Historic games

There’s certainly a lot of flapdoodle around the games of the XXXI Olympiad officially starting today in Rio.

Between vast swaths of the Russian team being banned for doping, outdoor water sports venues awash in raw sewage and other health and safety hazards, worries that visitors could be victims of fatal crimes before they can pay their bar bills, and, of course, wondering how long it will take for NBC’s coverage to top their last outing in fatuousness and jingoism—well, you know, it’s two weeks of crass melodrama occasionally interrupted by some actual athletic achievement.

And that’s before we start considering the Zika virus.

(The upside is that at least it takes our minds off the elections for a bit.)

But I was reminded recently how much of this quadrennial exercise in nationalism, politics and vainglorious waste of billions of dollars owes to the Berlin Olympics that took place 80 years ago. It’s only really since the 1936 games that every host city has gone absolutely insane trying to showcase a Potemkin Village—building obscenely expensive stadia and other venues for which there is no long-term use, transporting undesirables beyond municipal limits so visitors won’t be annoyed by the non-voting poor, and repeated rounds of self-congratulatory galas attended by politicians and corporate sponsors, while (as The Washington Post reported on Sunday) many of the athletes live in poverty).

Most of this infrastructure capital expense is off the backs of local taxpayers; the froofy stuff like the hospitality suites comes from tax-deductible corporate sponsorship.

All that display of rah-rah pretense started with the Nazis—from the torch relay through the grandiose purpose-built venues to the ceremonial panoply at the opening and closing: all cooked up to showcase German supremacy, both individual and national. 

If you’d like to refresh your memory on that one, I recommend watching Olympia, the iconic Leni Riefenstahl film of the Berlin Games. It’s interesting to compare the business, the style and the technology of international athletics then with now. (Plus, it has better production values than anything NBC-Comcast is going to shove down viewers’ throats.)

You know all about Jesse Owens poking holes in Nazi super-race theories, but there are several other interesting things about the events that Riefenstahl presented.

Diving standards have changed in the intervening 80 years: many of the divers went into the water feet first, and they hardly did more than one somersault or twist before hitting the water. They seemed almost leisurely. Plus—way more splash when they struck than is allowed now.  Today, you’d better barely make a ripple, or you’re outta the pool.

Athletic clothes were considerably lower tech than what you find these days. Runners, vaulters, jumpers, shot-putters and throwers frequently wore what we’d call warm-up gear (sweatshirts and pants) to compete. And the shoes—my dear, the shoes! Everything these men and women accomplished seemed to be in spite of their apparel.

Forty-nine nations competed in that Olympiad—so the parade of athletes went a lot faster than the one in Rio will be. And the athletes marched sharpish, all of them; they didn’t swarm about like weirdly-dressed paramecia equipped with photographic devices. Most of them gave the Nazi salute as they marched past Hitler and Olympic officials. (Or possibly the Olympic salute, which was remarkably similar to the Nazi one; it went out of fashion shortly after the beginning of the Second World War.) The Bulgarians got extra style points for goose-stepping and throwing the salute.

The only nations from the entire continent of Africa were South Africa, part of the British Empire, and Egypt, also under British rule. Asia was represented by India (likewise British), Afghanistan, the Philippines, Japan and China.

The marathon is a story all in itself. Riefenstahl devoted more than ten minutes to that ultimate Olympic event, and the first thing that strikes you is the lack of Africans. We’re so used to seeing Kenyans and Ethiopians dominating distance running—that’s when you learn that the only blacks appearing in 1936 mostly came from the US. And they seem to have concentrated on the sprint events.

But when I watched the film I thought it very odd that a couple of runners from the Japanese team were out front from the beginning. The Argentinian winner from the 1932 Olympics took the lead and held it; but he was trailed pretty closely by the two from Japan and a Brit.

Well, it was an incredibly exciting race. I mean, there is something about the punishment of the long-distance runner that you have to admire. These days, you wouldn’t see Olympic marathoners stopping for water, or walking for stretches, but you can still see these athletes from 80 years ago focused on what their bodies have to give in order to take the next stride, and the next.

