$pectacle, $ponsorship and $port

I have this wonderful friend named Sarah who is volunteering at the Olympics. She’s blogging about the experience, and she’s delightful. In fact, if you click on “delightful” in the last sentence it will take you to her blog.

I honestly think it's great that she’s volunteering and having a good time, but, as I said in a comment to her, this whole business of the Olympics brings out the Grinch in me. And, let’s be honest, the modern Olympics is, to say the least, a business. It’s not a benevolent society, nor a humanitarian organization. It’s not even a “movement” as it likes to style itself, but the largest, least accountable, multinational corporation in the world. At one time it may have been about sports and athletes, but now those things are, at best, secondary. The Olympic Corporation has one central purpose; to make tons of money by providing the world’s biggest and best advertising venue (billions of ears and eyes) for corporate sponsors. Athletes, national pride, and heart-warming stories of little people surmounting the insurmountable are the ear and eye candy, but the point of it all is a gazillion bucks.

As you might expect, I am sympathetic to much of the protest that’s taking place. But even that becomes part of the spectacle eye-candy that makes the whole thing work. And I can’t help wondering how many of the participants have a Visa card in their wallet or Petro-Can gas in their tank. How many drive a GM vehicle, have a GE toaster, or will stop at McDonald’s for a Coke on the way home. -- All corporate sponsors of the 2010 Olympic Games.

Isn’t it wonderful to live in a country where you are free to protest? Of course it is, because protest is the pressure valve that keeps the whole thing from blowing up in our faces. But, in a liberal democracy like Canada, it’s more than that. It’s a symbiotic relationship, like the rhino and the tick-bird. The rhino may imagine she’s benevolent, and the tick-bird may imagine he’s courageous, but the truth is they simply have "an arrangement".

And this is where I find Jesus’ approach so interesting. He saw Herod’s palace and Solomon’s temple for what they were; boondoggles of one kind and another. But he never wasted a lot of time and energy serving or attacking either. He expressed his amazement and his displeasure, and reminded his disciples that time will dismantle all of it, “...not a stone will be left upon a stone” (Mark 13:2). And then he turned back to serve the little people who were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34).

So, as the torch flickers and dies in a couple of weeks, let us give praise, not as the assembled throng, but as the psalmist gave praise:

...to him who alone does great wonders,

His love endures forever. Psalm 136:4