Are you not entertained?

Re-arranging my belongings at home provided me with an opportunity to re-read some of my newspaper commentaries from years past.  I am pretty darn impressed with myself, I tell ya.  For one, even in my earliest commentaries, it is clear that I quickly learnt how to write, after a disastrous start in graduate school.  More importantly, I am pleased with myself for the consistency with which I have argued many of my positions.

In one of those commentaries, I argued that the local government should not be in the entertainment business.  I wrote this in the context of Bakersfield's plan to spend gazillions on an arena.  My point was that we do not have governments in order to entertain us, and that sports and arenas should be left to the market.  Of course, given how much people love, love being entertained--no wonder Trump made it to the top with his reality entertainment--and given how much I am always on the losing side, well, ...

This is not a new position since graduate school.  I was even more opposed to governments investing in entertainment back when I was a commie sympathizer.  I was an undergraduate student when India hosted the Asian Games.  Television was a new thing in our lives at that time; yet, I decided that I would boycott it.  I did not watch even one minute of those games on TV.  I could not, and still cannot, understand why the government would waste all that money on entertainment when there were far more urgent human problems everywhere in India.  The only difference is that back then I did not articulate an argument that entertainment should come out of private spending.

Next month, it will be the mother of all sports entertainment--the Olympics.  As I have done with the past events, I will boycott this too.

Those with money, who want to be entertained, have somehow managed to convince those without any money--who also like to be entertained--that investing gazillions of public money on all things sports is an economic investment with huge returns.  One awesome bullshit that happens over and over again only because the unthinking people like to be entertained 24x7!

Any unbiased observer will tell you the same thing: You may as well dig huge holes, fill them with all the money you have, and pour concrete over them!

Economists are notorious for being unable to agree on anything. So it's striking that on the finances of the Olympics, they almost all agree.
"Investing in the Olympics is not worth the investment," says Andy Zimbalist of Smith College.
"You build all these facilities that are perfect for the Olympics, that are not really as desirable once the circus leaves town," says Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago.
"You end up with a very indebted city or host nation long after the confetti is cleaned up; someone has to pay the bills for it," says Bob von Rekowsky of Fidelity Investments.

We have known from the Roman days that the best way to continue to screw the country is by distracting the people with mass entertainment.  It is entertainment, not religion, that is the opium of the masses!

I sometimes want to scream that people are idiots.  Oops, did I say that? ;)  Spending is simply not worth it to the taxpayers:

Spending lavishly on a short-lived event is, economically speaking, a dubious long-term strategy. Stadiums, which cost a lot and produce minimal economic benefits, are a particularly lousy line of business. (This is why they are usually built by taxpayers rather than by corporations.)

Not difficult to understand.  Corporations would have spent the money if they knew they were going to make more money than what they invested.  They know a loser when they see stadiums, and they also see losers when they see taxpayers.  They, therefore, get the loser taxpayers to build those loser stadiums!

And then there are reports like this:

There’s just a month to go before the Summer Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro. And the bad news keeps coming.

Or, this:

One Month Before The Olympic Games in Rio, Everything Is A Disaster

So, hey, enjoy this latest installment of taxpayer-funded debauchery, which will be from August 5th; I will be busy with my summer reading ;)

Source

What are we really watching when we watch the Olympics?

That's what Louis Menand asks, when he writes:

If someone described to you an ancient civilization in which, every four years, at great expense, citizens convened to watch a carefully selected group perform a series of meticulously preset routines, and in which the watching was thought of not as a duty but as a hugely anticipated and unambiguously pleasurable experience, you would guess that, socially, this ritual was doing a lot of work. You would assume that it was instilling, or reinforcing, or rebooting attitudes and beliefs that this hypothetical civilization regarded—maybe correctly, maybe just superstitiously—as vital to its functioning. You would say that the spectacle had a content. Do these Summer Games have a content? What are we really watching when we watch the Olympics?

It is one heck of an interesting question.  What are we watching, and why are watching?

The modern Olympics are a model example of what the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have called invented traditions—ritualized official or quasi-official events, often presented as revivals of ancient practices or in other ways designed to imply continuity with the distant past.

Well, why would we want to invent such traditions anyway?  Why these rituals every four years?