The Argentine dropped out at mile 19, and the race belonged to “Son Kitei”, Ernest Harper and “Nan Shoryu”. And that’s how they finished.

In 1936 the winning athletes got laurel crowns, and Son was also given a small oak tree in a pot, which he held in front of his uniform, while the national anthem of Japan was played.

I looked at the names on the board and thought to myself, “Self—‘Son’ just does not sound Japanese to me. What’s up with that?”

And that’s where I discovered the real drama of that race.

Son Kitei and Nan Shoryu were Koreans; real names Sohn Kee-chung and Nam Sung-yong, respectively. Korea had been under Japanese occupation since 1910, and the marathoners were forced to represent their imperial overlords under the required Japanese names.

Son was able to obscure the Japanese flag on the front of his uniform with that little oak tree; Nam had no such protection. But both had to endure listening to the Japanese national anthem, and you can see their shame in the way they hold their heads in the photo. Their extraordinary achievement was subverted to the glorification of their oppressors.

And no one knew, because the Koreans’ translators were Japanese and they refused to translate any of their disclaimers.

(If you want to destroy a culture, first go after the language. Outlaw the indigenous speech, require that your language only be used. Make people take names in your language; destroy native news media; substitute your place names for theirs. The Japanese did that in Korea; the English did it in Ireland.)

The record books now show Sohn and Nam with asterisks next to their names, recognizing their nationality, but I had no clue about it until I watched Riefenstahl’s remarkable film—which covered all sorts of events, including ones the Germans tanked at.

Like Rio’s (and Sochi’s and a lot of others), the Berlin Olympics were awash in shady doings. The Games had been awarded before Hitler became Chancellor, but by 1936 the Nazis had already codified anti-Semitism in their legal structure for a year. There were rumblings in participating countries of boycotts if Jews were kept from competing, but the International Olympics Committee and the head of the US Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, made deals with the Germans that papered over the policies. (Brundage’s anti-Semitism made him an ideal partner for Hitler et al.) The Nazis took down the anti-Jewish signs in Berlin, said that no Jew had had the athletic ability to compete and everyone pretended that honor was salved.

Brundage did very well out of the games; in fact, you could say that he was one of its successes. He was elected to the IOC shortly afterward and became its president in 1952. No one on the IOC has ever struggled financially.

The Germans didn’t have multimedia, so they couldn’t put on the kind of opening ceremony that so far has culminated in the hours-long extravaganza four years ago in London. You can expect the Brazilians to up the stakes tonight, with no expense spared, just a few kilometers from favelas where thousands live without clean water. That, too, is an Olympic tradition dating back to Berlin.

No doubt the Rio games will have their entertainment value. Records will be broken, triumphs and agonies will be reported, and perhaps even some athletic contests will be decided. It will all be very colorful, the best spectacle that money can buy. Pretty much like the Games of 80 years ago.

Marine biology or politics?

Since my trip to Toontown continues apace, today I’ll be brief, courtesy of the New York Aquarium:

You’re welcome

Role playing

If your cable TV ever goes out, get thee to a coffeeshop or library with free Wi-Fi and head to the Twitters-dot-com. That stuff is way funnier than just about anything but a cat in a bathtub.

You don’t even have to search on either presidential candidate; just seeing how people choose to describe themselves in the 160 characters allotted for their profiles is a hoot and a half.

This guy, for example.

He followed me for a while, although I can’t think why. Perhaps I mentioned “mobile” in one of my tweets. But here are a couple of things I find interesting:

How is it that someone who’s put out fewer than 70 tweets has more than 10,000 followers? Yeah, part of it is the I’ll-follow-you-if-you-follow-me thinking. But that still puts him at nearly 1500 more followers than followees.

But what really cracks me is his self-proclaimed status as “cinnamon role expert”. Can you truly be an expert at something you can’t spell?

Alternatively, if there are cinnamon roles, where would you find them? Comedy? Drama? Saturday morning cartoons? Waiting for Godot?

