August 14th, 2008
There’s been some talk about the Chinese government’s manipulation of the broadcast of the Olympics opening ceremonies, in particular the fact that they switched another girl, who was deemed prettier, for the 7-year-old girl who had been chosen to sing the opening anthem, and made the first girl lip-synch to the second-girl’s voice.
Jay Nordlinger, best known for putting stupid things to say in George W. Bush’s mouth, contributes his insights to The Corner
What a thing to do to a seven-year-old girl — tell her she’s too ugly to appear in public, though the party will be happy to use her voice. That’s one of the worst things about Communist and dictatorial regimes: They are cruel to little girls.
He goes out of his way to note that he’s not kidding about this, and has in fact made the same argument elsewhere. For some reason, he also draws a parallel between this outrage and the casting practices of US opera companies, after first working in a racist joke. I don’t understand the way his mind works, but he’s a senior editor at NR, which explains a lot.
What I want to know is, how is this different from the far creepier practices of pre-teen beauty pageants that are ubiquitous in the US? It’s not like ranking and selecting girls for a combination of both talent and looks is somehow peculiarly Chinese, or that, in the end, such vicious meat markets don’t always wind up dividing winners and losers by tiny, superficial criteria. And casting adult performers for roles based on their looks also goes without saying; things are a bit different in the opera world, but I never understood why anyone acted surprised by it.
Suddenly this cruel insult by the Chinese is an offense to womanhood worldwide. The Corner is taking a stance against tracking girls’ careers by superficial physical standards, while they also vociferously oppose Titles IX and X here at home. Their characteristic Red-baiting is literally reflexive: it bypasses the upper nervous system entirely and just spews out as an uncontrollable muscle spasm. As Obama said in a different context, but with universal relevance: “It’s as if they take pride in being ignorant.”
It’s oppressive, and sad, that Politburo members can pass personal judgment on who meets the attractiveness standards of the Chinese government, but I can’t imagine it’s in any way better - and on sheer volume alone it’s probably much worse - that we’ve farmed that out to a profit-making system that preys on every bit of the cynicism, celebrity-worship, and body-image pathology that our society pressure-cooks girls in from birth. The Miss America pageants are said to be the single largest source of college scholarship money for women in the US - a travesty in itself, that speaks volumes about how much we care about what aspects of women’s lives - but each pageant, at each level, has just one winner, chosen in pretty much exactly the same way the Olympics singer was chosen in China. At least that little girl won’t lose her chance at an education over this.
Categories: Culture, Education, General, How Capitalism Will Ruin You, News & Current Events, Olympics |
10 Comments
November 13th, 2006
Figure skating is not a sport. It is athletic and involves amazing displays of skill, but it is not a sport. The winners and losers are decided by the subjective opinion of judges. Often, skaters have to “pay their dues” over a few competitions, even years, before they are given the highest marks by the judges. In other words, it is just like college football’s “championship”.
Who gets to play in the “championship” game is largely decided by the polls, which are nothing more than the badly formed opinions of people who cannot possibly have watched all the teams they are voting on each week. since the polls start in the preseason, position is determined by everything BUT how well the teams perform on the field. This year, Rutgers could go undefeated in the Big East conference, a team with three top ten teams and the second highest rated conference in college football, but has no chance to play in the national title game. Why? Because they hadn’t “paid their dues” — they were not a big time program, and so they were not ranked in the pre-season polls. College football has adopted, for all intents and purposes, the figure skating method of determining a champion. Just more proof that college football isn’t a real sport.
Categories: Olympics, Sports, World Cup |
5 Comments
February 23rd, 2006
This just in! Mike Modano is a whiner! In other news, ice is cold, water is wet, and the US Men’s Hockey team is old, slow and horribly overrated.
Categories: NHL, Olympics, Sports |
2 Comments
February 20th, 2006
- Shani Davis will be remembered for fifty years. He is the first African-American to win an individual gold medal at a Winter Olympics, and his story is a true Horatio Alger. he grew up on the South Side of Chicago and participated in a sport that was foreign to his friends and neighborhood. He overcame material hardship and the psychological hardship of being a trailblazer. It is a remarkable achievement that will live in Olympic lore for a generation.
- In five years, no one will remember Chad Hedrick I suspect that is why Hedrick is acting like a spoiled brat. His implied attacks on the patriotism of Shani Davis were petulant and ridiculous. At the top level, asking an athlete to break his training schedule in order to compete in an extra event is an extraordinary imposition. But Hedrick had one and only one chance to be remembered past these next two weeks or so: win five gold medals. But because Davis didn’t skate, the US had a lesser chance to win the relay, and thus Hedrick had a lesser chance at his five medals and Olympic immortality. Hedrick was asking Davis to make a huge sacrifice in order to advance his own glory. And when Davis had the temerity to refuse to sacrifice his chance at history for Hedrick’s and then enter Olympic immortality himself, Hedrick’s petulant nature rose to the surface. he sulked on the bench during the 1000 meter that Davis won and then pointedly refused to congratulate him for his historic achievement. I love the Olympics, but part of me will be glad when they are over, so that I will never have to hear Hedrick’s impersonation of a three year old again.
