The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  Yet what this means, in practice, is that small cities, which are often relatively provincial cities, become the focus for our grandest global expectations, and all our hopes of crossing boundaries converge on a place that is not always accustomed to looking past its own borders. As the cost of staging an Olympics mounts (to $7 billion or more), many of the people they’re meant to help rise up against the costly gambles—even placid Stockholm was hit by a series of bombs recently, aimed at disrupting its Olympic bid (while in rival Rome, citizens brought out bilingual pamphlets entitled Ten Good Reasons to Say No to the 2004 Games in Rome). What it also means is that one of the fiercest competitions on display at every Games involves the representatives of second cities handing out favors in an attempt to prove themselves worthy of being a future Olympic host: Bishop Tutu appears to promote the cause of Cape Town, and Istanbul stages a Turkish Blues Night (complete WITH THE MEETING OF CONTINENTS tote bags), while Athens and Osaka spend $20 million or more on freebies and $1 million lunches and law-abiding Toronto complains about the necessity of bribing.

  In its desperate attempt to prove itself a major global player (by winning the rights to the 2000 Games), Beijing closed down factories in anticipation of IOC visitations and released some of its famous dissidents (while placing other potential troublemakers in a lunatic asylum). According to the New York Times correspondents who won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China, at least one mentally retarded man was beaten to death, lest his untelegenic presence distract visiting Olympians from the banners saying A MORE OPEN CHINA WELCOMES THE 2000 OLYMPICS.

  In the case of Atlanta, which had won the right to host the “Centennial Games” over the sentimental favorite, Athens (“Coca-Cola won over the Parthenon Temple,” said Melina Mercouri bitterly), I flew in exactly a year before the Opening Ceremonies to see how the city of Reconstruction was preparing for its moment in the global sun. I knew next to nothing about the place beforehand, other than that it boasted the best growth rate of any city in America, and had become a kind of shrine, worldwide, to black middle-class achievement: its police chief, its congressman from the Eleventh District, the editorial-page editor of its Constitution, and all its recent mayors were African-American. Having pulled itself up from the ashes of the Civil War, and having built its gleaming towers in a city where blacks, fifty years before, had not even been allowed to vote, it called itself now “the Phoenix of the South.”

  Almost as soon as I arrived, I could see that Atlanta was an Olympic city in more ways than one. “In the beginning,” said the monitors in the arrivals lounge (broadcasting the CNN Airport Network), “the world was a big global market,” and videos on every side instructed one on how to set up a business in this “Competitors’ Paradise.” Walking through Hartsfield felt a little like walking through a curriculum vitae: this was the “world’s fastest-growing airport,” I was told, and home to what had once been the “world’s largest passenger terminal.” It was the largest public employer in the city (Delta being the largest private employer), and Atlanta itself was said to be the “fastest-spreading human settlement in history,” eating up five hundred acres of field and farmland every week. All this went a little strangely with the fact that the door on the APM (or automated people mover) was broken, and the robot reciting instructions in several languages was incomprehensible in all.

  Just next to the mess of scaffolding that denoted the Baggage Claim area, the city had set up a special Martin Luther King, Jr., display. THIS AREA TEMPORARILY CLOSED, a sign outside it said.

  I lined up at the Hertz desk to collect a new Aspire—this seemed the way to “do as the Romans do” in what I’d seen described as the “new imperial Rome”—and, driving into town, I felt myself moving into the Olympic Planet. Cars already had Olympic flames on their license plates (my own had a CENTENNIAL OLYMPICS plate), and buildings flashed numbers denoting how many days remained before the Opening Ceremonies (366). On the AM radio, the “Official Olympic News Source” was advertising the “Official Power Source of the 1996 Games” and even the Electrical Workers Union downtown had at the top of its red brick block the message COME CELEBRATE OUR DREAM.

  Atlanta had already been transformed by winning the Olympic bid (through the curious system of balloting whereby a city that collects many second-place votes can beat one that collects more first-place ones); and one day after it was named an Olympic city, three corporations had named it their new national headquarters. By now, eighty thousand new temporary jobs had come into being, and even in LAX, where I boarded my plane, the terminal for Delta (the “Official Carrier of the Olympic Games”) was a forest of Olympic shot glasses and Olympic Gourmet Biscuits.

