor as this 6-minute tribute does nothing to help the image of the U.S. abroad. And then we complain about "anti-Americanism!" The tribute to the London victims could have been an opportunity for Americans to contemplate 9-11 alongside 7/7. As Joanne Garde-Hansen writes in Media and Memory, "National broadcast media, in particular, across the world tend to tell self-aggrandising stories about a nation to a nation" (109). The Olympics is the perfect stage for tales of rebirth from the ashes -- as long as the ashes are those of our own.
See the BBC video here.
