Guest Commentary One person's viewpoint
Hold the Mao
Mack Hall

No one even pretends anymore that the Olympic Games, which have nothing to do with Mount Olympus and are not games, are all about sport and health and youth and it's-a-small-world unity. When a Chinese government goon squad is permitted by the British government to beat the snot out of people in the streets of London, one needn't bother to ask if the Marquess of Queensberry rules are being followed.

People wearing Dalai Lama tees exchange abuse with other folks wearing Mao tees, with the guys in Che tees taking pictures. And everything, from Dalai Lama tees to Mao tees to Che tees to the reporters' cameras are made in China.

People along the route of the Great Zippo protest the Chinese in favor of the Dalai Lama, an exiled dictator now working the red carpet as the ultimate party guest. Perhaps some book of etiquette recommends that the Dalai Lama be seated above Richard Gere but below Madonna, cattycorner across from Elton John and convenient for exchanging spiritual advice with The Reverend Doctor Pastor Jeremiah Wright.

Part of the secular religion the world inherited from the 1930s was a series of pseudo-religious icons to replace the disinherited Christian ones. It worked with Queen Elizabeth I, so why not with Stalin and Hitler? The people were persuaded to worship large dams and tunnels and power plants and change, and invented a totally bogus religious drama in the Olympics, with torches and interlocking rings as objects of veneration, maidens in ersatz- Greek costume chanting lines written by government propaganda hacks, and masses of obedient worshippers adoring more masses of youths doing exercises under a neo-pagan sun.

Huge temples for the worship of exercise and of an impossibly idealized youth were built in Art Deco Style, from Los Angeles to Berlin, and the construction of public buildings, railway stations, and the first commercial airfields dutifully followed this first mass-produced style. Rather like torchlight parades and uniforms on parade, Art Deco would be far more attractive if its purposes - the ordering of the masses and the denial of the individual - had not been made manifest in such huge scale, Albert Speer instead of William Morris.

And the people obeyed, dressed as their masters bade them and lined up and chanted slogans in programmed unison - just as they do now. For what is a contemporary sporting event if not a similar ordering of the masses? The people do as they are told, consume as they are told, chant as they are told, and dress as they are told, wearing not just their masters' colors but even their masters' pictures.

A modern child - and childhood continues well into the thirties and even forties now - can only dress in the uniform of the day as commanded by the advertisers. Pity the poor individual who does not costume as told, and thus must suffer the scorn of the masses. People have been harmed and even murdered over the design of a shoe made in a slave-labor factory in Asia, and while many think it sad, few now think it strange. The label is everything; a human life is little.

Thus it is with the degenerate spectacles some are pleased to call the Olympics, expressions of the self-worshiping fantasies of governments and cults, with the followers of Mao and the followers of the Dalai Lama rioting in the streets of the world's cities as an ugly prelude.

Somewhere, perhaps next door, children are playing in a field or in someone's backyard, climbing trees, swimming, or seeing who can run the fastest, all without regard for keeping score with regards to the games or to the labels on their clothing. Those are the games worth seeing.

Mack Hall is a resident of Kirbyville