See what I mean about the entertainment value of Twitter?

Light in the tunnel

Let me share with you something really quite uplifting that happened on my commute home yesterday.

It was one of your typical (these days) Metro Blue Line rides: through the District, then Rosslyn and Arlington National Cemetery, heading for Franconia. Somewhere in the tunnel before Pentagon we lurched to a halt, and eventually came the announcement (intelligible, for once) that there was a train ahead of us at the platform.

A couple of minutes later, we started up again, went about 50 yards or so and then stopped. Once more the driver got on the horn to say, “There is a train ahead of us on the platform. Train will be moving shortly.”

(As an aside: “Train will be moving shortly” should be the official motto of Metro.)

Then, as we cranked up again and moved into Pentagon station, the driver announced that shuttle buses would be available at National Airport to take “customers” (we’re never “passengers”, we’re “customers”) to stops beyond the airport. “That might change, but as of this moment this train terminates at National Airport”, three stops beyond Pentagon. (By the time we pulled into Pentagon City, the story had become: this Blue Line train terminated service at National; Yellow Line trains were going on to Huntington. Basically, the District version of "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." It makes no sense, but you're in a ramshackle metal transportation box in a dark tunnel; there it is.)

Well, the person sitting in front of me got off at Pentagon, and a young woman who’d been standing for some time grabbed the seat. Then an older woman got on and the younger one stood up and offered her the seat.

Honestly—it was the nicest thing I’d seen all day. Those trains lurch and jerk, and they don’t have sufficient places to hold onto if you’re standing. Only occasionally do you see someone offering their seat to someone else. Yesterday was hot, and the commute less than smooth—and showing all signs of getting worse. That young woman’s gesture reminded me that some people can rise above all that crap and be decent.

It made my day.

Gratitude Monday: Get thee behind me

You know it’s a bad month when the most straightforward and competent organization you deal with is the California Department of Motor Vehicles. That was my July, all month long.

From the coup in Turkey, which gives Erdogan carte blanche to go all Stalin and liquidate thousands of people who express an opinion of him he considers inadequate, to the death of a friend’s son in a horrible car crash, the entire month of July just sucked.

(It was interesting to me that when I mentioned both events to a colleague last week, he dismissed my dismay about Turkey, even though he understands that Turks have form when it comes to genocide, and he story-topped my friend’s loss by telling me that the son of someone he used to work with—“she’s bat-shit crazy”—was diagnosed with brain cancer. I’ve already deduced that this person is probably ADHD, but this reinforced my understanding that most opinions I express at work are going to be considered irrelevant.)

Then there’s the cluster around the “tiger team” project at work, and my realization that the entire exercise has been a bit of a Potemkin Village cruise…

Well, anyway, today I am well and truly grateful that July is in my rearview mirror.

My Valiant effort

Okay, I’ve realized that my work life has moved out of the realm of fine art—no matter how apocalyptic or surreal. It’s strictly Toontown:

 

Snack on that

A while ago someone left a partly-full jar of chocolate-covered almonds in the kitchen at work.

I had a couple of them, and I’ll attest to the fact that they’re aptly named.

But it was interesting: I went into the kitchen a few hours later and found that someone had emptied out the jar onto a paper towel. Perhaps he or she needed the container.

They looked somewhat less appetizing spread out over the towel. Kind of like a rabbit had run through the place. Regardless, they disappeared in a New York minute.

What this world needs...

If you want to know how people lived in the past, you don’t turn to art, you look at fashion and architecture. I was reminded of that by this meme going around the Internet:

The wide porch or verandah was a common sight in the American South, and in colonial structures in places like India, Africa and Australia. These are all places that get right hot in the summertime, and a covered porch was a place where residents could sit in the shade, catch any cross-breezes stirring at all, and take it easy.

A secondary benefit was that they were typically constructed at the front of the house, so the residents faced out into the neighborhood, and they and passers-by could commit acts of sociability with some frequency.

