The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  With its curious gift for advertising its least attractive qualities, the city had managed to sum up that image perfectly in the Olympic mascot it unveiled at the end of the Closing Ceremonies in Barcelona in 1992. For more than a quarter of a century now, Olympic cities have generated a noble line of bears and tigers and raccoons, “symbolizing the vision of the Games,” which, in the great Olympic way, manage to be profitable by being adorable, and appear on millions of tiepins and camping knives for years before and after the actual competition. But when Atlanta’s contribution to the heritage was revealed, the whole world caught its breath: was it a bird, a plane, or an astronaut? Whatizit, as the figure was uncompanionably called, seemed an indeterminate blob—or virus—without race or sex or even species.

  Almost immediately, the PC Play-Doh man began drawing the world together in horror: even Atlanta magazine referred to it as an “animated airbrush,” while Atlanta’s local paper declared that any local symbol would have been preferable—a peach, a phoenix, even a goddamn peanut. The first Olympic mascot to be “specifically designed for children” looked uncannily like the first one to be designed by them (some of the names suggested for it had been I.M. There, Gofer D. Gold, and Jimmy Nastics), and faced with the uproar, the city quickly moved to give its state-of-the-art morph a makeover. His body was filled out, his eyes were made brighter, lightning bolts were attached to his sneakers, and he was given the marginally less corporate name of Izzy. Izzy, we were suddenly told, was a teenager whose mission was to collect five rings in order to achieve his Olympic dream.

  Yet to me at least, Izzy did from the beginning seem an-all-too apt embodiment of an undefined company town whose private sector was more prominent than its public face, and whose baseball team played one year in the National League West, and one year in the National League East. At a deeper level, Izzy confirmed my suspicion that Atlanta had fatally little sense of what the world expected; it was a small town’s idea of what a big city should be. Atlanta was international, I was coming to feel, as CNN and Coke were—in other words, as an internationally known symbol of all-American pop. The city boasted an International Boulevard downtown, but its claim to fame was that, at a single intersection, it offered a Hard Rock Café, a Planet Hollywood, a McDonald’s outlet, and a seventy-three-story Westin hotel (with four-by-six “corporate profiles” on the sundeck). The Chamber of Commerce boasted of thirty-two Aleuts and forty-one Guamanians in the city’s makeup, but the same organization spelled the critical word “foriegn.”

  Even the way in which the city looked upon the future seemed to be curiously old-fashioned, as if harking back to a time when internationalism meant men in gray flannel suits gathering in space-age auditoriums (and imports represented less than 4 percent of America’s gross national product). More than any American city I knew, Atlanta seemed to belong squarely to the 1950s, that can-do time of organization men and Dale Carnegie precepts, of atomic-age worries and suburbs meant to accommodate the car of tomorrow; the time when America promised to show the world how to achieve peace and democracy in ten easy steps. Even the most famous eating place in town (President Clinton dined there while I was staying in Atlanta) was a sock hop–era burger joint that took up a whole city block (though, in the trademark Atlantan style, it came with ATM machines, long-distance telephone cards, and fourteen kinds of souvenirs on sale among the onion rings).

  Every Olympic host is asked to play its role in the Games’ favored drama by showing off all the adversities it’s weathered: Seoul, in 1988, was demonstrating just how far it had come since being a mass of rubble at the end of the Korean War, only thirty-five years before; Barcelona, in 1992, was airing a Catalan heritage that had been banned, in recent memory, at Franco’s decree. Atlanta’s mandate was to exemplify a highly American tale of reinvention: this, after all, was the city that had had just $1.64 in its treasury after General Sherman burned it to the ground, and had hardly recovered from that blow when, in 1917, a huge fire destroyed nearly two thousand buildings downtown.

  Atlanta’s very identity, in fact, seemed caught up in the outlines of the rags-to-riches story. It defined itself largely through a series of local heroes who had conquered impossible odds to make an impact on the world: Jimmy Carter, the country boy who had walked all the way from a peanut farm to the White House; Ted Turner, starting an all-news station in the basement of a country club that within a few years was being hailed by the secretary-general of the UN as the “sixteenth member of the Security Council”; most recently, Newt Gingrich, the congressman for Buckhead County, suddenly becoming Speaker of the House and bringing his earnest, somewhat loopy Successories ideas to a nation not quite sure what to make of him (the one time I heard Gingrich speak, he was affirming McDonalds’s Hamburger University as a model of higher education).

