It’s Time for Nationalism, Schmaltzy Stories, and the Supersad Jim McCay-in-Munich Hour!
It’s that time; it’s the time for the world’s worst coverage of the world’s largest athletic event from the world’s largest lover of packaged poop. It’s time for sentimentalism and barbecued nationalism. It’s time for the comeback story and the montage sequences showing a determined athlete rowing at 3am on calm waters or running down darkened streets while John Tesh bangs away on a keyboard with his bony knuckles. It’s time to cheer for that determined midget woman who’s been locked up in a modern-day zoo camp and caressed by the calloused hands of Bela Karolyis into courageously tumbling herself (with half-broken ankle) into a magic moment that simultaneously wins her a Chicom Gold, a McDonald’s 50-year commercial contract, and the well-wishes of five million graying, tear-dripping grandmas from the banks of the Mississippi to the New Jersey Shore. The Today Show awaits! Letterman and Lauer: prepare!
I hate it.
Not the Olympics, that is (well I do despise the Mafia-esque IOC and their nefarious supersecret Monacan yacht fund), but my country’s highest bidding network’s pathetic attempt to “cover” it by making it a long epic–a love story–with good guys and bad guys, soundtracks, and pathetic, baritone-voiced, has-been narrators–orating to us like modern-day Demosthenes’. I also hate the commercials and the the medal counts. The former: always trying to tell us how much they are doing for them darned aw shucks Olympians. The latter: Instead of breaking them out by nation, how about we show them by these categories:
1. # of Gold medals won by clean athletes
2. # of Gold medals won by supposedly clean athletes
3. # of Gold medals won according to the Bono-Geldoff Ratio ™ which is: (GDP)-(Amount skimmed by the country’s Olympic committee)*baksheesh factor (see: Sir Bono’s Guide to Saving the World) / # of circa 1990s tee shirts circulating in the given land.
4. # of Gold medals won per the Walmart standard ™ which is: # of Walmarts in said land + nation’s obesity percentage (that is BMI>30) MINUS ((the doping probability factor–DPF) + (doohickey/contraption factor–DCF which can be calculated by determining the power requirements of said country’s Olympic training facility, because a lot of power is required to fuel those antigravity treadmills and those Supershockballsixer ™ machines etc). An alternate to the DCF would be the mean value of the coaches’ cars in the Olympic training facilities’ parking lots.
Ok…this is turning into a drinking game.
5. # of times Jim McKay is wheeled out and placed under the lamps–casting long shadows on those canyons-for-wrinkles; making his face look like the crumbling, circa 1906 San Francisco facade that it is.
6. # of comeback kid/aw shucks stories.
And so on. (Can you tell that I’m reading Breakfast of Champions presently?)