by Pico Iyer
“But don’t you think the world is retribalizing?” the young man from Lahore asked me.
“Yes. But on nonnational grounds. It’s forming into tribes based on Web sites, communities of interest, affiliations described in nontraditional ways. The beauty of the present is that we can find ourselves in the company of the cultures that we never expected to encounter otherwise. I mean, forty years ago, you would never have had the chance to find you had so much in common with someone from a different country and religion and group; they would have been the enemy.”
“That’s true,” said the oldest at the table. “Take this place; it’s so chichi now. Toronto the Diverse began right here, with the Italians; but now it’s all changed. This place used to be pool tables and faded wallpaper and gangsters; now it’s all international.”
“Yes,” said the video importer, going back to the earlier strand. “And maybe what I related to in her was the isolation she felt, as a Christian from Hyderabad. I’d felt the same as a boy from Karachi in Poughkeepsie. In those days, I used to read all the time: I read Salman Rushdie in Mississauga, and then I read Philip Roth in Lahore, Portnoy’s Complaint. And that made perfect sense. To me, Philip Roth wrote the Great Pakistani Novel!”
These were the surprises that hardly took us back now; the private revolutions we spoke at dinner tables in open-air cafés, crossing cultures, abandoning boundaries without even noticing we were doing so. “At home,” I’d often make no effort to extend myself to the people who looked and thought like me; abroad, I’d find myself drawn to the piece of home they represented. And for many of us, now, all the world was abroad.
As the evening drew on, the conversation turned, as it often had that week, to the recently completed World Cup, and how “the streets would fill up with cars and we wouldn’t even know where the people were from. They’d be waving flags, and we’d have no idea what flags they were. Suddenly, there’d be a thousand black guys racing down the street!”
“One day England was playing Argentina,” someone said, “and I had to work that day, and I really didn’t want to know the result, so I could watch the game on TV when I got home. So I didn’t log on to the World Cup Web site, and I made sure not to listen to the radio, and I pretty much screened myself off from the news all day. I did everything I could to keep myself in a state of ignorance. But then I went outside—on my way to see the game—and there were all these cars honking their horns, and people waving Argentinian flags. The streets were all Argentinian!
“In Toronto!”
THE GAMES
“Best thing about Brooklyn? All the
countries of the world are here.
Worst thing about Brooklyn? None of
us get along.”
—An elderly black man in Wayne
Wang’s and Paul Auster’s mock
documentary, Blue in the Face
Whenever I wish to get an update on the state of our One World order—how much it is coming together, how much it is falling apart—I try to take myself to an Olympic Games. The image of global harmony the Games consecrate is, of course, a little like a gossamer globe entangled in a crackly cellophane of bureaucracy and bickering, and all the world knows, more and more, how much our official caretakers of purity are tarnished by corruption, as much off the field as on; to attend an Olympiad these days is to sit amongst 100,000 security guards, with teams of Doping Control officers under the stands, while Olympians in the shadows collect illicit payoffs.
Yet for all these reminders of the world outside, the Games do provide as compact and protected a model of our dreams of unity as exists, with hopeful young champions from around the globe coming together in an Olympic Village that is a version of what our global village could be, to lay their talents on the altar of “friendly competition.” At their best, the Olympics pay homage to the very sense of “world loyalty” that Whitehead called the essence of religion.
I’ve been to six Olympiads in the past fifteen years, and at five of them I’ve been responsible for every sport on offer, and so found myself racing from cycling to three-day eventing to badminton arenas every day from dawn till after midnight for sixteen days. Every city had its scandals, of course, and no one could soon forget the terrorists of Munich, the bankruptcy of Montreal, yet on every occasion I found myself stilled by the simple, piercing humanity of it all: the sight of Derek Redmond, the British hurdler, hobbling over the finish line with his arms around his father’s shoulders, the older man having raced down from the stands as soon as he saw his son pull a hamstring; Iranians trading pins with Iraqis in the sanctified neutral zone of the Olympic Village Plaza; the people of Barcelona streaming out into their spotlit streets, for night after balmy night in 1992, so delighted were they to have their Catalan culture discovered by the world.
