I'll come clean first. I've been lying low here these past few months, stepping aside to allow writers with greater access and better information to daily deconstruct the Bush Administration and the surrounding neoconservative criminal conspiracy. There was no way a part-time entertainment producer and fulltime boxing commentator could match the kind of work Arianna and countless others have put forth here, and I stand in awe of them.
But then I read Bill Maher's brief putdown of the Winter Olympics the other day. Thanks Bill. I'm awake now.
It's a bit difficult to tell from Maher's cryptic post exactly what his objection to the Olympics is. It's even more difficult in light of his appearance on Jay Leno's set last night, comfortably seated next to snowboarding halfpipe gold medalist Shaun White. Did Maher take advantage of the opportunity to inform White that the Games are "insipid"? Did he use the platform of "the network of the Olympics" to establish for White that he isn't really an athlete because gravity figures into his sport's dynamics? Uh, not exactly. But then that isn't really the culture of the Tonight Show, is it? As yet another fatuous, self-involved, egomaniacal exhibitionist like Maher, I can identify with the urge, and with the way the game is played.
Of course no one should expect a career cynic like Bill Maher to get it about something as self-consciously high-minded as the Olympics. Truth is, to a mind like that this surely appears to be as easy a target as Dick Cheney. But in focusing on what he sees as the absurdity of the events at the Winter Games, Maher totally misses the point. It doesn't matter what Maher or anyone else thinks about snowboarding or cross-country skiing or hockey or luge or skeleton. It isn't the games that drives the appeal of the Games. This is about flags and anthems, about communion across borders, about an elusive dream that the world can be better. If Maher doesn't get that, it's because he doesn't want to.
The parade of nations at the opening ceremony, the gathering of the athletes when they break ranks at the closing ceremony-- in terms of any useful hope that this small planet can somehow become a more hospitable place for us all, this is simply the best we do. It's better than war, better than trade negotiations, better than cultural exchange, better than the United Nations, better than anything. Not perfect, not a match for the rhetoric of the "Olympic ideal", not immune to constructive criticism for the excesses of competitive desire and nationalist fervor it can engender, but again, the best we do. Without the absolutely genuine moments of cross-cultural sharing and friendship that take place here, where the hell else would you find it? Nowhere.
Bill Maher is patently brilliant, and his HBO show is must-see TV each and every week. But in his reflexive and ill-considered attempt to deconstruct the Winter Olympics, he is as wrong as Lindsey Jacobellis was to grab her snowboard in mid-air today and give away a sure gold medal. Lindsey might get another chance to ask the public to reconsider four years from now in Vancouver. Maher should reconsider right now, while there is still plenty of time to appreciate what is good and valuable about Torino. Besides, he appeared to have a jolly good time last night, sitting shoulder to shoulder with halfpipe millionaire Shaun White.
