The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  “What’s the Olympics about?” I once heard Arnold Schwarzenegger shouting at me, above the din of a private upstairs reception in Planet Hollywood, celebrating something called the Inner City Games, sponsored (noisily) by Speedo. “It’s all about fighting off set-backs and getting over hurdles. I learned about friendship through sport, I learned about overcoming obstacles; I learned about setting a goal.” Around us, a whole assortment of semi-demi names—Evander Holyfield and Edwin Moses, Dexter King and Mayor Bill Campbell—mingled and photogenically mixed. “Where would I be without sports?” Arnold concluded his highly quotable sermon. “On a farm in Austria.”

  Outside, Frankenstein was being enacted in puppet form and an American Indian Pow Wow was offering “Alligator Demonstrations” and “Living Villages” in an “inter-tribal festival,” not far from where Ladysmith Black Mambazo was doing its thing. Itzhak Perlman was giving a concert the same day as the Blues Brothers, and when I went to a women’s basketball game, I saw Chelsea Clinton in the same general area as George Steinbrenner (“Women are becoming more marketable,” said the U.S. center, Lisa Leslie, before slinking away to her next gig as a fashion model).

  Outside the stadia, where tens of thousands gathered, Jews for Jesus were handing out pamphlets saying, “It’s not too late to shot put your sins and triple jump to Jesus,” while Islamic missionaries were distributing “A Welcome to the Olympics” brochure (which, when pressed, they admitted consisted of verses from the Koran). It was strange to think that Baron de Coubertin had revived the Olympics almost as a tribute to Empire (traveling around British boarding-schools to pay reverence to the “superior powers of the Anglo-Saxon world”); now they seemed a monument to the International Empire.

  The entire Games, in fact, can sometimes seem to be little more than a full-blooded embodiment of Daniel Boorstin’s classic argument in The Image, with more “human pseudo-events” (in his unforgettable phrase) piling up than at a political convention or a Vegas prizefight. One moves, at times, through crowds of “image directors” and “atmosphere managers,” promotional flunkies from Reebok and professional optimists, with Saddam Hussein’s eldest son over there (he’s the head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee), and some flustered spokesperson over here, calling you by the name she’s trying to read from your security tag.

  In a universe in which names are more and more a floating currency—the only kind of value known around the world—the Olympics become a global stock exchange. Tipper Gore is writing a column for USA Today, Mary Lou Retton is doing color commentary for whichever network will have her, and Albert Grimaldi (“Occupation:” says his official biography, “Heir to the throne of Monaco”) is riding on the Monegasque bobsled team for the fourth straight Winter Games.

  And just below this grand assembly of all the temporary deities of our bold-face universe exists, unnoticed, its shadow side, in the people who appear all around the tunnels and corners of the stadia, selling inflated tickets they’ve bought in bulk. They come from everywhere—Germany, Istanbul, Canada—flying from special event to superevent (often on Business Class), and making a killing off the discrepancies between supply and demand. While the official subculture of “pinheads” swaps collectibles near the Ethnic Import Plaza and the Society for the Buckwheat Noodles stand (no mere hobby—Saks Fifth Avenue, to take but one example, has issued an Olympic pin that’s worth $340,000), the unofficial side of globalism gathers round the edges: a Turk whispers to a Japanese, “Speed-o ticket-o?” and then mutters something in German to a Swede so his customer won’t understand.

  “Our life is like the great and crowded assembly at the Olympic Games,” Montaigne quotes Pythagoras as saying. Which is a backwards way of saying that the Olympics are less an interlude from life than the thing itself in condensed and homogenized form.

