The Olympunks

The Olympics coverage on Yahoo (which is practically the only source of establisment news that I ever encounter - probably not the best situation) is getting on my nerves. Yes, a great deal of it is that Yahoo News itself just gets on my nerves, but there's more to it than that. I have no great insight here, and I couldn't care less about the Olympics, really, but it's annoying and alarming that professional athletes who are also high profile representatives of their repsective countries are carrying on like such babies. Moreover, the journalists who are disseminating stories about them aren't behaving much better. I mean, I've seen some decent writing, at least in terms of rhetorical skill, but the judgement of these writers seems skewed and adolescent in the extreme.


The people who are in control of our world right now are children, at least in terms of their ethical development. I know this already, but it is becomingly increasingly impossible to ignore as it begins to define the prevailing culture more and more totally.

Apparently I'm not fully grown myself. I say this because I keep being dumbfounded at all the silliness going in projects that adults are supposed to be in charge of. Like the Olympics, for instance. I assume that the people who are in charge of the Olympics, hello, are adults and know how to behave. Now, I have no reason to assume this. I know that Western culture is presently suffering from an acute state of arrested development. I know that spending bookoo bucks on a bunch of hyped-up, tacky opening ceremonies (replete with malfunctioning machinery - didn't those things look disturbingly like Superman's ice home in the movies from the 70's?) doesn't guarantee that anything dignified is going to occur. And yet this Russian skater with his self-awarded platinum medal still astounds me.

Well, this is what adults are like now, regardless of socio-economic background. All the various spheres of civilized life - the sports world, the academic world, the corporate world, the entertainment world, the art world, the politcal world, the medical world - they are all governed by children. Except these children have grown up bodies and ambitions, along with lots of money.

I can't help wondering if things were like this when I was a kid. Maybe so. They didn't seem to be. But then, I was just a kid.