The Olympics pose a curious kind of conundrum for people such as me, of course, if only because they affirm affiliation to nation-states in an age that has largely left them behind, mass-producing images of nationalism and universalism without much troubling to distinguish between them. They ask us to applaud the patriotism of others while transcending the patriotism in ourselves, and they draw our attention to the very boundaries that are increasingly beside the point (I, surrounded by cheering fans waving flags, am often reminded how difficult it is for the rootless to root for anyone, and, reluctant to ally myself with a Britain, an India, or an America that I don’t think of as home, generally end up cheering the majestically talented Cubans or the perennial good sportsmen from Japan).
Still, there’s something almost primal—tribal, you could say—about the nationalistic sentiments the Games release, and, in spite of the fifty-foot Gumbies on the skyline, they touch a spark of sweetness that leaps inside us like a flame: forty thousand Japanese stand in thickly falling snow to cheer their ski jumpers to victory, and even Norwegians (or hardened journalists) who’ve come all the way around the world to pursue their own agendas can’t help but smile and say, “Congratulations!” The Games begin with the forces of 197 nations marching out behind flags, strictly segregated and almost military in their color-coordinated uniforms; they conclude, just two weeks later, with all the competitors spilling out onto a central lawn, till you can’t tell one team from another. The colors run.
• • •
Backstage, away from the scripted tableaux of the cameras, the Games unveil a more human and vulnerable side to international relations, which helps to correct, and sometimes to redeem, the grander shows of global unity. I remember once in Barcelona escaping the ranks of seven hundred TV cameras and the hundreds of thousands forever climbing up Montjuich, past Bob Costas’s floodlit throne, to try to catch my breath in the relative calm of the strictly guarded Olympic Village, a utopian global campus complete with its own religious centers, hair salons, nightclubs, movie theaters, daily newspaper, and even mayor. Walking around the stylish new complex, built beside two private beaches, I found myself suddenly surrounded by three very small, very polite, slightly lost-seeming figures. They were archers, from Bhutan, as it transpired, who couldn’t quite orient themselves amidst this crush of alienness.
They’d never seen a stadium before, one of the teenagers explained, and they’d never seen a subway. They’d never seen a high-rise building or a working television set, and they’d never seen a boat. I remembered how, in their landlocked home, I’d watched students practice archery between the willow trees behind the Druk Hotel, their arrows whistling through the silent air.
None of them had ever boarded a plane before, one of them went on (in careful English—the Raj having penetrated even those places that television could not reach), and none of them had ever competed before crowds (besides, Olympic rules are so different from Bhutanese that they were all but guaranteed of last place). “I thought Barcelona was going to be peaceful, like Thimbu,” one of the young students said. “It’s so busy!” The Olympic Village alone was almost the size of their capital.
At that point, the country’
s first (and only) defense minister interceded to give a more official account of his nation’s meeting with the world (he doubled as the Dragon Kingdom’s Olympic Committee), and to make the right diplomatic noises; yet what stays with me, many years later, is the image of those guileless, bewildered, excited souls, one day in a hidden kingdom where everyone has to wear medieval clothes and all the buildings are constructed in fourteenth-century style, and the next, in the midst of the greatest planetary show on earth. And then, after two weeks surrounded by exploding flashbulbs, to be back in their forgotten home, where the only concrete mementos they’d have of the surreal episode would be their photographs. Whenever she had a free moment, one of the archers told me, she hurried off to take pictures of the harbor. She’d never seen an ocean before.
The figures who oversee our official dreams of harmony—the 115 members of the International Olympic Committee—are often described as presiding over one of the last great empires on earth. Their doyen is the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and the chief of drug enforcement for all its thirty-one years has been a Belgian prince. It was a count, famously, who assured the world that it was fine to hold the Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin (provided a few embarrassing signs were covered up), and the current, increasingly embattled president, Juan Antonio Samaranch (once the sponsor of a Barcelona roller-hockey team), likes to be addressed as “Your Excellency.”
