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July 18, 2012
The Olympics have changed. They've become a global extravaganza. A sporting event ---a festival of bodies--- has become overlaid with commercialism, heavy-handed security, ostentatious plutocracy and phoney patriotism. The people of London have been sacrificed for the London Olympics that will cost the host city close to $20 billion.
This overlay when coupled with the International Olympic Committee( I.O.C.) history of corruption tarnishes the Olympic brand. The image that surfaces from the media hype is not a city city clogging up and grinding to a halt. It is the armed drones being deployed in the skies above his city and the blue fence around Olympic Park. It is the image of surveillance ---cameras, the blue fence surrounding the stadium, armed soldiers on rooftop buildings, brand protection teams” roaming the city.
The London Olympics is an example of civic enhancement that acclaim themselves as "regenerative" and find their expression most charismatically in architectural "grand projects": domes, stadiums, mega-sculptures and super-cities. It is a grand project as a firm of corporate futurism premised on the privatisation of public space whose stadiums may well become modern ruins in a global city
It is an example of what Ian Sinclair calls Grand Projects that are abandoned and useless and suck up lots of money. The Olympics, for Sinclair, London's heart of darkness.
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The Australian media and Olympic boosters tell us that Olympic loss is a cause for national shame and victory is a cause for national ecstasy. The medal count seen as evidence of national superiority.
What a load of junk.