  Yet Atlanta at first sight looked like nowhere on earth: suburb led to interstate led to off-ramp led to suburb. I passed an Economy Inn, a Quality Inn, a Comfort Inn, a Days Inn; I passed a Holiday Inn Select, which gave way, soon enough, to a Holiday Inn Express. On every side of me were look-alike office blocks and landscaped driveways, mirror-glass buildings and office parks: all the interchangeable props of an International Style that could, in its latest incarnation, be called Silicon Neo-Colonial.

  I’d been told to look out for the Perimeter area (one of three Perimeter areas in Atlanta), and so I got off the interstate onto Perimeter Center West, and drove in the direction of Perimeter Pointe. I passed business parks and condo worlds, shopping centers and gated subdivisions—the urban equivalent of bottled water. Then at last, spotting another parking lot, a patch of grass, and some more concrete landscaping, I saw my “Hotel of Distinction.”

  “Hi there,” said the woman at the desk. “If you want to look around, Perimeter Mall’s across the street.”

  I walked out again and found myself in a web of stores almost parodically placeless—Home Depot, Home Place, Computer City, the Cosmetic Center. On every side were strip malls, minimalls, strip clubs, and shopping malls. And though this would have been no less the case in Los Angeles, where I’d woken up this morning, or some “Metro Lite” sprawl around Houston, Atlanta seemed curiously ready to define itself by its twenty-one malls—Cumberland Mall was advertising itself as “the first mall to sponsor a United States Olympic team”—and forty, by one count, airports. I felt myself in the “Phoenix of the South” in a less-than-mythic sense.

  This was, in part perhaps, because Atlanta is a convention city, in the business of providing homes for people passing through; every year, 1.6 million souls walk through its streets with their companies’ names next to their own above their hearts. Where other cities base their economy on natural resources or local industry, Atlanta had long been a center of emptiness and hospitality, a service-industry, Information Highway McSuburb before the terms had been invented: in 1930, though only the twenty-ninth-largest city in the country, it already was the second-largest in terms of office space, and a local had boasted, “Office buildings are to Atlanta what automobiles are to Detroit.” Reading the literature in my room—“The complete conference center is a traditional meeting environment,” it said, “focused to provide the ultimate small meeting experience”—I felt as if I had landed up in a city by Marriott, a place that was global by virtue of being featureless; as if a city had been replaced by a scenic functional base as picturesque and not quite real as the forests you see on the background of personal checks.

  Picking up the tourist magazine by my bed, This Week Atlanta, I found a special boxed review of a strip club (“This architectural landmark serves as a shrine to adult entertainment”); in the Yellow Pages, there were 132 listings for the Babbitt Aachen Aaland Aalborg escort agency alone. One lap-dance palace boasted in the tourist magazine of its “corporate atmosphere”—its address was 1876 Corporate Boulevard—and, having cited its free valet parking, Internet address, and on-premises ATM, concluded, like some graduate of a middle-management workshop, “MORE THAN JUST ADULT ENTERTAINMENT … A CLUB WITH VISION.”

  The next day, when I woke up, the sky was still blue-black (parts of me, just o
ff the plane, were still in Osaka, parts were in California), and when I turned on the TV, it was to see Andrew Young, the former mayor who had done so much to give the city an international profile, gathering with a host of other Olympic luminaries in the predawn dark to celebrate the one-year mark before the opening of the Games. Television crews from Savannah, from Chattanooga, even from New York, were assembled outside the still-unfinished stadium to join “Atlanta’s Official Station for the Olympics” in broadcasting the pep rally, scheduled for 6:45 a.m. (before the heat became oppressive).

  For me, the best commemoration of the city’s global hopes seemed to be a visit to the birthplace of its greatest son, and so I got back into my Aspire and, pulling onto I-85, drove past any number of Host Inns and Dial Inns and corporate condos, past the sign global burgers (Think Globally, Eat Locally), to the Freedom Parkway.