  My own response to all this, at every Olympics I attend, is to try to escape the swarm of microphones, and to seek out the nonevents, the regular, daily commotions that belong less to soap opera than to situation comedy. This is never very hard, especially when so many cultures are collecting all at once, and the Olympics, for me, are often a happy carousel of moments that belong more to Virginia Woolf than the TelePrompTer, with something resolutely human breaking through the rehearsed affirmations of “tolerance and competition.” Seoul was a hockey game in distant Songnam Stadium, where rent-a-crowd matrons in billowing blue-and-yellow hamboks sang mournful threnodies and dutifully donned and doffed their caps in time to a scratchy melody crackling out of a handheld cassette player (for the Dutch team, they waved tulips; for the Indians, merely flags); Barcelona was a deserted country baseball field where black-and-yellow butterflies landed on my knuckles as I sat cross-legged on the ground and watched volunteers hand-operating a scoreboard featuring Roman numerals. Nagano was a curling rink where women from the suburbs of Saskatchewan, in windbreakers that said MIKE’S MOM, cried, “Come on, button boy. Stop, baby, stop!” next to sleeping babies and bewildered Japanese grandmas waving KAMIKAZE banners. (The city had erected, next door to the gym, a Museum of Curling, which consisted of two half-bare display cases containing a signed brush, a nineteenth-century crampit, and all ten issues of the now-defunct Japanese magazine Happy Curling).

  The International Olympic Committee stages a group shot of the Family of Man, and an uninvited miscreant appears in the upper-right-hand corner, making an inverted peace sign. English athletes at the Opening Ceremonies, gathering under the stadium, sport I SPEAK ENGLISH buttons (thus showing, in fact, how English they are) and the Iranians (forty men and no women, all arriving in dull beige POW sackcloth) refuse to walk behind a woman in the Parade of Nations. South Koreans cheer on North Korean skaters (an act for which they could be imprisoned at home), and in the disco in the Olympic Village, teenagers cross every language barrier just by giggling.

  In Albertville, I watched the Byronic heartthrob Alberto Tomba (“This is Alberto-ville,” he announced, even before winning two dramatic golds) through the eyes of the Philippine team, a sweet and slightly confused twenty-one-year-old from Cornell who didn’t know much about the Philippines and had come largely to impress an unimpressionable girl back home. He felt a little weird, he said, representing a country whose language he hardly spoke, especially since, as a rich doctor’s son born in Buffalo, he was standing for so many who live in bushes and under money-changing agencies on the streets. “If I had grown up in the Philippines,” he confessed, “I probably wouldn’t be here.”

  Yet the psychology major with braces on his teeth, asking three Moroccan skiers to pose with him before his tiny Sure Shot, was precisely the kind of person the Olympic Ideal was meant to encourage, and not only because he was talking about dreams while more successful Olympians were discussing their $121 million contracts in private Reebok press conferences. When he finished seventy-first—the most successful Philippine result in Winter Olympic history (and well ahead of many other downhillers from India, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Taiwan)—he was greeted not by cheering crowds (they had left), but by the Philippine Olympic Committee (“my mom and dad”), bringing him two bags of M & M’s.

  A surprisingly large number of Olympic moments are just like that, and often, surrounded by émigré linguists and other Global Souls, I wandered around the Olympic Village in the evenings, watching the fresh-faced kids of every continent trickle into the private cinema that was showing Toxic Event and Altered States, or crowd into the cybershack where they could E-mail the homes and friends they missed. A tall Jamaican, in thick jacket and bobble hat, was using his free telephone card to shout endearments to a girlfriend in the tropics; frightened-looking North Korean skaters, who missed such resources at home, were banging away at the Blast City games in the jam-packed video-game room.

  “Excuse me. Are you from India?” I heard on the streets of Nagano one day, and turned around, to see a young man, cool in sunglasses, and fluent in American English, who, when I asked, turned out to be from New York, Tokyo, Bangkok, K.L., the UAE, and Kyushu
(a “diplobrat,” in short, who’d grown up everywhere).

  “Are you Japanese-American?” an American nearby asked him.

  “Japanese-Americanized,” he responded with what I found to be characteristic silkiness.

  Yet at the Olympics, more than anywhere, there is a parallel world on-screen, and one of the most disconcerting things about the modern Games is seeing the new biculturalists move back and forth between planes of reality, the fourteen-year-old putting aside her stuffed bear and picking up her best-selling “autobiography” as the TV invites her to turn herself into a “human-interest story.” Even some of the youngest today—perhaps especially the youngest—seem to have intuited the heart of Boorstin’s thesis, that the hero has been replaced by the celebrity, and the most winning “real person” on TV is the one who can best play at being a TV character. Once, Boorstin writes, we looked in our heroes for traces of the handiwork of God; now we search in them for the thumbprints of their publicists.

