The Olympics are coming up here in just a couple of days, and if you’re like me then you already stopped caring about them a long time ago. In fact, I’m already getting a head start on not caring about the 2012 Olympics. Seriously, dealing with the Olympics is enough of a struggle in and of itself, but this time around we have the double whammy of an Olympics event marketed on the “special date” of 2008.08.08. I thought those kinds of date-marketing were okay back in the mid 1990s, but by 1999.09.09 I was sick of them. (Not just because Final Fantasy VIII was such a huge disappointment for me, either.) 2006.06.06 had some potential, but then Ann Coulter had to come along and screw that up with another of her sophomoric screeds.

Anyway, back to the Olympics. When I was younger I thought the Olympics was a big thing, but as I grew older I began to realize that I only thought the Olympics were big because the media had led me to believe that they were; it probably didn’t help that I was eight years old when the Olympics hit Los Angeles, and of course there’s always a surplus of marketing here in the United States when the Olympics come here. Finally I began to be around other people who didn’t care about the Olympics, and I began to see the wisdom in their arguments. For some people the Olympics lost their lustre after the Munich Massarce in 1972; for others the Cold War-related boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Olympics demolished their ideas of the Olympic spirit, that athletes should come together to compete regardless of the world political stage. For me it was the 1992 games, most notably for the inclusion of NBA players in the United States’ men’s basketball team. Nothing would please me more than to say that I took this stand out of principle that professional athletes making millions of dollars every year have no place in the Olympics, but in all honesty I was just pissed that no Detroit Pistons were named to the Dream Team. (Seriously, Chris Mullin over Isiah Thomas?)

I don’t want to disparage the overall idea of the Olympics. I believe that the training and hardships that Olympic athletes put themselves through is nothing short of noble, and for those people whose lives have been dedicated to competing in the games, I wish nothing for them but the best of luck. For me, though, the combination of how absurdly overmarketed each successive Olympics gets, all the people trying to force me to care about them, and the sickening jingoism that crops up from nearly every competition, just drives me up the wall. (Not including baseball as a competition this year doesn’t exactly make me happy, either.) I’m sure that I’ll catch a little coverage here and there, probably on CBC since their coverage is so much more level-headed than American coverage, but the less I hear about the Olympics over these next few weeks, the better.

None of this, of course, is meant to diminish the fact that this is the time the world should have its more critical of eyes trained on the brutalities of the Chinese government. I thought that the whole idea behind giving Beijing the Olympics was that it would shame them into cleaning up both their environment and their disgraceful human rights record. Clearly the human rights situation hasn’t been improved on any, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a marathon runner or two pass out from taking in all that toxic air for a prolonged time. For the past twenty years we were told that spreading capitalism in China, giving them most favoured nation trading status, and being nice to them would solve all the political problems over there, but that sure hasn’t worked either. One has to wonder why this administration hasn’t gone ahead and invaded China already; it would be supported by more countries than the invasion of Iraq was, and on top of that, China’s got a whole lot of oil.

I’m being facetious when I say that, of course, but in all seriousness, it says something about our culture that we would send all of these reporters and cameras to China, but instead of looking into all the disappearances and killings of innocents, they’re instead focusing on preteen girls swinging around on the uneven bars. If that isn’t an apt description of the problems with America’s corporate media, I don’t know what is.