In the South, things slowed down in the summer months. You wore lighter clothes. You took longer breaks. You drank cool beverages poured from glass pitchers into tall glasses. You weren’t expected to exert top effort at the office, where windows were opened, creaky fans blew air around, and there was an actual use for paperweights.

Yeah, the penny only dropped for me within the past couple of years. As a kid, I recall paperweights in “gift” shops, but only ever seeing them on people’s shelves. As far as I could tell, they were just something you stuck on mantels and the like, tschatschkes like glass animals or souvenir spoons; things that you had to dust.

But take a look at this 1943 office in the Department of the Interior, and imagine July and August, with the windows open and fans cranked up to the max. Your glass ashtray wouldn’t have been enough to keep all the stacks of paper on your desk from flying around.

And at quitting time, you’d have left that office, maybe had supper in the dining room, but then you’d have repaired with the family to the porch, to sit through the evening until it was time to go to bed. In the South, the porch or a portion of it might have been screened, because insects. But you’d still have spent a good part of your life out there. And as neighbors strolled past, you’d invite them up for a glass of iced tea or lemonade, and you’d have caught up on all the gossip.

We had a front porch in the house where I grew up.

It was in Southern California, so not quite the heat factor as in Mobile or Atlanta. But it was on a quiet street, and the kids of multiple families used to play games in one or another front yard (or—truth be told—in the street), while the parents would sit on the porch and talk about whatever parents talked about. It seems like another planet now.

(And can I just say that the current residents clearly don't use the front yard for anything, and obviously don't make much use of a lawn mower or the sprinkler system. Someone's taken out all the camellias and let the crepe myrtle go ballistic. But whatever.)

Air conditioning changed all that. It’s a tremendous boon, I am here to tell you. But you can chart the point at which AC changed attitudes toward both work and play here in the South. Office windows stayed closed (and then sealed) all year long, and full effort was expected whether it was January or July.

And houses lost those front-facing porches, swapped out for two- or three-car garages in places of prominence, with decks on the back, where individual families could engage in activities as small units. (Having the most eye-grabbing part of your house be where you park your cars tells you a lot about priorities.) You’d have to be invited to come over and have a chat or a drink.

And nowadays, of course, it wouldn’t matter where you are—front porch, back deck, living room, dining room or bathroom—each individual person would have his/her shoulders hunched over a mobile device, fully engaged with people not in front of them, whether personally known or characters in a game or scripted show. You see it when groups of people (whether families or friends) gather in restaurants: each with his/her own device, barely looking up to order or receive the food.

So it’ll take more than a meme to get people to interact in the way they did pre-60s, when sitting down with your neighbors was the best defense against nature’s idea of a summer. But it’s a nice thought.

The art of work

Well, alrighty then—my job has moved a few rungs down from Designed-by-Dalí. It’s now Built-by-Bosch.

Hieronymus Bosch.

’Nuff said.

Gratitude Monday: the best of civilizatiion

We are at the apex of a DC summer here. I own up to the fact that, if I want to have a change of seasons, I’m going to have to put up with some discomfort. But honestly, weather, give it a rest, will ya?

Don’t believe me? Here’s the forecast as of yesterday:

Friday afternoon, the Metro car I rode on my 30-minute commute home had no air conditioning. Three middle-aged guys dressed in Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts & walking shoes got on at McPherson Square, noticed the oven-like state and hopped off at Farragut West to try a different car. (I actually didn’t mind it so much for myself, but I had a container of overpriced macaroons I’d bought at the downtown farmers’ market; they’re made with sweetened condensed milk, and I was afraid they’d melt. They did.)

Saturday I had to run some errands, including going to the library, which doesn’t open until 1000. By the time I got home at 1100, my brain was pretty much fried. It was such a relief to be out of that miserable, stifling heat.

So, as that miserable, stifling heat continues unabated, I’m grateful for two things: an automatic ice maker and air conditioning. How did a society that invented both of these things ever get sidetracked into Pokémon Go and assault weapons?