2022 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies (International Olympic Committee, NBC-TV, aired February 4, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 5:10 p.m. I watched the opening ceremonies of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China (formerly Peking, and still referred to as such in French). The commentaries were in the official languages of the International Olympic Committee, English and French, plus the official language of the host country, which in this case is Mandarin Chinese since when Mao Zedong took over in 1949 he issued a decree declaring that Mandarin be the official language of China, presumably to avoid the linguistic confusion that has beset India and kept English as a second language through much of India’s politics and commerce. The 2022 Winter Olympics are occurring at a fraught moment in the political contest between democracy and authoritarianism, the latter represented not only by China’s president-for-life, Xi Jinping, but by Russian President Vladimir Putin,who was there as Xi’s honored guest; reportedly the first time in two years Xi has hosted a foreign head of state on Chinese soil. Ironically, while former (and possibly future) U.S. President Donald Trump focused his re-election campaign on the alleged threat from China and counted Russia as an ally, Xi and Putin are forming an alliance and offering massive grants to Third World countries essentially to buy their support in the new Cold War.

There were a couple of interesting political commentators, a former Wall Street Journal reporter (who looked white) and an Asian woman, a Chinese émigré who has published a book about the politics behind the Chinese system of writing. Though one of Mao’s innovations was the Pinyin writing system, which adopts the Roman alphabet we’re all familiar with, Chinese still make “alphabetical” lists based on the number of strokes needed to write the first character of their name. Thus, as the various nations participated in the opening parade, they were called in seemingly random order reflecting the ease with which their countries’ names can be written in characters, with the lowest numbers first. The commentators also warned us to expect some great political message to be slipped into the opening ceremonies, and it duly came; The Chinese flag tiat will fly over the main stadium was carried en masse by members of all 56 Chinese ethnic groups, and there were two torchbearers to light the Olympic flame, one of whom was a Uighur, a Muslim moniroty in China whom the current government has been accused of targeting for genocide. That, along with the recent crackdowns on political protest and press freedom in Hong Kong, was the reason U.S. President Joe Biden and several leaders in his administration gave in ordering a so-called “diplomatic boycott” of the Olympics. In practice, that means that neither Biden nor anyone else from the U.S. government would attend the ceremonies, to which the Chinese probably thought, “Good riddance.”

The U.S. is in the middle of a worldwide clash between democracy and authoritarians, and unlike in the last previous clash, World War II, the democracies are losing. Of the three main countries that united to fight in the war, Russia and China are already dictatorships and the U.S. is set to become one as soon as President Trump (or a hand-picked successor which will continue not only the same policies but the same visceral contempt for the rule of the people) and the Republicans retake the presidency and Congress. (Yesterday the Republican National Committee censured Congressmembers Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their participation in the committee investigating the Januar6 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and calling the attack itself “legitimate political discourse.”) It comes as no surprise that the Chinese government is using the opening ceremonies of the Olympics to generate support for their authoritarian policies since that’s what all this elaborate pageantry was invented for in the first place: it was cooked up by the Nazis, the real ones, wneh the 1936 Games were awarded to them. (Both the Winter and the Summer Olympics that year were held in Germany, the Summer Games in Berlin and the Winter Games in the well-established ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Richard Strauss had his winter home.)

