China's Five Ring Circus of Death

On July 13, 2001, the world was a very different place. George W. Bush was getting ready to ignore FBI reports about Al-Qaida operatives learning to fly planes. Iraq was still contained by UN sanctions and had only begun concealing the Weapons of Mass Destruction which remain hidden to this day. Stephen Harper was tearing his original hair out watching the Canadian Alliance implode under Stockwell Day. Exposing oneself through 'Self-Generated Content' usually got people arrested. On July 13, 2001, the International Olympic Committee thought the Peoples' Republic of China could be reasoned with and gave Beijing the 2008 Olympics.

Almost seven years later, and with about five months before the Olympic Torch is relayed to the site of the Tianamen Square Massacre, it is glaringly apparent to everyone outside the Olympic 'Family' that the idea the Olympics would change the world's largest totalitarian dictatorship only proves the myopic and elitist delusions of Jacques Rogge and the Sporting Princes of Lusanne. The crackdown in Lhasa , complete with propaganda assaults against the Tibetan People and the Dalai Lama are only the first cracks in China's Great Wall of Olympic Failure. Athletes such as Haile Gebrselassie, the World Record holder in the Marathon, are refusing to choke down Beijing's pollution, and more will decide to stay home. If the air quality isn't bad enough, visiting athletes, spectators, and media will be subject to constant surveillance by the police and the military.

That is, if they are lucky enough to actually get into the country. Around the same time China was awarded these games, a friend of this page, who was born and raised near Shanghai, was barred from entering China and visiting the village where she was born and raised because she had committed the 'atrocity' of having previously visited Taiwan. I don't think she'll be missing much this summer in China, because as I recall, she's not a big fan of martial law, food riots, water shortages, or any of the other 'games' that Beijing will be hosting in August.

*For those of you scoring at home, had the IOC not awarded the Summer Games to Beijing that day, Vancouver would not have been forced to put up with the folly of the 2010 Winter Games because they would have gone somewhere else. The runner-up for the 2008 Summer Games was Toronto, which would have effectively eliminated Vancouver from bidding for the Winter games two years later.