Modern societies are still obsessed with these secular rituals, in part because almost all of them have become successfully commercialized. Maybe they offer an illusion of permanence and continuity in a world characterized mainly by mobility, change, and uncertainty. No matter what happens to us next year, there will be a Super Bowl. Or maybe they feed our tribal instincts, stimulate the irrational basis of loyalty to our community or our country. Even the most cosmopolitan American viewer of the Olympics has a hard time not rooting for the American. If you watch, you don’t just want to see how it comes out. You care who wins.
And, despite the virtuous talk about the honor of competing and the comity of sport—and the talk is virtuous, and fine as far as it goes—winning really is what the spectacle is all about.

Hmmm .... Menand seems to be voicing that ultimate bottom-line often quoted here in the US: Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.

To me, what was way more interesting than anything else in the essay was the lack-of-sports-enthusiasm that Menand describes in his family when he was growing up because of "an aversion to the belief" that

the ability to run faster or throw farther than other people is a contribution to the common good, and that we ought to honor the athlete in the same way that we honor the artist and the statesman.

Now, if only Menand would pursue that thought in another essay of his.  

Here is one real-world situation that reflects that thought: NASA successfully landed Curiosity on a planet about 150 million miles away.  And it took more than eight months to travel from here.

Immediately after learning about the successful landing, did President Obama congratulate NASA and its engineers?  After all, this President has annually made a big deal of his picks in the NCAA basketball tournament.  With NASA, well, not to my knowledge. Perhaps he did after a couple of days? 

Did Candidate Romney immediately congratulate NASA and its engineers? Not to my knowledge.  Perhaps he did after a couple of days?

Will the winning Super Bowl team be invited to pose with the President at the White House? You betcha!  Because, "the ability to run faster or throw farther than other people is a contribution to the common good" more than, for instance, the NASA engineers' contribution to the common good?  And then we wonder why kids in America don't feel inclined to work on their math and science skills? Oh well!

 

So, why does India not win at sporting events like the Olympics?

Two summers ago, against the backdrop of soccer's World Cup mania, I commented on how India rarely blips in the global sports radar.  As with anything else, here too it is awfully difficult understanding India!  We could come up with a gazillion explanations for why not many athletes emerge from a country with a billion people.  All those explanations will sound good and none of those explanations will sound good.  That is India for you.

But, people do attempt to offer explanations.  After all, it is one tempting puzzle.  Unless one is as determined as Ulysses was in order to avoid succumbing to the call of the sirens, well, the topic of India's flame-outs at the Olympics and other events is sheer entrapment.

I liked how this author deftly managed this topic:

The obvious question -- why does India, despite a population of over one billion, field so few medalists? --  is as frequently asked as it is difficult to answer. There's no consensus, no obvious explanation, no single unified theory of Indian Olympic under-performance. Though there are certainly some factors particular to India that might explain this trend, this story might say as much about the better-performing countries and their ability to exploit certain advantages that India lacks.

See how he quickly broadened the questions to more than merely about India? :)

All the reference in that piece to field hockey reminds me of India's glorious past in the game.  Of course, we referred to it as hockey, without the "field" prefix because, after all, there was no ice anywhere around for us to even remotely imagine any other hockey.

One of the scars I have in my shin is from playing hockey, back in perhaps the ninth grade.  My classmate Ravikumar swung the stick to hit the ball hard.  He did dispatch the ball.  But then he got my shin too.

Blood, sweat, and tears, is how I played hockey, because I was far from athletic :)

Anyway, in my way, way, younger days, when I had lots and lots of hair on my head and it was all black, I keenly followed the news about India's hockey team.  Even now, I can recall the radio commentary (yes, no television at that time!): "Govinda, Govinda, Govinda, gooooooaaaaaallll")

There was one memorable match, towards the end of my undergrad days.  By then, the Indian team was already in doldrums. It was India v. West Germany. India was down four goals, and the Germans were so certain that they would win that they eased up.

And then there was a player who displayed all the effort that we love to see in all the sportspeople.  Well, in everybody in every walk of life. The guy scored one, and then another, and another, and in a matter of few minutes, the game was tied. Even! Germany couldn't manufacture anything more and the match that was so much in their favor ended in a draw.

Google helps me out with the name of that player: Pargat Singh.

It was almost as if that was the last attempt by the dying Indian hockey team.  Since then, of course, I have wandered away, mentally and geographically,  Following any news about India's hockey is strictly because of the news junkie that I am, and there is no emotion invested in any match.