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, while head of the United Nations, cited “Olympism” as a “school of democracy”; in fact, its self-elected rulers, officially appointed for life, administer a realm in which their word is final, and senior citizens trump athletes at every turn.
The Olympic Movement is a force that no one should underestimate. It has its own museum, near its headquarters in Lausanne, and it brings out its own glossy magazine; it boasts an honorary degree from the Sorbonne, and recently instituted a prize for Sports Science that, worth $500,000, is the most lucrative such award in the world, other than the Nobel Prize. At Cultural Olympiads, Nobel laureates in literature discuss the future of the soul and at International Youth Camps, children absorb the principles enunciated in a seventy-four-page Olympic Charter. The organization even, like every self-respecting government, now has its own front-page scandal, with six different investigations uncovering improprieties.
In recent years, this unofficial empire has expanded dramatically in part through alliances with the two great powers of our global order, multinationals and the media. Thus, eleven of the world’s largest companies pay roughly $40 million each for the exclusive right to attach themselves to the Olympic Rings, the Mascot, and the Torch, and U.S. television networks alone sign contracts worth $3.55 billion. The Olympic Rings, its organizers boast, are “the most recognized symbol in the world,” and 90 percent of all the people in the world with access to a television—3.5 billion at last count—watch such events as the Opening Ceremonies.
It’s tempting to conclude, in fact, that the Olympic Movement is, in its way, more powerful than the UN, especially as it gets to show off its triumphs on the global screen (while the UN has to try to sort out real-world messes behind the scenes, with everyone criticizing it in what has become an ethical Babel). To this day, the IOC has more member states than the United Nations (whose founding it predates by forty-nine years), and all are pledged to an ideal Oversoul that rhymes with our highest, sweetest dreams.
Like anyone who attends the Games, I could never help squirming a bit at all the contradictions involved in the marketing of idealism, and a mischievous part of me rejoiced in the Jacobean notion of would-be Olympians trying to bribe the Princess Royal with a fur coat; when Samaranch reminded the world of the Olympic Truce in 1998 (an “ancient concept for the new millennium,” as canny Olympic strategists dubbed it), he was conspicuously clad in a Mizuno coat, in a stadium equally conspicuously naked—by Olympic decree—of advertising. The IOC keeps dozens of lawyers on hand to protect the very terms sacred torch and peace festival; even the slogan “The World Is Welcome Here” is jealously copyrighted Olympic property. When Japanese fans were once seen to wave a banner saying, seiko, in support of their speed-skating star Seiko Hashimoto, they were told to desist, lest their cheers be interpreted as support for the watch manufacturer that is now an Olympic Gold Sponsor.
Yet always the hope persists that men will be wiser than their institutions, and, in a world where cultures are clashing by the hour, nobody objects to seeing the competition among nations turned into a game; when I was young, I remember largely scoffing at the self-serving claims of Olympic chieftains like Avery Brundage: “The Olympics is perhaps the greatest social force in the world today.” Yet these days, even such uninvolved observers as the director of the Institute of American Studies in Beijing, while naming the dominant powers of our “multipole globe,” cites not just the classic nation-states but also “such actors as the World Bank, CNN, International Olympic Committee and Exxon.”
My own role in all of this, as a longtime member of the “Olympic Family,” observes its own rituals, as pronounced as those of any church, and every time I prepare to attend an Olympic Games, I feel as if I’m entering a foreign country (albeit a migrant one founded on the principles of transnationalism).
Well over eighteen months before the Games begin, I apply for what is in effect a visa—a coded credential—and upon arrival in the host city, I am generally greeted by one of the fifty thousand smiling volunteers, who will take me to an Official Accreditation Center. There I am “processed” into a bar-coded entity whose ID will get me through the magnetometers that guard every venue, hotel, and subimage center. To thank me for my troubles, I am given a McDonald’s pad, a Media Monster pin from Xerox, a Coca-Cola backpack, and a penguin wearing the IBM logo, so I can serve, in effect, as a walking advertisement for the Worldwide Olympic Partners (whose dream, their ad explains, is of “Creating a World With Principles”).