  I remember once watching a backstroker, not very well known, make the most of his brief moment in the global spotlight, after winning a gold medal. “Those experiences made me what I am today,” he said, effortlessly going through deaths in his family, injuries that had almost crippled him, losses that had left him waiting for four years. “I asked myself a lot of whys. Really what matters is not what we do in the pool, and what medals we win. What I’ve learned is that I’m not just a swimmer, and that I’m probably a better man than a swimmer.”

  To be honest, I knew that I, in the same position, would have reached for sound bites just as energetically, though no doubt less successfully—indeed, I did so every time I went on book tour—and the nature of public discourse is to give the public what it wants: locker-room interviews are the Homeric recitations of our time. Yet still, as I heard this young champion, on the greatest evening of his life, say cheerfully of his bitterest rival, who’d deprived him of a gold before, “I thanked him for beating me,” I realized that what was sobering was not so much that he didn’t mean it, but that he did; even his most heartfelt sentiments came out as if rehearsed for “plausibly live” transmission.

  In all these ways, again, Atlanta seemed the spiritual center of Olympic dreams, with its bottom-line internationalism, its corporate optimism, and its go-getter’s sense of the profits that could be made from ideals. “Atlanta is a pom-pom city,” a friend of mine who’d been born here said. “Miami, where I used to live, has great vitality but no PR; Atlanta has no vitality but great PR. Everybody here’s got their cheerleading outfit on.” Once, famously, Mayor Maynard Jackson had hired an adman to find ways to market the city better: the pundit had suggested billboards in outer space and streets named after corporations.

  As I began to drive around the Golflands and Girls-R-Fun outlets (sometimes wandering for long spells around parking lots where every other car was identical to mine), I was startled to see how unsure of itself the twin city of Olympia seemed. As a typical visitor, I was introduced to the “largest cable-supported dome in the world,” and then to the “second-largest convention center in the U.S.”; I was told that I was surveying the “world’s largest granite outcropping,” conveniently close to “America’s First Regional Visitor’s Center.” Going through Atlanta was like going through the bulleted highlights of a company’s annual report: I saw “the largest institution in the U.S. devoted to puppetry as an art form,” “the largest black-powder cannon ball still found in the United States,” “the largest urban park built since the war.” It was hard to imagine Milan or even Jogjakarta boasting of “the largest toll-free calling area in the nation.”

  Atlanta’s problem, I surmised, was that it had plenty of global reach and almost no global clout. Everyone relied on it, but no one spared a thought for it. For seen in a certain light, Atlanta was a central player in making the global economy go round. It was home to Coca-Cola, “the world’s most famous trademark,” and the center for CNN, “the largest news-gathering organization in the world.” It was the headquarters of Holiday Inn, “the largest hotel chain both in name and reality in the world,” and the home base of United Parcel Service. Delta, with its “Magazine of International Culture” and “World’s In-Flight Shopping Mall” placed in every seat pocket, had its hub in Atlanta—had, in fact, pioneered the very notion of a hub in the city once known as Terminus.

  Yet none of these features had brought Atlanta the status it felt it deserved. A tenth of the world got its news from Atlanta, 195 countries got their soft drinks from Atlanta, Hartsfield was soon to claim to be the busiest airport in the world (“Even when you die,” I often heard, “you change planes in Atlanta”); yet the city seemed to hold less fascination for the globe than a Dallas or even a Santa Barbara. As in some shadowed fairy tale, all the superlatives in the world could not turn bigness into greatness. Being global and being central were very different things.

  I went to pay homage to the CNN Center one of my first days in town, and found myself in a giant food court, with a Turner Store on one side, a Medalist store on another, and four fellow sightseers standing around nearby. (CNN asserts its global interest by offering tours in Turkish, Farsi, and Korean, as well as Serbian, Croatian and Norwegian.)

  “Where are you all from?” the friendly man from Ohio asked the other three, who were clad in Hard Rock Atlanta T-shirts.

  There was a long, long pause. “Iraq,” the father finally said.

  The Ohioan was clearly taken aback. “Iraq?” he said, nervously, backing away just a little. “Well—well, that’s fine. If you’re from Iraq, you’re from Iraq.”

  A guide took us up the “largest freestanding elevator in the world,” and, when we got to the top, he asked us to introduce ourselves.

