What would Pierre de Coubertin think of today’s Olympics? Youth have improved beyond his imagination in speed, accuracy, strength, precision, flexibility, spirit, endurance, competitiveness and all the qualities sportspeople need. He would fret that commercialism and politics have absorbed sports extinguishing many qualities needed to create a kinder world. Camaraderie may have improved among athletes, but it is not a medal objective. He would marvel at the fine facilities, the number of contestants, events and record performances, the incredible speed of Mark Phelps and the Jamaicans, the endurance of East Africans,

the precision of the mechanistic Chinese, and might congratulate Canadian rowers, or India’s rifleman Abhinav Bhindra who won gold over his Chinese opponent despite someone’s attempt to damage his rifle. China planned to win 122 medals and become victor ludorum, regardless of cost. The 1936 Nazis had a similar aim. But the expensive and intensive opening show would have overwhelmed him. China used special effects to the limits of technology to dazzle and create an aura of power, ascendancy and control. The glitz however did not mask the dominant push of China’s megalomaniac commissars to astound and bamboozle the world while keeping ordinary Chinese underfoot. Some Western media—American and European—blinded by the ruse, were slow to identify the deceptions, as if vanquished already by China’s neo-fascism. “…in the Olympic opening,” one Chinese professor complained, “the relational and communal spirit (of Chinese culture) was absent… What was displayed was not the Chinese concept of the collective, but the communist idea of ‘the masses’.” The fireworks display was actually computer-generated, not real. After Lin Miaoke sang, China released a glowing story of the nine year-old, “already…becoming a star.” But when the real singer was identified as seven year-old Yang Peiyi, China brazenly brushed the lip-synch trickery aside: "The main consideration was the national interest…The child on the screen should be flawless in image, in her internal feelings, and in her expression. In the matter of her voice, Yang Peiyi was flawless…So we made the choice… it is fair to both Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi,…we have a perfect voice, a perfect image and a perfect show." Performers are mere pawns. Incredible!
Pierre would be distressed to note how many youth of the world were still engaged in killing; China keeps its vast army occupied in stepping on dissenters to preserve its image. “In the run-up to the Olympics, the Chinese authorities have locked up, put under house arrest and forcibly removed individuals they believe may threaten the image of ‘stability’ and ‘harmony’ they want to present to the world,” said Amnesty International. Householders protesting loss of property, Falun Gong members and numerous others complaining have been jailed. The suppression of Tibetans threatened a boycott of the Games, suggested by France’s President Sarkozy on March 26; in April US Senators Obama and Clinton urged their President to follow. "If the Chinese do not take steps to help stop the genocide in Darfur and to respect the dignity, security and human rights of the Tibetan people, the president should boycott the opening ceremonies," Obama said.
With rising protests China refused to change the torch relay and surrounded the torch with goons, whom Lord Coe in London called thugs. And when it seemed that world opinion would have condemned China, Sichuan erupted in wondrous coincidence as if on demand, like blue skies over Beijing. (Some speculate that the ’quake was a man-made underground explosion set to distract and evoke sympathy, which it did.) But it also diverted attention from local charges of official corruption in the collapse of schools, charges which earned the complainants not the culprits jail-time. This is China!
Actress Sharon Stone drew China’s most strident condemnation when she suggested that the earthquake stemmed from China’s “bad karma” for its treatment of Tibet and the Dalai Lama. That remark would have gone unnoticed anywhere, but the hubbub provided another opportunity to distract from official wrongs. She was castigated as “dissolute and shameless”; her work is banned in the most egregious exercise of over-reaction and hypersensitivity one could possibly find; one headline screamed, “Shut up, shameless woman”! Yet China apes the worst of western materialism and sex symbolism. Its hypocrisy is astonishing. It condemns America, yet covets its products; its youth today apes the most degrading of US values and practises. Ten years ago the Chinese condemned bikinis as immoral; today they flaunt it everywhere.
Someone said, “The Games will soon be over. But the real test of endurance is still to come.”