There are often four times more journalists than athletes at the modern Games—fifteen thousand of us in all—and we are stationed in the Main Press Center (or MPC) and its high-tech cousin, the International Broadcasting Center (or IBC). These multistory buildings, constructed more and more according to an international plan, look like monitor-filled airline terminals from which not beings, but words and images, will be beamed around the world. Icons and logos and universally understood pictograms fill their long corridors, and vending machines serve up free drinks (so long as they’re made by Coke), Global ATMs belch out banknotes (so long as they’re accessed by a Visa card). The MPC has a post office and a travel agency and private offices for seventy different organizations, nearly all of which buzz with local middlemen—or, more often, middle-women—mediating between the host nation and thousands of foreign bodies (while six thousand “language agents” stand ready to turn Finnish into Korean).
For those without a large company at their back, there’s a vast Common Work Room lined with rows of telephones and fax machines on which more than six hundred correspondents can send their copy back to Guinea-Bissau or Costa Rica. Around them, giant Panasonic screens broadcast all the action as it happens in twenty-six different venues.
The Olympics today are largely a made-for-TV production, based around the needs of crews from 160 different countries (to the point where South Korea, for example, in 1988, actually instituted daylight saving time just for the duration of the Games, so that its high-profile events, already scheduled for the morning, would chime even better with U.S. prime time). More even than the Academy Awards or a Miss Universe contest, the Games are a television producer’s dream: every day for sixteen days, they can be relied upon to produce shocks, stirring heroism, and images that shake us to the core (and even villainy touches something universal—the showdown between Tonya Harding and the figure-skating rival she’d attacked, Nancy Kerrigan, was one of the most-watched programs in U.S. television history). And so, as the largest Image Center in the world processes photographs for free (so long as they’re Kodak), TV networks spend $7,500 for
every dollar they spent in 1960.
And I, for three weeks every two years, move through a parallel universe that looks like a sleeker, on-screen version of our global future. Every day I travel from the MPC to the MTM (Media Transport Mall), by way, often, of IOC offices, on a special network of MTM shuttle buses. There are TVs on all thirty buses, broadcasting the events we’re going to; there are TVs in the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s outlets in the MPC; there are TVs next to every press seat at the larger venues, with closed-circuit programming of all the other events (Channel 101 plays a “scenic video” of the Olympic Torch burning for eighteen hours every day). Even in the small dormlike rooms in the Media Village (or, as it was nicely called in Nagano, the “Medea” Village), there are TVs in every room so that we can follow the action on BBC or CNN or the special Olympic network. We watch ourselves watching ourselves, with “videos-on-demand.”
Perhaps the central event in my own Olympic preparation is a visit or two to the Olympic city a few months before the Games begin (and a few months before the local government tells its citizens to smile at foreigners, its taxi drivers to say “Have a nice day!” and its restaurateurs to stop serving dog: in 1998, in Nagano, even the local professional gangsters observed an official Olympic truce). The cities that compete for the honor of staging the universal road show are, nearly always, somewhat anxious and prideful and prickly places, with something they want to prove to the world. The Olympics provide an almost unique opportunity to address the whole of humanity at once, and to make over one’s image at a single stroke: thus, Barcelona, in 1992, was determined to show the world that it belongs not to Spain but to Catalonia (maps appeared on its streets in which Spain did not even appear, and King Juan Carlos himself, while opening the Games, was obliged to speak in Catalan); Seoul, in 1988, aspired to muscle its way into the Executive Club of nations much as its hated rival—and unacknowledged role model—Tokyo had done in 1964; and Atlanta, in 1996, was keen to present itself as the “Next Great International City” (and one day after it won the bid, its paper ran the simple headline WORLD-CLASS!).