Big, bold and blatant, the Beijing Games are an unwitting response to complicated times, writes Tom Humphries.
HIGHER? FASTER? Stronger? The usual, thanks, but give us a hero on the side. Somebody we can believe in. Olympic time again and before a starter's gun has sounded, before a medal has been awarded, before a sample has come back positive, Beijing already feels different. It is, for instance, the first Olympics of recent memory not to have involved a race against time.
Yes, there have been human-rights worries and the Olympic flame had to be bundled about as carefully as a heart harvested from a donor.
Yes, there have been build-up stories and leaked word of the new superdeeduperdee drug testing, but what the Beijing Games have cost in terms of either dollars or the lives of construction workers has never been an issue.
Whether everything would be finished in time was never in question. Are there overruns? Who cares? Budget Schmudget.
The Chinese said they would build it. We said we would come. End of story. These are old style state-run Games. Like them or lump them, folks, but if you are going to China, take and accept your 57-item set of guidelines for how you should behave when there.
Strange, isn't it? We are already fretting about cost overruns for the London Games and scheming as to how we Paddies can make off with a little of the greasy-till action, but Beijing is seemingly costless and problem-free. The Stepford of Olympic celebrations. A monolithic superstate buying its 15 minutes in the world spotlight and dictating what the world shall direct its gaze to.
Forget Tibet and look at our bird's-nest-style stadium. Never mind Darfur, look at the aquatic centre.
Ignore those dissidents, they're fine. Look, we can control the weather, just press this and we blast the clouds away!
By virtue of being the least overwhelmed Olympic host of the post-Montreal era (Montreal being a landmark in bankruptcy history, it took the city 30 years to pay off the debt), Beijing threatens to overwhelm us all. We have been steamrollered into submission.
We were wrong perhaps to expect different from these Games. The Olympics have been the whore of geopolitics since they were handed with blessings to Hitler and Berlin in 1936.
Lord Killanin, our Irish IOC president, always liked to maintain that for everyone who was taken in by Berlin (many athletes gave Hitler the Nazi salute as they passed the viewing stand), two others went forth and exposed Nazism.
For an Olympian to have expressed this view after 1945 explains a lot about how the IOC have always felt about themselves and their place in the world. So perhaps it is a bit late in the day for us to start cavilling about ideals and such when it comes to Olympism.
We were naive to expect anything but sly pragmatism from the Olympics blazers and silly to expect anything but big brush-strokes from the Chinese. Whatever our quibbles, it looks like we are going to have to live with them because the Chinese ain't for changing.
Anyway, perhaps the strange moral fuzziness surrounding China's hosting/hijacking of the Games and its attendant propaganda campaign is appropriate for the times we live in.
A bit late and a bit too dimly lit.
There was a time when the political wrapping paper in which the Games are always delivered was more clearly marked. In the Cold War era one side would boycott the other side's hosting. Ya paid your money and ya took your choice.
During apartheid we knew what was black and what was white. And for a long time we knew that we Irish were the only drug-free Olympians in the world.
Now, in our world of complicated moral equivalencies, there are no good nations or bad nations and everyone cheats, even our lovely horses. Everybody cheats and everybody was either for terrorism or a partner in the terrifying coalition of the willing which presided over Baghdad, Basra and Abu Ghraib in the name of righteousness.
The world keeps shrinking and as it gets more condensed the moralities of nations become harder to discern. In that sense, by being so big and bold and blatant the Beijing Games are an unwitting response to complicated times.
The Beijing Olympiad is frightening just because of its glacial irresistibility, because of its lack of subtlety and colossal arrogance. Three million of the city's inhabitants were shifted to make room for the games and €128 billion was spent on tarting the place up.
The numbers are too outsized for us to talk rationally about. What China does with €128 billion of its own money is, on the one hand, its business.
On the other hand, spending it on something as trivial as sport and propaganda while huge swathes of the country have health and education problems seems just that wee bit morally derelict. Still, two billion.
The immense arrogance of the Chinese in laying on this hubristic celebration is matched and facilitated, however, by the grand-scale delusions of the International Olympic Committee, who, with their usual blatherings about Olympic truces and the ennobling spirit of Olympism, are as convinced now on the eve of the Games as they were back in Moscow eight years ago when awarding them to Beijing that a festival of running and lepping will somehow force the Chinese authorities to review their attitude to the many and disparate victims of official sate repression.
And the whole thing is underwritten by our own woolly ignorance. I used to know a man whose theory of humanity was bleak but mostly correct. He argued that if you put a button on the counter of every pub in Ireland and told punters that by pressing the button they would get a free pint and a nameless Chinese person would get vaporised, well, there would be a holocaust in China every Friday and Saturday night.
And that touches on a third part of the problem. We have virtually no grasp of China beyond the big wall and the food and the long march. So the Games, for good or for bad, have so far failed to engage us or take us by the lapels.
And that is the challenge for the next 16 days. Will there be a Carlos and a Smith willing to make a gesture which breaks the selfish insularity of the competitors? Will there be a record breaker, a performer, a rivalry to deliver us from the cynicism we feel after Marion Jones and company?
There will surely be many wonderful performances by Chinese competitors. Given our hosts' history of state-sponsored cheating, will we be able to believe any of it?
The last Games were dominated by the comical farce of Kostas Kenteris and Ekaterina Thanou, the Greek sprinting-cum-cheating duo who hilariously pretended to have fallen off a motor bike when asked to explain their absence from drug tests in the Olympic village.
It was amusing but it was sad to note our own jaded cynicism and the predictable way the Greek sense of nationalism eventually overwhelmed what embarrassment they felt.
Their own federation reinstated the pair.
The Greeks on the night of the 200-metre final which Kenteris would have contested had he stayed clean and passed his tests, filled the stadium with chants of "Hel-las" and "Ken-ter-is" to the extent the runners couldn't hear the pistol and false-started twice. Nationalism had suffocated even the most basic moral principle of sport.
Looking at our own nationalism, it seems unlikely we will be craning our necks looking at the Tricolour being run up or down any flagpoles at victory ceremonies over the next few weeks. These, the first Games of the post-Sonia era, deprive us of the ever-engaging adventures of the Cobh woman. We laughed with her and we cried with her and we always tuned in to watch.
The team which goes to Beijing will be the most faceless we have sent in many decades.
And when the dust settles what will be the fallout for Irish sport? It is quite some time now since the Sports Council, as an instrument of chastisement created by the Government, took the responsibility for Olympic preparations away from the Olympic Council of Ireland.
A hell of a lot more money gets spent by a much bigger bureaucracy but still it looks like we will punch beneath our weight at these Games and Sonia's silver in Sydney will remain the only unbesmirched medal we have won since Barcelona 16 years ago, and Ron Delany's gold in Melbourne more than half a century ago will remain our last athletics gold.
We hope we are wrong, but when the dust settles we should be looking at China and whether it implements any of the policies of openness and fairness it talked about eight years ago in Moscow when hustling to win these Games. But most likely we will be looking at more traditional post-Olympic entertainment: the OCI going mano a mano with the Government.
So let the Games begin! Beset as the Olympics are by politics, gigantism, drugs and cynicism, we know that one great performance of riveting drama can force us to forgive everything and fall in love again.
There has never been a better time for some five-ringed romance to capture our hearts.