At first the Nazis were ready to cancel the Olympics since the whole principle of friendly competition between nations was anathema to the spirit of Nazism, but Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, quickly realized that hosting an Olympics was a good way of rehabilitating their nation’s image on the world stage. They ordered a temporary halt to the persecution of the Jews for the duration of the Games (which of course they ramped up again as soon as those pesky foreign correspondents went home) and they even let one Jewish athlete, a woman swimmer, onto the national team. It was also the Nazis who cooked up a lot of the rituals that have become obligatory to open the Olympics, including the idea of a torch being carried worldwide from the original site of the Games in ancient Greece to their modern-day home and the huge displays of neoclassical statuary that lined the stadium entrance. (One thing the Nazis were good at was putting on pageants.) And hosting an Olympics (two, actually) was also good for Nazi Germany’s long-term goal of conquering first Europe and then the entire world: training young men to be athletes would also give them the training and discipline to be soldiers in the upcoming world war Hitler intended to start. (Recently Vladimir Putin has ordered over 130,000 troops to the border with Ukraine and laid plans for a false-flag operation with corpses to simulate war casualties and actors dressed as Ukrainian soldiers, which is the same way Hitler started World War II by forcing German prisoners to dress in Polish army uniforms and smuggle then across the Polish border to launch a supposed “attack” the Germans would “retaliate” against. I predict that not only will Russia launch an invasion of Ukraine – possibly during the Olympics, the way Putin launched an invasion of Georgia during the previous Olympics he was hosting in Sochi – but the outcome will be a quick Russian victory the way Nazi forces similarly overran Poland.)

Besides the geopolitical controversies, there is also a quite different agenda in China now than there was the last time Beijing hosted an Olympics opening ceremony in 2008 (Beijing, as we were constantly reminded last night, is the only city in history to have launched both a Summer and a Winter Olympics), when China staged a massive celebration to impress the world and show their prowess on the stage. Today the political situation is very different – under Xi, China is turning inward and engaging in political repression – and also the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has complicated matters. Not only did nobody expect the pandemic to be going on this long (even I, a glass-half-empty kind of guy, didn’t expect the pandemic to last more than two years, partly because I expected the virus to evolve into a more benign form the way the flu did and partly because I was expecting that as soon as the vaccine were made available everybody, or almost everybody, would get it and there wouldn’t be this well-organized resistance campaign against it), but it also originated in China and thus the Chinese have suffered the blame for it. So there was a controversy surrounding the very idea of a gathering of people from all over the world, and one of the most heartbreaking segments of last night’s coverage was the segment, scored with Frank Sinatra’s version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (I hadn’t remembered that Sinatra had recorded that song!), on how the parents ald relatives were being denied the chance to see their kids compete after looking forward to that opportunity for years or even decades.

The actual opening ceremony was low-keyed, though there were enough pyrotechnics to remind us that China was the country that invented fireworks in the first place (they came up with gunpowder but used it only decoratively, and it was we in the West who first realized that it could be put in a metal tube and used to fire a projectile that could kill people). The main themes were snowflakes, used as a symbol of unity both around the world and specifically within China; and the number 24, which represented both the 24th Winter Olympics and the 24 months of the traditional lunar new year by which the Chinese figure out what year it is. Since the start of the Olympics happened to coincide with the Chinese new year (this being the Year of the Tiger in Chinese astrology), the 24 seasons into which the Chinese divide the calendar became a key theme of the ceremony. Along the way we heard a lot of singing, some in Chinese from massed choruses and some in English by solo singers plowing their way through inspirational songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” – though I couldn’t make out any of the words to “Hallelujah” besides the title and they might have just been singing that one word over and over.

At one point the 200 or so choristers formed a circle around the ice of the Bird’s Nest stadium (built for the 2008 Summer Games, and whose architect later became a dissident and ultimately defected to the U.S.) and both my husband Charles and I were reminded of a Busby Berkeley musical number and also of Herman Mankiewicz’ comment about Cecil B. DeMille: “It just goes to show what God could do if He had money.” (Of course I also mentioned my joke about how Beyoncé’s videos look like they were directed by the love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl.) These opening ceremonies weren’t a patch on the most spectacular ones I’ve seen – those would be the ones in Lillehammer, Norway, with both bad and good vettas (local spirits) fighting it out for control. It also didn’t live up to the one in Vancouver, where “Hallelujah” was sung by native Canadian k. d. lang and she turned in one of the three best performances of the song (along with Leonard Cohen’s and Jeff Buckley’s), but it was still a nice segment and a good kick-off to the next two weeks.