A story is doing the rounds of a North Korean athlete apologising to Kim Jong-un for only winning a silver medal at the regular Olympics. “Not to worry,” replies the kindly leader. “You’ll get your gold at the 2020 Paralympics.”
In a parallel development, one of my best friends sent me this e-mail: “Please come with me to Rio and help me host a parasymposium, a three weeks’ philosophy conference for those who can’t so much as spell ‘epistemology’, let alone practise it.”
I’d be happy to, I replied, except that I’m already going there to referee the cripple jump event and take part in the obese marathon, open to those with a BMI of 40-plus. Mine is lower, but a strategically placed bribe should take care of that problem, while at the same time reaffirming the new Olympic ideals.
But enough of this levity. Actually, I was going to write a serious piece about this, but instead decided to settle for a bit of plagiarism. My only excuse is that I’m plagiarising an article I myself wrote exactly four years ago. There’s nothing to change, nothing to add:
The Paralympics is upon us, as if to prove that the heights of vulgarity scaled by the regular Olympics aren’t the highest peaks possible.
This sideshow is supposed to testify to the triumph of unconquerable spirit over abbreviated flesh. In reality it testifies to something else entirely.
The whole thing smacks of Victorian county fairs, where people paid to look at bearded ladies or boys with two heads. Usually there were some tricks involved then: the beard was glued on, and the other head was made of papier-mâché. But the Paralympics is for real.
We’re supposed to admire those poor deluded people who put themselves on show to cater to the PC idea that they’re no different from those with a full complement of limbs. But they are. They’ve all suffered a tragedy, and they deserve our sympathy and prayers. One of those would be that God grant them the strength to bear their misfortune with dignity.
Yet dignity is precisely what the Paralympics denies them, while also diminishing the voyeurs whose bad taste is indulged by the sight of double amputees trying to outrun one another. Add to this the crass commercialism that inevitably accompanies sporting extravaganzas, the trumped-up enthusiasm of the TV presenters, the glued-on smiles of the sponsors, and the emetic effect becomes uncontainable.
It takes strength to refuse to be kept down by physical deformity. If these Paralympians did all the same things in private, one’s hat would be off to them – they’ve refused to wallow in self-pity, proving that the human spirit can triumph over physical incidentals.
But when they appear in a stadium to the accompaniment of a marching band, one’s hat remains firmly in place. Suddenly respect gives way to discomfort – surely not the emotion these poor people expect to elicit.
Imagine a pianist who loses both hands in an accident. He then acquires prosthetic limbs and, after years of toil, learns to play simple tunes to the standard of a little child attending music school. The pianist deserves respect and applause from his friends. He’d deserve neither if he then hired Wigmore Hall, had a PR company do publicity and played a recital to an audience who don’t care about music but love a titillating oddity.
Similarly, people who watch a tennis match between two wheelchair-bound players aren’t there to admire the game. If asked why they’re attending, they’ll give you the usual mantra of bien pensant jargon they’ve absorbed from ambient air. You’ll never get the real answer: they’re there to have their nerve endings tickled by what deep down they see as a freak show or, to be charitable, a circus act.
Our whole way of life these days both encourages and rewards exhibitionism. Grown-up people reveal to a million-strong TV audience their innermost problems, of the kind that in the past they wouldn’t have divulged even to a best friend. Millions watch morons copulate and relieve themselves on camera. Youngsters scream for attention by disfiguring themselves with tattoos and facial metal. Old women wear miniskirts and tank tops, old men with varicose legs sport tight shorts. People go to group therapy and let it all hang out: “I’m John, and I’m sleeping with my daughter…”, “I’m Jane, and I can’t stop sniffing glue…”
Paralympians parade a different sort of exhibitionism, and yet not all that different. The competitors put their deformities on show, knowing they’ll always find willing dupes eager to watch.
Suddenly we realise they’ve succeeded in their professed aim of showing they’re no different from healthy athletes or indeed from most modern people. Suffering, which in the past was believed to strengthen a person’s character and enable him to plumb greater spiritual depths, now has no such effect. Seeking to prove they’re as good as anybody, the Paralympians waste the chance to become better than others.
Suffering or no suffering, we’re all expected to function to exactly the same laws of vulgarity and rotten taste. Such laws will never be repealed. They’re here to stay.