Living In A Political World

You can always count on the Olympics to come around every four years. And, trailing in its wake, you can always count on smug media elitists to tell us all that we are all Very Bad People for celebrating American achievements at the Games. Susan Jacoby, who writes some sort of Atheism Column for the Washington Post (as God is my witness, I am not making this up), provides this year's model (h/t Newsbusters): Olympic Boosterism: When American Superiority Means Inferiority

If you would like a graphic (literal and figurative) demonstration of our nation's greatest failing, sit in front of your television set and watch NBC cover an international sports event, the Winter Olympics, as if only Americans were participating. Every time the Today show's Meredith Vieira stumbles over the name of the Russian figure skater Yevgeny Plushenko (it's pronounced exactly as it's spelled, Meredith, with the accent on the second syllables) and giggles to show that it's OK to be ignorant, I think about all of the announcers from Canada and Europe who pronounce everyone's name correctly. Their employers care about getting it right, and NBC doesn't. Not if the athlete isn't one of us, contributing to the mounting total of "American" medals announced breathlessly every day. Why, anyone would think that these medals were more important than the performance of American students on international comparison tests of achievement in school. In case you're interested, Finland was No. 1 and Canada No. 2 in the most recent international assessment of reading comprehension. The United States was No. 15. U.S.A., U.S.A....

Boy, for an atheist, this lady sure is judgmental, not to mention puritanical. No sports for you until your reading comprehension "beats" Finland's!

Jacoby's attempts at international sophistication are probably the funniest bits of her screed. She claims that foreign media outlets "pronounce everyone's name correctly." No they don't. If you watch TV in France, American names are rendered in an elaborate (and dashingly romantic) French accent. Go to Japan and American names receive the same treatment (in 7 years living in Japan, not one person pronounced my name correctly, although they were very nice about it). And so on. Also, I don't know what countries Jacoby has visited, but I can guarantee the citizens of those countries care about the performance of their teams first and foremost. Shocking, I know. I think I can already hear the guns of August.

Worse, according to Jacoby, we give athletes from other countries short shrift

This Olympic coverage matters because it offers a window into a deeply provincial, reflexively nationalistic mindset that hampers our understanding of the rest of the world and prevents any realistic assessment of American weaknesses and strengths in comparison to other countries. In a truly emblematic moment in the "We're No. 1" extravaganza, NBC showed a recap of the medals ceremony for theMen's Super-G, an Alpine skiing event. Americans Bode Miller and Andrew Weibrecht won silver and bronze, respectively, but the network simply blanked out the gold medal podium, which was occupied by Norwegian Aksel Svindal. Well, who cares about a Norwegian? He's just an athlete from one of those unhappy countries cursed by secularism and universal health care.

That is simply wrong. Svindal, for one, was the subject of a Sentimental Puff Piece (SPP), and NBC has been talking up his historic performance. And if there has been a men's alpine event that did not feature numerous shots of Svindal's emotional father (who bears an alarming resemblance to Psota's Norwegian grandfather), I'd like to know its name. Curling coverage has given short shrift to the US team because, frankly, they suck. Bobsledding, ski jumping, nordic combined, biathalon, even women's figure skating have been dominated by Dread Furriners, and NBC's coverage has reflected that.

Then, Jacoby gets around to what really gets her goat. Universal health care has not gotten enough attention in these Olympics:

A twin of this delusion about superior American morality is the conviction that we have nothing to learn from the way any other country does things. The dire warnings that "Obamacare" was going to turn the U.S. into Europe or Canada--as if the inferiority of European and Canadian medical care were self-evident--has been very much a part of the non-debate over health care this year. And here is why the NBC coverage means more than the jingoistic flag-waving that always surrounds international sporting competitions. This has been a lost opportunity for a little bit of education that could have been sandwiched in between the medal counts. Since the Olympics are being held in Canada, would this not have been a perfect opportunity to do a feature on the Canadian health care system to go along with the endless time-filling blurbs on what the American athletes are listening to on their iPods? There were certainly ample news pegs, since injured athletes were being carried off the slopes to Vancouver hospitals every day.

Moreover, the first Canadian ever to win an Olympic gold medal on his home soil, Alexandre Bilodeau, has a medical and human backstory that would have been made for TV--had he been an American.

Actually, that last bit is evidence that Jacoby has not watched one second of NBC's coverage. Bilodeau was the subject of another SPP, which went heavy on the sentiment regarding his brother, Frederic, who suffers from cerebral palsey. And NBC did broadcast Bilodeau's medal ceremony which included a rousing crowd sing-along of "Oh, Canada!" along with so much flag waving that you would have thought the massed Canadians were ready to march on Baghdad. There's an inconvenient truth for you: even Canadians like to indulge in "jingoistic flag waving" of the sort Jacoby disapproves.

Jacoby also manages to throw in Brit Hume, Tiger Woods, Justice Scalia, 9/11, and a lot more. Wake me up when there's some atheism in there.

Such is life under our "hip" progressive masters. We can't even enjoy something as simple as a downhill ski run without someone smugly lecturing us about reading comprehension and universal health care. A question for Jacoby: if we do as you wish and mix sports with discussions of public policy regarding health care (or whatever) isn't that the sort of rank "bread & circuses" propaganda that sophisticates like you are always so quick to deplore?