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Village Idiot |
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| The gold medal for misunderstanding What if the 2008 Olympics had been held in this country? Would the Chinese reporters cover it the way the American reporters did? "This is Hui Chin for China News Today. There was much talk whether the Americans would finish the construction on all the Olympic venues in time and they did, just barely. Why they don't finish buildings years before they are needed, like we do, we'll never know, some defect with their culture, no doubt. Face it, it took them 15 years just to finish Mount Rushmore, something we could have done in a couple of days and shipped to them. "This Olympics is a bridge between America's past and future. But mainly a bridge to the past. The airport in Los Angelos is, like, 70 years old. The ones in New York and Chicago are even older. You're taking your life in your hands when you fly here. Some of their planes are 50 years old. Our stewardess was using a walker. Almost everything in this country was built in the 1900s -- it's like being stuck in a time warp. "They don't have any high-speed, Maglev trains between cities. If you want to go from New York to Chicago, it's a two-day car trip on old-fashioned, pot-holed, bridge-falling highways or one of those Korean War-era planes. "You know when you pull into a gas station in Beijing how 12 people run out of nowhere to wash your car and pump your gas? The first time I drove into a gas station here, I sat there for 10 minutes and nothing happened. Everyone was honking their horns for service, but, still, no one came out. Finally I got so disgusted, I got out and pumped it myself. Can you imagine? "And the plumbing. You don't want to know. It's so primitive. Even in their best gas stations! Just hold it until you get back to China. No matter how loudly I yelled, 'Doesn't anyone speak Mandarin in this backward place?' I couldn't find anyone who spoke Chinese. How hard can it be?' "Once you get out of the big cities, the poverty is incredible. It's so sad. When Americans run out of money, they put all their possessions out on their front lawn and sell them to passers-by. 'Yard sales' they call them. Can you imagine the family's disgrace? The shame? The humiliation? Their government seems to have plenty of money for an Olympics, but none for their workers. "We don't expect China to take too many medals at the Olympics this time. The Americans have all these special programs to help their athletes from the youngest age. Thousands of them are trained with no other purpose than to win athletic contests. Their schools are nothing more than mills for athletes. The ones that aren't good enough to go to the Olympics or play football or basketball are just discarded. It's cheating, but what can you do? There's always some country that bends the rules. "Many Chinese people wonder why we didn't boycott the Olympics to protest all the human rights issues over there -- the way they stole California from Mexico, the way they treat the native Americans, the way they pay women less so they can only afford to have one child -- but it's the Olympics, it shouldn't be about trying to score political points. It should be about sports, that's all." |
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