Pictures may speak volumes

Many words may be spoken about the elaborate opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. Outperforming the opening of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, for example. That's saying something since "Hollywood" helped produce that ceremony. And we thought communists were supposed to be boring.


Not when they run the third largest economy in the world and currently produce more billionaires than the other economic juggernauts.

Be that as it may, like many onlookers, I was moved by the guileless beauty of the Chinese children, the sound and light issuing from the stadium, and the athletes parading before the crowd. An element of hopefulness briefly emerged from the deep well of cynical, political reality. Then, in the final phase of the pageant a group of stern-looking, goose-stepping Chinese soldiers porting the Olympic flag and raising it cleared the brain of its sentiment.

I reflected that in the ancient games in Olympia, Greece all militant actions of war were put off. All ornaments and military trappings were set aside. Here we have the Chinese military goose-stepping with the flag, its five rings representing the five major regions of the globe firmly in their grasp.

Then again, we know that Chinese soldiers have been used for purposes other than military engagement before, as when they were ordered to don Buddhist robes in order to impersonate Tibetan monks in a movie. Is the word propaganda out of order? Note the red robes in the soldiers' arms in the photograph below.








But was this really so contradictory a conclusion to the opening ceremony? After all, Baron Pierre de Coubertin who conceived and promoted the revival of the modern Olympics at the beginning of the last century "...was convinced that the sports-centered English public school system of the late 19th century was the rock upon which the vast and majestic British empire rested."

On with the games.

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