the olympics
the olympics are coming. soon! and sadly, like stuffed-crust pizza, TGIF, Monopoly, and Michael Jackson, the olympics are not nearly as cool as they used to be. i think one reason is that olympians, like all professional athletes in this country, are becoming increasingly unlikable. gone are heroes like carl lewis, michael johnson, and gail devers. in their place are anonymous athletes who take drugs and lie about it. it’s sad, to say the least. but life in america today is different than what it was ten to fifteen years ago. kids don’t like ice cream anymore, they like pie. people have to budget for gas. people spend fridays watching not urkel but something stupid on cable. gone is jerry seinfeld and in his place some guy named bill engvall. people demand superhuman powers in their movie stars these days, watching batman, spiderman, and superman, too good for ernest going to summer camp or chevy chase getting lost on vacation. things have changed and so have athletes. our olympians have tried to outperform the athletes of yesteryear not by training harder and dialing up the charisma but by cheating, lying, racketeering, etc. And plus we don’t dominate the sport of basketball anymore. Probably the most depressing change. But there is hope. Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone recently made kick ass movies (not Rambo). The gas station on my way to work is back under four dollars a gallon. So maybe the tide is turning. I hope that we find some new heroes this year. I hope that the olympics become relevant again. I hope that things go back to the way they were. And I hope that we treat the Angola basketball team like we used to. By letting them score the first basket and then beating them by 50. We invented basketball; that’s what should happen.