  The area around Martin Luther King’s birthplace is now a national park, visited by more people every year than go to Mount Rushmore or the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. There were sightseers there when I arrived from Florida and the Carolinas and the Ivory Coast, mostly black, following a crisp young black woman, in a National Park Service uniform and Smokey the Bear hat, around the reverend’s home, his church, and a museum in his honor. In the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Non-Violent Social Change, a huge portrait of Gandhi dominated the entrance, and in the broken little cafeteria, a sign was up for WOE (The Wretched of the Earth, Inc.), a group that helped the homeless.

  I thought King would have been touched to see how much the world had moved towards a sense of global brotherhood since his death twenty-seven years before. Outside one of the houses associated with him, a white man was sitting with his black wife, on the porch, watching their two boys play, as the words rolled out of the speakers—“America is, essentially, a dream … a dream of a place where men of all races, all nationalities, can live together.” Behind the King Center, an AMC van bore a motto of pride on its license plate—black-owned—and in back of the Ebenezer Baptist Church (where King had preached, as his father and grandfather had done), a van was advertising something called Integrated Resources, Inc. There was a Martin Luther King Church in Atlanta now, and a Martin Luther King Chapel of Love; the state capitol itself, as in some fairy tale of freedom, stood at the intersection where Washington ran into Martin Luther King.

  Yet just where the Historic Monument ended, only a block or two from King’s house, Auburn Avenue was as desolate a hell as ever I have seen. Broken windows, boarded-up storefronts, abandoned houses with nothing but a Huey Newton poster here and there, an OPEN TO THE PUBLIC sign outside a dark and silent Elks Kitchen. Auburn Avenue called itself the “Street of Pride,” and, in 1956, Fortune had deemed it “the richest Negro street in the world”; once, Bessie Smith and Cab Calloway had played there, and in King’s time, it was a sign of all a black community could achieve. Now, though, five minutes’ walk from the one-thousand-room hotels downtown, and within sight of the corporate blocks of up-and-coming Atlanta, there were few signs of the $25 million revitalization campaign the city had promised for it, or the local “Bourbon Street” Atlanta’s director of planning had foretold: just kids hawking T-shirts of the black-power salute at the ’68 Olympics, and people walking around looking lost.

  At the very end of Auburn Avenue, where it bumps up against the glowing towers of modern Atlanta, a new African American Panoramic Experience was shown on all the maps: a 97,000-square-foot high-tech center that was “the planet’s greatest show on African-American hope and heritage,” according to the Peach State Black Tourist Association. It consisted, when at last I located it, of an empty parking lot, a temporary entrance, and a sign that said PLEASE EXCUSE THE INCONVENIENCE.

  “I think,” said a caretaker, with an apologetic smile, “they may get to work on it after the Olympics are done.”

  I walked back down towards the King Center, past the overgrown vacant lots and the listless men standing next to signs that said DOWNTOWN IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT. It was here, I’d just heard, that King had reminded his congregation that it was rich not just in spiritual terms but in actual ones: the collective wealth of black America, at the time, was greater than that of all but nine nations in the world. Now, I recalled, almost half Atlanta’s children lived in poverty, and fourteen thousand homes were without telephones. By some counts, the “city too busy to hate” (as it called itself) had the highest violent crime rate of any city in America: King’s own mother, our guide had explained, had been shot, six years after he was, while playing the Lord’s Prayer on the organ in the Ebenezer Church, for no reason other than the whim of a “black deranged individual.”

  I sat down again on the porch outside his home, and as the sleepy summer morning drifted on, I looked out at the Ritz-Carlton down the street, the silhouette of the World Congress Center, and “the tallest hotel in the hemisphere.” Men were sashaying blearily down the side streets, in and out of their shotgun houses, and my own car seemed precariously parked, a block beyond the sign that said FREEDOM WALK ENDS.

  “The world in which we live is geographically one”—the words, beautiful and wrenching, boomed out into the street. “Now we are challenged to make it spiritually one. We’ve made of the world a neighborhood. Now we must make it a brotherhood.”