Thus, no blood nor sweat nor tears over the news that India's hockey has sunk to new lows at the Olympics:

India, who play Belgium in their final Pool B fixture on Tuesday, will finish last in the group irrespective of the result of this match and will then have to play the bottom-place team in the other pool in the playoff for the 11th and 12th positions.

India are the only team not to have secured a point so far in the ongoing Olympic Games hockey competition, while all others in their group have four points or more. Even an Indian victory over Belgium, who are determined to move up the rankings, will leave India at the bottom.

At the bottom? Seriously?

London was the venue where the hockey team won independent India’s first sporting honour by winning the gold medal at the 1948 Olympics.

Balbir Singh, the centre-forward who won three Olympic gold medals as a member of the Indian teams in 1948, 1952 and 1956 editions, came to the Olympic hockey arena to support the Indian team against South Korea, but like thousands of other supporters left the venue disappointed at India’s performance.

It was not the glory of the 1948 Olympic gold medal, but the dejection of the 1986 World Cup at the British capital that has arrived on the horizon. ...

This will be the lowest position in the Olympics for eight-time gold medallists India, whose previous lowest was the eighth-place finish at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

The low-country with a population of 10 million will finish ahead of a eight-time gold medalist with 100 times the population!  Explain that at your own peril!

Meanwhile, there is always the reliable New Yorker :)

So, is the beginning of the implosion of candidate Romney?

Nothing like the live political theatre that I can watch from my living room :)

London Mayor Calls Out Mitt Romney Over Olympics Criticism

Romney is spectacularly failing the Coriolanus test that campaigns essentially are in a democracy!

John Stewart had a wonderful observation about this condescending attitude of his:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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How Soccer Explains the World

While India and China seem to be in the news all the time when it comes to economic matters, their noticeable absence from the World Cup tournament in South Africa might be obvious even to those who are not sports junkies.

With a combined population of about 2.5 billion, China and India account for almost two-fifths of the humans on the planet, and yet their teams did not make it to South Africa.  This is not merely the result of the preliminary rounds that determine the qualifiers for the tournament, but might be a reflection of the respective sociopolitical ethos as well.

When the Olympics were held in Beijing last summer, it was clear that China had morphed into a sports power.  Chinese athletes earned the most gold medals—51—but, the United States beat China in the aggregate medal count by ten.  This rapid rise in Olympics was triggered by the Chinese government’s extensive investment in facilities and athletes themselves.

It also turns out that political decisions to invest in sports mean that there is a lot more attention paid to individual performances—such as gymnastics or diving.  Team sports require a lot more planning and coordination at various levels, and are not amenable to delivering quick results.  Further, a football—er, soccer—team, for instance, is simply more than a mere collection of eleven players on the field, and is a wonderful illustration of the philosophical notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  The net result is that China did not get past the third round of the qualifiers for this World Cup. 

The US offers quite a contrast to the Chinese approach in that there is no formal government investment in sports, including football, and expenses are met primarily through sponsorships and endorsements.  The extensive network of youth soccer programs has been slowly and steadily developing quality players and the US soccer teams are no longer taken for granted.

India has neither the Chinese approach to sports, nor does it have an American style bottom-up grassroots structure.  But, it is not because the Indian population or government is indifferent to sports.  For instance, later this year, in October, India will be hosting the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, and the government spending for it has generated immense controversy. 

Whether it is the Olympics or football, India does not suffer a shortage of television viewership either.  Millions, like my high school friend who lives in Chennai, even re-arrange their schedules in order to keep up with the telecasts from abroad.  But, this passion is not reflected in the results on the field—at the Beijing Olympics, India won one gold and two bronzes for a grand total of three medals. 

Such a situation is not a result of the attention on that other great game—cricket.  After all, teams from countries with significantly lesser population, like Australia or Sri Lanka, often humble the Indian cricket team.  And in field hockey, which is another popular sport in the Subcontinent, teams from the tiny Netherlands routinely rout the Indians.  In soccer, India’s team lost to Lebanon in the first round of the qualifiers.  It turns out that a billion people do not make a sports powerhouse!

A reason that is offered more often than not—even during my childhood years—is that the Indian culture advocates contentment.  Hence, the lack of a “killer instinct” that is needed to push oneself to be a winner in sports. 

