Nathan’s Musings

I went to see the Simpsons movie on Sunday. I had told my children that this was going to be the pivotal cultural event of 2007, maybe even of the entire decade. I have been a huge fan of the Simpsons for many years. It contains some of the best satire and commentary on US affairs anywhere. So I was really looking forward to the movie…and I walked away disappointed. The movie is nothing more than a regular episode of the Simsons, only longer. I was fully expecting some major revelation and had been speculating about it for months–would Flanders turn out to be gay? Would Mr. Burns die? Would…? But no. None of that. And as my wife remarked after the movie, several major characters did not appear at all: where was Apu the shopkeeper? And Marge’s sisters? It all smells like a setup for a sequel. Look out for Simpsons II next year. As Homer says in the beginning of the movie: people who pay good money to go to the movies to see something they get for free on TV are suckers. Indeed.

This week the city of Beijing has been celebrating the fact that precisely one year remains till the start of the 2008 Olympics to be held there. In the best traditions of the People’s Republic, the actual people were kept well away from the celebrations at Tiananmen Square, since the Communist Party is still nervous about large crowds on that particular square.

The leaders of the “Olympic movement” have been falling over themselves to praise the Chinese preparations, and the athletes interviewed on Dutch radio, when asked if they are not concerned about human rights in China, dutifully responded that they are going there for sport and are not going to get involved in politics. Exactly the same drivel as one heard before the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and I am sure also before the 1936 Berlin games.

Regardless of all the hype about China’s growth and so on, the fact remains that the 2008 Olympics will be used by a brutal dictatorship to showcase itself to the world, in exactly the same way Hitler used the 1936 Olympics and the Soviet leaders the 1980 version. Any athlete who goes there to compete; any corporate sponsor who will pay the IOC millions to have its logo displayed; any TV networks which pay vast sums to broadcast the 2008 Beijing Olympics; and anybody who tunes in to those broadcasts–all will be complicit in the PR exercise and cover up of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese Communist government.