  In some ways, it seemed too good to be true (and perfectly Atlantan) that, thanks to Ted Turner again, the city was now the home of many of Hollywood’s old movies—the very storehouse of American mythmaking—and was hard at work “colorizing” them.

  Yet none of the city’s transformations had really come about through interaction with the globe: unlike New York or Toronto or San Francisco, say, Atlanta had remade itself not so much with fresh immigrant energy as with new mottoes and corporate headquarters, and where, in 1990, nearly 40 percent of all the people in Greater Los Angeles spoke a language other than English at home, the figure at the same time for metropolitan Atlanta was 6 percent. For me, coming to Atlanta from Seattle and Miami, it seemed a strikingly unmulticultural place, whose destiny was played out in the old, half-forgotten shades of black and white (a binary culture, in a sense). True, there were more foreign companies headquartered in Atlanta than in any other American city, but for all the more than three hundred Japanese companies based here, there were scarcely five thousand actual Japanese in residence.

  As I drove around Atlanta for week after week, I felt I was negotiating precisely that empty space that lies between globalism and true universalism (TIPPING IS NOT A CITY IN CHINA said the sign by the cash register in the tiny counterculture district). Yes, you could find a B and B here by calling RSVP Grits, Inc., and if you really scanned the customized Yellow Pages, you could come upon “Afrocentric psychics” and bilingual therapists, gay cruise operators and an outfit called Southern Bears, Inc. (“club for hirsute men and their admirers”). Out on the tattered edges of the Buford Highway, among pawnshops and tattoo parlors, I even located, my last day in town, copies of the Atlanta Chinese News and some Vietnamese bakeries selling “grass jelly drink.”

  But the overall tenor of the place—and the way it saw itself—seemed to be pulling in the opposite direction. As the Games approached, Cobb County, in suburban Atlanta, decided against being part of the Olympics because it would mean repealing a 1993 resolution condemning the “gay lifestyle” (that Atlanta had the largest gay population in the U.S., outside of New York and San Francisco, was another of the facts it chose not to publicize). And the Chamber of Commerce in the county of Barrow voted 13–2 against letting Somali athletes train in the neighborhood, a move justified in the name of economics, but looking suspiciously like good old Southern xenophobia.

  Those Atlantans conversant with the outside world seemed to understand that Atlanta might not travel well: Andrew Young told a colleague of mine, on the record, “The world really is here in Atlanta, but most people still live in their own cocoon. They are not ready for prime time.” (And Jane Fonda, Atlanta’s favorite adopted daughter, would later get into trouble for likening her new home to the Third World.) But the distinguishing characteristic of provincialism is not to know how provincial it is. Billy Payne, the self-styled “ordinary guy” who had dreamed of bringing the world to his hometown—the latest rags-to-riches candidate—had assured the world that his Olympics would be “the greatest peacetime gathering in the history of mankind.”

  Given that Payne himself had never been abroad, except on holiday, when he issued his invitation to the world
, the promise mostly raised the question of how much he really knew of history or mankind.

  When the Centennial Games finally got under way, I watched the would-be global city and the global village bump into each other, and back away a little, rubbing their foreheads. Suddenly, the center of downtown turned into a labyrinth of theme parks—Bud World, the World Sports Jam, the World Party—and gleaming new pavilions telling us we were all one: Reebok Center, Nike Park, a $20 million new Coca-Cola Olympic City. Gaggles of chirping kids in corporate uniforms invited us to enjoy Visa’s “Olympics of the Imagination” and a fifty-six-dollar virtual reality ride, not far from the Olympic Experience store. Local banks boasted of “Bringing the World Together Through Barter” and, at the very heart of the new Centennial Olympic Park sat a stunning $30 million spaceship of sorts—AT&T’s Global Olympic Village (“Imagine a world without limits”) in which “athletic ambassadors” and their families were invited to enjoy a “safe haven” from the commotion where they could follow events through holographic walls and “the largest video show in the world.”

