LONDON — While the world’s athletes limber up at the Olympic Park, Londoners are practicing some of their own favorite sports: complaining, expecting the worst and cursing the authorities.
Asked “What do you feel about the Olympics?” the other day, a random sampling of people here gave answers that included bitter laughter; the words “fiasco,” “disaster” and “police state”; and detailed explanations of how they usually get to work, how that is no longer possible and how very unhappy that makes them.
All of those seem perfectly reasonable to me. However, the biggest cause for complaint is that this massively over-budget obscene junket has been paid for by arse-raping our wallets without so much as a by your leave. Indeed, that rapscallion Ken Livingstone had the effrontery to increase London council tax to help fund his vanity project – for that is what it was.
So, having a moan about something that most of us really couldn’t give a damn about, won’t be attending or watching and object to being forced to pay for is eminently reasonable and perfectly understandable, I’d have thought.
On Twitter, Mr. Hancox said that for Londoners, “it’s as if someone else is throwing a party in our house, with a huge entry fee, and we’re all locked in the basement.”
Sounds about right and I like the analogy.
It may be true that Britons like a good moan – well, let’s be fair, there is some sense of catharsis to be derived from the practice – but this is not a good example of the phenomenon. With the Olympics, we have a jolly good reason for our complaints.
The irony is that the statists are the loudest to moan about stuff that other people choose to do, which is none of their business (e.g. Harriet Harman wanting Arnie to shut down Punternet).
The thing about Britain being the only nation of moaners is a myth. It’s just the sort of crap that lazy journalists write to fill pages.
Matthew d’Ancona inaccurately wrote that “One of the great British exports is irony. It is entirely appropriate that in the superb comedy series, Twenty Twelve, we satirised our own Games pre-emptively: no other nation on earth would do that. ” despite the fact that Australia made a series called The Games that did the same thing. If he’d done even 5 minutes of research, he’d have found that out.
Now, it might be that you saw lots of smiling Aussies in Sydney, but that’s because of how mainstream media gets distorted by PR and being lazy about getting a more complete picture. Fly in, interview some people, write 400 words and fly home again. They won’t get on a bus and go and sit in a bar and just talk to everyday folk about it, yet that is what they get here.
I’ve talked to people online who lived in Vancouver and they were just as much “The Olympics is shit” as the rest of us.
What’s fun about these games is that they’re the first games where the IOC can’t just butter up the media (the media centre lays on all sorts of freebies for journalists). Everyone has a phone at the stadium and can record things and post them on Twitter. The amount of effort they’ve put into spinning these games could be very easily wiped out.
I have enjoyed the 2012 comedy.
Looking more and more like a documentary.
Yes Stigler, but only some people who actually live in downtown Vancouver. I visited in 2010 as I’m domiciled just over the Georgia Straits, and there was a lot of criticism about the choice of venue for some events, the legalise Cannabis guys were much in evidence, but the rest was happy smiley stuff with green coated volunteers everywhere.
BTW; Biggest partiers in town were the Russians.