We're number one! We're number one!
Pierre Tristam does an excellent job of blasting NBC for covering the Olympics with the embarrassingly infantile standpoint that America has become world famous for. It's the sort of attitude that is widely loathed when encountered in humans, yet when it comes to the national persona, bloated arrogance is perfectly acceptable. The doctrine of national conceit is taught even in our schools under the guise of patriotism.
So tune in to NBC's Olympic coverage if you want to look through the chest-beating lens of insufferable braggart America, the only damn country that matters because 'we' are superior, don't you know?
About half the readers of this site are from outside the United States, which means that among those of you who chose to watch the Olympics’ opening ceremonies from Turin Friday, about half of you were lucky enough not to be subjected to NBC’s nauseating production. But I’m not so sure you should count your blessings. Watching an American production of a world sporting event these days may be embarrassing. It is simplistic. It is supremacist. It is promotional to the core. But it is also instructive. NBC covers the Olympics the way American neocons do foreign policy: The world is 95 percent America, 3 percent water, and 2 percent everything else. America’s projection onto the world is mostly as an emblem of force, preferably unrivaled. What world does exist outside its borders is reduced to elementary-school simplicities (“1.3 billion Chinese!” and how to say Turin in Italian).
Above all, it’s reduced to the presumption that the rest of the world is either a by-stander, an enabler or a threat to American hegemony—what America’s Republicans, who have more in common with Charles DeGaulle than with Abraham Lincoln, would call American greatness (even as that greatness is right now pulling an Algerian rug from under its booted feet, with Iraqi weaving). That’s how NBC projects its Olympic coverage. All the world’s a spectator to American prowess and dominance. You get the sense that none but American athletes are in these competitions, just as the Bush White House gives the sense that all the world is collateral for American foreign policy. NBC has been trained for the task. The same people who brought us the Iraq war as show business and “The Rescue of Jessica Lynch” as truth, and who keep bringing us coverage of the White House as public relations, now bring us the Olympics as a two-week commercial for American power. . . .
In 2001, the whole world called itself American in solidarity with the attacks the country sustained. It didn’t last, because President Bush couldn’t pass up the opportunity to answer fanaticism with fanaticism, alienating the world along the way. That the world’s pronounced tendency to hate America almost as much as it hates Iran seems only to reinforce his conviction that the only country that matters is America. He said as much in an interview with Bob Woodward in early 2002: “At some point,” Bush said of the war on terror, “we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with me. We are America.” NBC’s Olympic coverage revels in that unilateral view. It should be alienating to anyone but the most hardened, modern version of America-Firsters.
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NBC Olympics American Conceit Empire Imperialism Ethnocentrism Patriotism