  I happened to be staying in a Comfort Inn right across from Centennial Park—together with the Olympic teams of Time and Newsweek—and every time I descended into the street to make my way to the Main Press Center next door, I found myself in an all but impassable confusion of panpipers, Christian puppet shows and huge, inflatable Elvises somewhere around the “Celebration of the Century.” Jostling past men with snakes around their shoulders and pamphleteers handing out reminders that “You are born in SIN. HEADED FOR HELL,” I found myself yearning, with a palpable ache, for the silent hermitage above the sea where I would be going as soon as the Games were over.

  The modern Olympic Games were developed, more or less, as sideshows to international expositions—even in 1908 they were including Anthropological Days shows featuring “savage tribes.” But Atlanta took the hustle-bustle to a new cosmic level, RENT-A-LOT signs appearing above every patch of free grass and sidewalk hucksters peddling bottles of “great American water” for four dollars a shot. In Nagano, the Olympic Spirit would take the form of tiny hardware stores posting signs that said, GO JAMAICA and shopkeepers writing up their hobbies at their entrances (“Kite-flying. Joking and singing”). In Atlanta, as soon as you left the central web of the Atlanta Gift Mart, the Atlanta Apparel Mart, and the Atlanta Merchandising Mart (the sound of “Taking Care of Business” ringing in your ears from an Olympic basketball game), you found yourself in an international jumble sale, and stores selling “designer T-shirts with military equipment and insignia.”

  Brave the Olympian now who cited Avery Brundage’s famous claim, “The Olympics is a revolt against 20th century materialism.”

  • • •

  To many, I think, the Atlanta Games served to show, in seventy-foot-block capitals, how the global market hovers above the global village and sometimes threatens to swallow it up altogether. Atlanta has always been a Coca-Cola City (the company is responsible for its art centers, its parks, its concert series, and even, to some extent, the presence of the Centers for Disease Control—what the de’ Medicis were to Florence, it’s been said, Coca-Cola’s Robert Woodruff was to Atlanta), but during the Games it began to seem as if the soft-drink company owned not just the city but the whole event.

  Coke had attached itself to the Olympics as early as 1928, and in that year—it already reached seventy-eight countries around the world—it shipped one thousand cases of its “Wonderful Nerve and Brain Tonic” to Amsterdam, in the company of the U.S. team. By 1952, it was commandeering a World War II landing craft to run Operation Muscle, whereby thirty thousand cases of Coke went to Helsinki, and by 1972, it had simply taken over the catering operations of the entire Olympic Village. Coke was the first sponsor of the Olympic Museum, and the force behind the U. S. Olympic Hall of Fame.

  You can take in much of this information in what is in some respects the central monument in Atlanta, the three-story World of Coke “promotainment” that sits on Martin Luther King, just two blocks from the state capitol. There, visitors are invited to spend $4.50 apiece to enjoy a spectacular advertisement for what is called “the most successful product in the history of commerce,” and peppy multilingual salesgirls from Yokahama and São Paulo will direct you towards the Coke-shaped phone booths, the video theaters playing nothing but Coke ads, the free tasting parlor where you can enjoy Coke products from twenty-one countries. From display cases you can learn how Coke was already advertising on the back of school report cards in 1893, and by 1896 was bringing out a Coca-Cola News, to inform readers that “Coca-Cola is a beverage, a restorative, a blessing to humanity.”

  But the Olympics are the centerpiece of Coke’s efforts to make itself synonymous with youth and global harmony: the company has its own Olympic radio broadcasts and runs its own Salute to Folk Art (wherein “folk and crafts traditions” from around the world are brought to bear on the theme of the Coke bottle). The Coke Pin Trading Center is one of the central meeting places in most Olympic towns, and the company releases new pins every day of the competition; when collected and put together, they form the shape of a contoured Coke bottle (in Nagano, not untypically, every other lantern along the main street wore the insignia of Coke). Coke even runs the Olympic Torch Relay, which means that it selects more than half the dignitaries deemed worthy of carrying the “sacred flame” and presents the “ancient rite” in flags and documents and uniforms stamped with the name Coca-Cola.