As much as it is tempting to buy into this explanation, Sweden offers quite a comparison.  The Swedish folks, after all, have their own word for moderation—“lagom”.  “Lagom” is a way of life that emphasizes individual and social attributes such as enough, sameness, and average.  However, this has not precluded the Swedes from excelling in individual or collective activities. 

A sport is, thus, more than merely about the game itself.  It presents yet another opportunity to begin to understand the peoples of the world, and their cultures and politics.  Yet, if the game of soccer does not grab one’s attention, I suggest the following books as summer readings—“Soccer and Philosophy” and “How Soccer Explains the World.”

Olympics final score: Pele 1, Obama 0

I mean, did Obama really think there would not be any spin on his trip, particularly when there was a distinct possibility that Rio would be awarded the games?

I think this was the dumbest thing Obama and his advisers have done, yet.  I hope this will be the last one.  There are some issues that even during normal times a President should completely stay away from, and this is one of those.

And, BTW, I am really happy that the US will not host the 2016 Olympics.  It is the most doggone awful waste of money ever.  If the market wants that, well and good. But, to waste tax dollars on it? No way!!!

But, what's up with Pele crying about this?  The soccer magician getting too soft in his older years? :-)

Cash for clunkers:bribing the middle class

Matt Welch:

Cash-for-clunkers is indeed very "popular." So is the home mortgage interest deduction, the prescription drug benefit, and any number of federal programs that siphon from the diffuse pool of tax revenue+debt and blast out concentrated benefits to the broad middle class. The standard for judging these things shouldn't be popularity–Richard Nixon's wage-and-price control spasm of 1971, to name one of many historical measures now widely and rightly considered asinine, was hugely popular at the time–but whether they make sense in both the short and long term.

Cash-for-clunkers amounts to a rounding error in Tim Geithner's nose-hair at this point, which is probably why at least some liberals seem so genuinely baffled by the disproportionate criticism it has drawn. But for some of us it's also a nearly perfect symbol of economic statism run amok. The federal government is taking from the many, giving it to the less-than-many, destroying functional cars, funneling money to an auto industry that it already largely owns (at a hefty taxpayer price tag), then taking multiple (and multiply premature) bows for rescuing the economy and the auto industry in the process.

Tim Geithner's nose-hair? Very funny.

On a totally different note, a year ago I read Matt Welch's piece on his experience at the 1984 Olympics, and how his own jingoistic theatrics changed his view forever. I emailed him in appreciation, also because it reminded me of how it similarly dawned on me in my teenage years that the anti-Pakistan tone in cricket matches were simply nauseating .... Here is an excerpt from what Welch had written:

Then Shane Mack struck out looking on a curve ball.

It was as if the Goodyear blimp had deflated in one second on the centerfield grass. People were either stunned into silence, or (as in our case) muttering bitter obscenities at the world in general. Then came a horrifying sound from somewhere behind my left shoulder. It was a grown man, a grown American man, and his two kids, clapping, and saying, in perfect English, "Hoo-ray Japan!"

My eyes nearly burned clean out of my skull. The Hulk, John McCain...they had nothing on the white-hot American rage I felt at that moment. I wheeled around, fangs bared, glared at this pleasant-looking man, and yelled: "SHUT UP, YOU...COMMIE!!!!"

The genie was seconds out of the bottle when I began to feel regret. A crowd of furious Americans, who had been taking our cues for several innings now, immediately erupted into a "YEAH!!!", then began to chant: "COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!!" Dodger Dog wrappers went zipping by my ear in the general direction of the offender. Confronted with a potentially violent mob of Angeleno nationalists, the alarmed fan fled the facility, ushering his two young kids to safety.

My friend was psyched. I, in the words of Bob Dylan, "became withdrawn." Harnessing (or having the illusion of harnessing) a crowd of thousands turned out to be much more frightening than fun. Going plum loco over an exhibition baseball game felt, well, loco. And taking the side of a snarling overdog against a hapless and vastly outnumbered minority suddenly felt like the opposite of how I ever again wanted to approach either social dynamics or political thought.

