"I wish American television would stop using Tiananmen Square as a set. This is a freaking grave. This is a place where a really bad thing happened. We would not tolerate French television coming to New York and using Ground Zero as a backdrop for talking about how happy and merry New Yorkers are. The corporations that own and sponsor the US coverage of the Olympics have to tap dance around the Chinese human rights record, but my Lord, let's not use this place as a backdrop. People died there."
-Charles P. Pierce, on NPR's "Only A Game"
I have a better answer to all this Olympic stuff...I don't watch. Not that I am boycotting anything or issue oriented, but badminton, rowing, gymnastics, and all these other so called sports.
ReplyDeleteThe Tribe might be in last place, but I will take bad baseball and preseason football over crappy games any day.
Good point.
ReplyDeleteThe free world (and for all I know China) thinks of the Tiananmen Square massacre every time they see the place. By showing it as a backdrop, even without mentioning the massacre, it is a reminder that mainland China is still a place that is run by a regime that gleefully killed 30+ million Chinese in the 1950s and after, and the founding leader of the regime is still considered to be a beloved spiritual father.
ReplyDeleteHaving the Olympics in China would be like having the Olympics in a modern alternate-reality Germany that had giant Hitler posters everywhere. But Germany doesn't do that, they? There is only one major nation that revels in and reveres the legacy of one of history's worst two or three mass murderers.
So, I don't feel it is bad to show the square.
Honestly, I wish you were right, but I don't think you are.
ReplyDeleteI'm not watching the coverage, so I don't know, but I don't think Bob Costas and Jim Lampley are reminding people about the rape of Nanking and the Cultural Revolution.
People like you and I, who pay attention to the world around us, remember Tiananmen as a slaughter pen. Regular people? I really don't think so.
And I'm not trusting that NBC is going to remind them.
I see what you mean...
ReplyDelete