"The Office" (workstation series) 110 (nationalism sucks edition)

If there's anything that watching the orgy of materialist nationalism that is the Olympics every four years ought to teach us, it's that there is nothing pure in the world--least of all in the world of global-echelon sports competition.

I'm old enough to remember the days of the actual Cold War (not the one that the increasingly-to-be-believed-senile John McCain seems to want to return to), and the impotent fury we would all feel when the Soviet Bloc judges consistently, in event after event, for decades, would rank American athletes consistently lower than did the other judges.

So now when I hear those fucking Botoxed chipmunks on MSNBC babbling about the "medal count" (I'm looking at you, Tiki Barber! Shut the fuck up!), or see those children the Chinese are claiming as of-age gymnasts, or the degree to which the Olympics for Kobe Bryant is nothing but a platform for growing his ego to truly epic proportions (I exempt Kidd and Lebron--those guys are soldiers, not media stars), or that miserable little war-criminal-in-Chief with his fucking visor and tails-out denim shirt and flip-flops, looking like the frat-house cheerleader he always was and still is, it makes me want to vomit.

But it also reminds me that it was ever thus.

The only purity is in the hours and hours and days and weeks and months and years of hard, physically-painful, boring, focused effort that got those athletes there. The best commentary on the magnitude, courage, and pure-D stick-to-it-ivity of those extraordinary people would be silence, and attention.