The ride home with my friend's dad was totally silent, as if we were keeping our lips sealed about some terrible crime. In the following days, I noticed everything began to look different. The crowd-whipping antics of Wally George were no longer funny. Republican politics in general, particularly the flag-waving, lefty-baiting strain, became revolting overnight. So did knee-jerk, anti-Ronnie Ray-gun rhetoric. Religious settings of all varieties—Southern California was then going through a big fundamentalist revival—became intolerable exercises in peer-and-God pressure. People who I had internally dismissed as outcasts at school I now externally sought after as friends. People whose approval I once craved were suddenly ridiculous to me. I started gravitating toward any book that challenged the accepted wisdom of a topic I thought I knew, starting with baseball. And any time I found myself in an overwhelming majority, my first question became, "What if we're wrong?"

None of this made me a better person, obviously, and undergoing a change of heart at age 16 is about as rare and interesting as the sun rising in the east, but I feel better having confessed.

Oh, BTW, Welch did reply to my email, with a note "Makes it all worthwhile ... almost!"
Indeed!

Kobe Bryant's quest for gold at the Olympics

Hilariously satirical and sarcastic, from Slate:

Olympics, jingoism, and the "wisdom" of crowds

I think the only time that the Olympics ever interested me was, well, never!
Strange events, almost scientifically sculpted and robotic athletes who are as professional as they can be. And then all the flag-waving, which essentially means that it is not about the sport anyway.

Matt Welch has a fantastic autobiographical piece on the 1984 Olympics, which were held in Los Angeles. It needs to be read in its entireity. But still, it is way too good for me not to excerpt the following:

Then Shane Mack struck out looking on a curve ball.

It was as if the Goodyear blimp had deflated in one second on the centerfield grass. People were either stunned into silence, or (as in our case) muttering bitter obscenities at the world in general. Then came a horrifying sound from somewhere behind my left shoulder. It was a grown man, a grown American man, and his two kids, clapping, and saying, in perfect English, "Hoo-ray Japan!"

My eyes nearly burned clean out of my skull. The Hulk, John McCain...they had nothing on the white-hot American rage I felt at that moment. I wheeled around, fangs bared, glared at this pleasant-looking man, and yelled: "SHUT UP, YOU...COMMIE!!!!"

The genie was seconds out of the bottle when I began to feel regret. A crowd of furious Americans, who had been taking our cues for several innings now, immediately erupted into a "YEAH!!!", then began to chant: "COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!! COM-MIE!!" Dodger Dog wrappers went zipping by my ear in the general direction of the offender. Confronted with a potentially violent mob of Angeleno nationalists, the alarmed fan fled the facility, ushering his two young kids to safety.

My friend was psyched. I, in the words of Bob Dylan, "became withdrawn." Harnessing (or having the illusion of harnessing) a crowd of thousands turned out to be much more frightening than fun. Going plum loco over an exhibition baseball game felt, well, loco. And taking the side of a snarling overdog against a hapless and vastly outnumbered minority suddenly felt like the opposite of how I ever again wanted to approach either social dynamics or political thought.

The ride home with my friend's dad was totally silent, as if we were keeping our lips sealed about some terrible crime. In the following days, I noticed everything began to look different. The crowd-whipping antics of Wally George were no longer funny. Republican politics in general, particularly the flag-waving, lefty-baiting strain, became revolting overnight. So did knee-jerk, anti-Ronnie Ray-gun rhetoric. Religious settings of all varieties—Southern California was then going through a big fundamentalist revival—became intolerable exercises in peer-and-God pressure. People who I had internally dismissed as outcasts at school I now externally sought after as friends. People whose approval I once craved were suddenly ridiculous to me. I started gravitating toward any book that challenged the accepted wisdom of a topic I thought I knew, starting with baseball. And any time I found myself in an overwhelming majority, my first question became, "What if we're wrong?"

China boycotting the Beijing Olympics

In an 11th-hour move that shocked the international athletic and political communities alike, the Chinese Olympic Team announced Wednesday that it will not be attending the XXIX Olympiad in Beijing due to "shocking, shameful, and ultimately dangerous environmental conditions" in the host city.
"Given the unconscionably bad environmental state of the area in and around the site of the 2008 Summer Games, we cannot in good conscience allow Chinese athletes to compete in China," said Olympic committee spokesman Sun Weide. "We deeply apologize to China for the bitter disappointment they will feel at not being represented in these Games. However, we place the blame squarely on China for their failure to prepare a suitable venue for international competition."

Of course, this is from The Onion:-) The rest of the story here