The Metropolis

It's Olympics "stop whingeing" day. Are you on board?

Mike Pollitt | Friday 27 July, 2012 11:41

There’s been a lot of whingeing going round just lately. A lot of lily-livered guff about how the Olympics are a corporate monstrosity run by paranoid control freaks who have corrupted and polluted a once noble and pure ideal.

That sort of stuff was all very well last week, but today the Games open and the whingeing is supposed to stop.

For inspiration, here’s the Mayor not whingeing to great rhetorical effect:

This is the thing:

A mass gathering of humanity is occurring in the middle of our city, one that will bring people together and create a warm though possibly illusory glow of mutual understanding. That is an interesting and exciting event, and it’s just about to start. Yay.

Does that make the whinges invalid? No. They are entirely valid.

The Olympics is both a wonderful gathering of humanity and a corporate and authoritarian monstrosity at the same time. This contradiction can be reconciled. The key is to cultivate an attitude of passionate ambivalence:

Passionately embrace and enjoy the glow of communal human experience, and the running, splashing, and dangling exploits of the planet’s finest human specimens.

Passionately critique and undermine the branding, restricting and controlling attempts of the planet’s most overbearing corporate lackeys.

So happy “sort of stop whingeing day” to you all!

Links:
Snipe – Five paranoid authority freakouts that could spoil the Olympics
Snipe – The London Eye Olympic happiness index illustrates everything that’s wrong with everything
Pindar – Olympian 8, For Alcimedon of Aegina who won the Boys’ Wrestling in 460 BC

---