  “What kind of name is that?” he asked of the man in the Hard Rock Atlanta T-shirt.

  “It’s Arabic,” the man confessed, and again there was a long silence. CNN might broadcast to Iraq, but it certainly didn’t seem to know what to do with it.

  Insofar as Atlanta did have glamour for the world, moreover, a large part of it seemed to reside precisely in the part it had worked so hard to erase. Soon after leaving the CNN Center, and its continuous-loop playing of Gone With the Wind, I found myself in the Road to Tara Museum, a place that had been recently opened in the basement of the once-famous Georgian Terrace Hotel to peddle the Burning of Atlanta to the world. Inside were crinoline dresses and musket balls, Hotchkiss shells and details of old plantation life—all the artifacts of a slave culture, in fact, that David Selznick had turned into a central part of the world’s imagination. A high percentage of the visitors, according to the guest book, came from far away—Brazil, Romania, Ecuador, Germany, and, especially, Japan, young Japanese women coming here, often on their birthdays, as to a holy site (the story of Rhett and Scarlett is so popular in Japan that it was once turned into a nine-hour musical with an all-woman cast). “I’m so happy to be here,” one exclaimed in the visitors’ book. “I remembered old days,” another exulted.

  Margaret Mitchell had decreed that her home be destroyed upon her death, so that she could enjoy at least the privacy in death that she had been denied in life. But the prospect of Olympic visitors from around the globe had moved the city to set about restoring her house, and talking of a $50 million Gone With the Wind theme park, and a renaming of a central square, Margaret Mitchell Square. Even the video-distribution system for the Olympics was due to be named Scarlett. Yet restoring the past in a city that had pledged itself to the future made for contradictions that no one in Atlanta had quite sorted out: the Loew’s Grand, where Gone With the Wind’s gala premiere had been held, had survived a massive fire in 1978, only (as the Road to Tara Museum related) to be “torn down for the property value”; the historic Hotel York next door was now another Days Inn.

  That evening, I went to Fulton County Stadium (another landmark due to be torn down after the Olympics, but, for years now, one of the inescapable backdrops of cable TV, Ted Turner having taken to br
oadcasting his Atlanta Braves games around the nation daily, thus turning them into “America’s Team” on-screen). Tucked away in the middle of some beat-up neighborhoods known as Mechanicsville and Peoplestown, the place was as Atlantan as McDonald’s apple pie. An ad for Office Depot graced the left-field fence, and in many of the stadium’s rampways, Info-Vision screens projected the business news of the day; even the rest rooms were plastered over, as I’d never seen before, with ads for army supplies, for divorce agencies, for golf.

  Every single vendor in the stadium—even the ones in the upper deck, somewhere behind the ATM machines—wore a button proclaiming THIS BADGE CERTIFIES THAT I HAVE COMPLETED TRAINING IN ALCOHOL AWARENESS.

  Yet within the outlines of this right-thinking, business-minded, slightly puritanical new city were the faces of an older one, peeping in from another century. They were wearing EX-WIFE FOR SALE baseball caps and T-shirts that said JESUS EXPRESS: DON’T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT HIM. They were yee-hahing, and shouting injunctions at the black players on the field (amazingly, the only black faces in the place were playing ball or selling snacks). “I never saw peanuts in a bag before,” someone cried behind me, waving a five-dollar tomahawk in the face of a startled blonde; someone else (the person who had written OLYMPUKES go home downtown, or helped sponsor the billboard quoting George Washington’s “A free people … must be armed”?) was saying, “You’re so dumb, you tried to change the channel on a TV dinner.”

  I’d brought along the autobiography of Atlanta’s greatest star, Henry Aaron, to read between the innings, and as the game went on, I read how Aaron, while closing in on Babe Ruth’s record for the most home runs hit in the major leagues, had received 930,000 letters in a single year, or thirty-five times as many as any American outside the realm of politics. Nearly all of them had come from fellow Atlantans, he wrote—supporters of his Braves—and as he drew closer to claiming baseball’s most prized record for Atlanta, he’d received more and more letters, addressed “Dear Jungle Bunny” or wishing death upon his loved ones. “I hope lightning strikes you, old-man four-flusher,” one not very extreme correspondent had written; others had promised to shoot him or “take care” of his family if he came within twenty homers of the Babe.