It took an effort recalling the last time I was stung by a wasp. Sometime before the turn of the century, perhaps even earlier, but definitely in the half-a-lifetime I’ve been in Canada. I spent even more time wandering down the dusty memories of two worlds, one in Canada, the other in Trinidad, trying to recall the last time I even saw a wasp’s nest, this before the one I noticed under a window earlier this month in Oakville. Perhaps a couple years ago in a dark corner in my garage – I was right when I went looking with a flashlight under the eaves only to discover the abandoned shell dusty and unlived in, parts of the cone torn with the hexagonal cells exposed like broken arteries, no territorial buzzing to warn me that I was encroaching.

I didn’t think about that wasp’s nest in Oakville until about a week later, when at the Ontario Science Centre the question was put to the audience about the origin of paper. Of course, my mind ran quickly to papyrus, but did not make the link to wasps chewing wood to build their nests as the originator of the idea.
It was a eureka moment for me, no doubt, and delayed by a few decades. To think after all these years my respect for these social insects was so misplaced! And a healthy respect it remains since I recall that last sting more than ten years ago hit about eight on the Richter scale, my tolerance for pain growing less over the years due to infrequency and distance from the source. The detail that came back to me was a surprise discovery of a nest under the concrete steps in the backyard; the moment turned out to be immediately mutual, with an alert wasp deliverying its annoyance on a bumbling, exposed forearm. It was as if the wasp had struck a bell, and from this point of impact a resonance began travelling in tight, predictable waves that made my ears hum and my eyes water. I could not recall a similar episode of pain in my youth, and stings from wasps then were plentiful because in those days of boyhood we were well-known throughout the neighbourhood as marauders for fruit. Too, we were armoured with young health and pain was just another by-product of having a good time.
We encountered the red Jack Spaniards mostly when we hid among the long, prickly watergrass, waiting for the green cashews to fill out and then turn red or yellow on the trees that lined the top of a small hill not far from where I was growing up in central Trinidad. No doubt the Jack Spaniards, or ‘jeps’, also chose these trees because of the fleshy, sweet false fruit that grew above the nut that is the cashew we know so well. Their nests were numerous, paper-thin of course, and hanging alongside our prizes like a dark version of a lethal fruit. In these nests were capped hexagons that held white, developing young wasps. Obviously, the cashews when ripe were also a source of food for baby wasps.
We made numerous trips to assess readiness before the final forage, when we would be armed with salt, hot peppers, a knife and a bowl, and a small tin of Vicks. The Vicks was the balm for the few of us who would inevitably be stung by the squadrons of attacking Jack Spaniards when we harvested, or rather, stole the fruit from right under their compound eyes. But we also had a plan. Simple as it was stupid – a purloined bar of blue soap, a few tins of water, and a made-on-the-spot soapy concoction hurled at the nests to immobilise the wasps long enough for us to run in, quickly grab the cashews, nut and all, and then run for our lives, the devil take the hindmost.
However, the soapy onslaught was not always effective, and many of us were the recipients of stinging reprisals, running ahead with hands covering our heads and tormented by fierce, angry wasps. The stings were numerous, the effect immediate in the welts that magnified pores on the skin and which could hit upper levels on the Richter for pain. A few of the less sturdy would break down and bawl for their mammies, but those among us who went on to successfully challenge the world bore the brunt with some dignity but mostly with silent fortitude. Sometimes the stings were on the face, and closer to the forehead caused grievous swelling that would shut an eye for days; both swollen eyes earned the fond but temporary nickname, ‘Chinee’. I recall living with this handle twice in my cashew-marauding career, and receiving a tremendous cut-tail because swollen eyes were difficult to conceal even from a short-sighted grandmother.
All for the good – today an enduring lesson from these boyhood days is to immediately appreciate an angry buzz and to deal with it before being hotly pursued in the spousal landscape.

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