- Everyone knows the “S” guy in that Chevy commercial is dead, right? And everyone realizes that his buddies use his corpse to pick up those two women, right? And we are all okay with this? When did necrophiliacs become Chevy’s target demographics?
- Joey Cheeks is a true Olympian Cheeks, who has won two long track speed skating medals, has given his bonus money — 40,000 dollars in total — to a charity designed to give poor children the world over and opportunity to play Olympic sports. Forty thousand dollars is a noticeable amount of money, and speed skaters are generally not multi-millionaires. Cheeks’ actions are in the best traditions of the Olympic spirit and he should be applauded for them
- The medals are ugly Sorry, Torino, but those are some ugly medals. They look like deformed DVDs. They are bulky, oddly designed, and lack anything that could be described as grace or elegance. They look like something from the Early Soviet Realism catalog.
- Why is Ice Dancing in the Olympics? Not only is it, like figure skating and ski jumping, not a sport, it is not even an athletic competition. The competitors are not allowed to do jumps. They are penalized for being too athletic. Why don’t we just add tidily-winks to the Olympics and be done with it?
- The Russian speed skating uniforms look like pajamas It is a bold statement, I think: they are so confidant that they are prepared to nap during the race to make things more equitable.
- The new NHL rules are really working. Watching the men’s Olympic Ice Hockey tournament has really driven home how much the new NHL rules have changed the game for the better. In the past, watching Olympic hockey just drove home how slow, choppy, and grabby the NHL had become. Where NHL players slogged, Olympic competitors flew. This year, however, aside form the obvious difference that having all the best players in the world in a small tournament produces, I can see almost no difference between the NHL and the Olympic games.
- Curling needs better announcers The NBC and affiliated networks have done a good job of explaining what is happening so that casual fans can understand what is happening during the event. Except for the curling announcers. I love curling. The mix of strategy and physical skill and the deliberate pace is enchanting. I have watched enough of it to be confidant in my knowledge of the basics and to try and figure out the strategy. It would be nice if the commentators would help with that. As it is now, I get a constant stream of “nice throw” and “missed and opportunity there” with not even an attempt at explaining why the throw was good or bad or what, exactly, the players are trying to do with each throw.
Categories: Olympics, Sports |
8 Comments
February 14th, 2006
I swear, the old codger they have doing commentary for the figure skating competitions has to be a joke. His commentary runs something like this:
“Oh, that’s just awful. The skaters do X so badly know. They used to do it so much better back in the day. And their costumes, they look like old dish clothes. The costumes used to be so much better. And the women aren’t as pretty as they used to be, either. Not like when I was young. And they have no elegance. Why, when I was a boy the figure skaters skated over piranhas. Nazi piranhas. Hungry Nazi piranhas that would kill you for a bad stitch in your costume. And they liked it. “
Categories: Olympics, Sports |
2 Comments
February 13th, 2006
Some random thoughts on the Olympics.
- NBCs coverage of the Summer Olympics was much better. In the Summer, they showed more events live on more of their affiliated channels. Perhaps this is just a function of the number of events and perhaps the schedules will become more crowded as we get deeper into the events, but as of right now, I am kinda under whelmed by the coverage.
- Please, please, please stop with the sob stories. Apparently it is not enough to just be good at an event. No, you have to also have a heart wrenching story to go along with it. NBCs coverage has been so maudlin and so inundated with “X overcame such a horrible event” that I would not be surprised to find out that NBC had taken out a contract on the loved one of a medal contender in order to boost ratings. I appreciate a good story of overcoming horrible odds, but there is such a thing as too much. And NBC has hit too much two days into these Olympics.
- The Olympics can survive without Michelle Kwan. NBC has treated her departure like it would the death of a head of state. Kwan has never lived up to her billing in the Olympics, and she did not deserve to be on the team. She was obviously still too injured to compete, and if she hadn’t had the self-awareness to quit, the alternate would have been denied her rightful place on the squad. Kwan’s tale is not a sad one, it is a pathetic. And besides, it is not as if figure skating is a real sport.
- Figure skating is not a sport. Neither is ski jumping or ay of the made up sports that rich ski bums from Colorado have somehow wedged into the Olympics, like moguls or half-pipe. Anything that depends upon a score for a subjective judge is not a sport, it is an artistic competition.
- Italy is gorgeous. The mountain shots NBC uses to open their coverage each night are breathtaking.
- The hockey rules need to change. Right now, goal differential is a tie breaker. That leads to ugly situations like the Canadian women running up scores of 15-0 against the clearly inferior Italian team. Teams are forced to be poor sports, and that runs counter to the spirit of the Olympics. The rules should be changed.
- Norway should be an easy conquest. In the biathlon — a gloriously bizarre event in which people cross country ski around a track, stopping periodically to shoot at targets — the Norwegians as a group skated very, very fast but also shot so poorly that they negated the advantage their speed gave them.
- There have already been great moments in these Olympics. I have seen the first female Estonian to win a medal for her country — and it was a gold. I have seen a 52 year old compete in the luge. I have seen Italy win its first cross country medals and win them in front of their home crowds. I have seen races tens of kilometers long come down to the width of a toe. I love the Olympics.
- Finnish names are cool. Apparently they spend the interminable winters thinking up really, really neat names.
- German Nicknames are not. The Flying White Sausage?
Categories: Olympics, Sports |
12 Comments