  It’s often hard, in fact, to know where the Coke jingle ends and the Olympic song begins, as the stars singing “Amigos para siempre” at Barcelona all but intoned the new Coke motto of “Sabor para siempre.” And sometimes, when I found myself watching bright young dreamers from around the globe gather to sing, “I’d like to build the world a home / And furnish it with love,” I lost track of whether I was watching a Coke ad or an Olympic Moment.

  As it happened, I took in the Opening Ceremonies in Atlanta in a Coca-Cola seat, surrounded by strapping blond regional managers and their ex–beauty queen wives, many of them high-fiving the ex-Olympians who’d been brought onto the team for visibility. Around us, the city gleamed with the new billboards of a $200 million “Olympic-themed” Coke campaign, and Olympic lawyers on every side sat ready to fight back if Pepsi attempted “ambush” or “parasite” marketing (in other words, capitalizing on the cachet of the Olympics without paying the $40 million that Official Sponsors pay to “rent” Olympic values).

  The city didn’t seem quite sure of how it should project itself to the world (“How are we supposed to make a number about economic opportunity?” the director of the Opening Ceremonies had asked. “Have five thousand dancing guys with briefcases?”), but as the Games got under way, I could see Atlanta revealing its true colors to every visitor: when they visited the central mall downtown, Underground Atlanta, they would pass ten “Rules of Etiquette” before coming upon the flagship property of Hooter’s, the restaurant chain that serves up large-breasted waitresses in hot pants. When they wanted to take a trip out of town, they could visit the site voted “Best Outing” by Atlanta magazine two years before—a park “commemorating one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles.” And when they turned on the radio, they would, as likely as not, catch “step-by-step” counsel for Christian businessmen from “someone who by the grace of God went from being broke to being a millionaire.”

  Everywhere we went, moreover, we were reminded that we were now in “the safest city in the world,” home to “the largest security effort ever held for any event in the free world.” As Carl Lewis himself would say—and he was more or less the Tiresias of the modern Olympic Movement—“These days there are only two things that can draw Americans together—the Olympic Games and war.”

  For my own part, I tried, in my usual way, to reduce the event to a human scale by going in the opposite direction from the crowds, and so, one afternoon, I found myself watching kids spraying one another with high-tech fluorescent water pistols
as France took on Estonia in beach volleyball, at Atlanta Beach (230 miles from the nearest ocean), Bob Marley singing “Jamming” on the sound system and the smell of strawberry margaritas mingling with the coconut tang of suntan oil. I took a long bus ride to Athens (in its Georgian form), and met a kid in a deserted parking lot who said, “This is the laziest job I ever got paid for. I signed up for the Olympics, and I got parking attendant! For rhythmic gymnastics! But that’s okay: it’s the Olympics.”

  Inside the somewhat rickety arena, a sign on the pressroom door said PLEASE PUSH SLOWLY BEFORE ENTERING, and when I did as instructed, it was to find sixteen volunteers dancing attention on two journalists, the vast majority of them peering into a Xerox machine with a pencil flashlight.

  My sense that Atlanta had abdicated from its own tradition somehow, leaving the South without quite arriving anywhere else, was only confirmed when I went down to Savannah to watch the sailing competition. Here, I felt, was a Southern town in all its unapologetic ease, with no pressing designs upon the world and no great concern about its image. The first day of Olympic competition in Savannah’s history, most of the signs around town said, simply, BOILED PEANUTS, and the only emblems of Olympic fervor were a few handwritten banners, appropriate for a high school game, out amongst the Piggly Wiggly stores and Hot-Dig-A-Dee Dog outlets. Savannah was not without its controversies, of course, and some people complained that a city where 30 percent of all children lived in poverty should not be spending $37.8 million on sailing; but at least the place seemed sure enough of itself to leave the visitor in peace.

  In Savannah, the volunteers for the Olympics were sometimes homeless men drawn to the city by the prospect of being paid to drive BMWs; and the Media Transport Center, when finally I tracked it down, turned out to be a man in a deck chair, his face covered by a newspaper. The transport itself consisted of an enormous bus peopled by three rather small-seeming souls, and when we disembarked at the other end, a volunteer told us that, prior to our arrival, he’d seen exactly two people in seven hours.