  I could see another reason why the Olympics, and their mass-market globalism, are not universally popular—the opposite reason, in a sense—when I went to inspect Nagano, the rural counter-Atlanta that was the site of the next Olympiad. By the time I arrived, the old train station, which had long presided over the city as a two-story traditional temple of sorts, to usher pilgrims to the great Buddhist center of Zenkoji down the street, had been pulled down to make way for a space-age, video-filled terminal with a McDonald’s at its south entrance, a McDonald’s at its north entrance. Nagano had long prided itself on being the prefectural capital farthest in time from Tokyo (because there is no airport there); now a superexpress bullet train put it within seventy-nine minutes of city holidaymakers. Futuristic new stadia had been erected all around the unpretentious country city in the shape of a “fresh breeze,” in one case, and in others “a drop of water” and a “range of mountains.” In Zenkoji itself, amidst its forty dark-roofed temples, CBS had erected a tall glass tower, where members of its two-thousand-person crew (as numerous as all the athletes in attendance combined) could look down on a 1928 UPS mail truck now set up to commemorate another Worldwide Olympic Partner.

  The temple’s monks, it should be said, had been eager for the exposure and increased revenue, and Japan is more than capable of effecting such transitions without an Olympic juggernaut. Yet still it was strange to see this apple-cheeked, down-home city famous for its noodles now togged out with two official Olympic songs, four official Olympic “support songs” and four other promotional ditties that had received the official Olympic imprimatur—as well as five official posters, seven “official sports posters,” and one fifteenth-century landscape poster just for the Opening Ceremonies. Nagano had won the bid for 1998, it was later claimed, because it had given IOC delegates video cameras, where its rival had handed out disposables.

  “Every household in Nagano has to pay thirty thousand dollars for the Olympics,” a local professor complained to me at a Christmas party in a tiny dark village in the Japanese Alps, its streets narrower than those of the Main Press Center corridor. “And for what? Now we have four ice arenas. Maybe we need one—but four? And now we have a one-hundred-million-dollar bobsled and luge course. Do you know how many people in Japan practice bobsled and luge? Fewer than two hundred. They’ve changed Nagano, and they can’t change it back.”

  When the new train station put up a sign that said welcome to nagano, with a painted torch on it, its bosses were told to take it down, because the torch was protected Olympic property; when oyaki dumplings were suggested for the Olympic Village menu, caterers had to decline because “Yamazaki Baking Co. hold the rights to sweet bean-jam buns.”


  Nationalism, in the Olympic context, took the form of a director of catering urging his troops, “We should regard even a slice of meat and a piece of tomato as representatives of Japan.”

  Yet for all such absurdities, the chance to be the center of the globe, if only for two weeks, remains as unstoppable as a runway scandal, especially as the world tends to focus its attention more and more narrowly upon a few single points, and the mergers we see in business find their counterpart in consciousness. The Olympics are designed to encourage a commonality of vision, in Emerson’s sense (all of us focused on the same ideals), yet just as often they create a kind of community of television, all of us looking at the same images being instantly replayed. The upshot of this universal exposure is that more and more people descend on the hyperevent—not just the 2 million fans eager to enjoy sports and exoticism amidst the excitement of a nonstop carnival but also that whole shadow realm of people who make up our Greek gods in the celebrity culture: O. J. Simpson and David Hasselhoff and Kathy Ireland and George Foreman, here to partake of the greatest photo op on earth.

  The Olympic song is written by Andrew Lloyd Webber (in three languages), and Celine Dion and José Carreras show up to belt it out. Carlos Saura directs the movie (in Barcelona, at least) and Annie Leibovitz does the photo shoot for Time. Hiro Yamagata designs the official poster, and the producers of Jurassic Park join the author of Schindler’s List to make an IMAX epic of the Games.

  In the ancient competition in Olympia, Plato and Herodotus and Pindar and even Diogenes used to fill the stands; now we have their equivalents in a motley assembly of athletes who want to become personalities, and ex-athletes who are working as commentators, and commentators who have become stars in their own right, and ex-stars who are developing talk-show “projects.”