Partial Readings: The New Austerity Games

Partial Readings: The New Austerity Games

Partial Readings: The New Austerity Games

While the Olympic Games are intended to signify global togetherness and healthy competition, they have often featured unsavory displays of nationalism and xenophobia, most notoriously during the 1936 Berlin Games. George Orwell, with this event and others in mind, called international sport ?war minus the shooting.? A recent New York Times story is guilty of sentimentalizing the ?Olympic Spirit,? but also points to the ?confluence? of forces that contemporary Olympic Games represent: not just nationalism, but ?commercialization, professionalism, capitalism.?

The opening ceremonies, more than any other part of the Olympics, bring to bear all the national glory and spectacle of the host country, and Great Britain got an early start with Queen Elizabeth II?s Diamond Jubilee, held last month to celebrate her sixtieth year on the throne. Beneath the pageantry, there?s another story to be told. Derek Jarman, whose 1978 film, also called Jubilee, juxtaposed British punk anomie with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Queen?s coronation, has laid some of the groundwork. It was just one year ago that the Tottenham Riots, a violent manifestation of social frustrations, painted the London skyline orange. Owen Jones recently reminded his readers of this fact:

It is this feeling of not being treated like everybody else?or ?not given full status as British people,? as Brown puts?which makes so many young people in Tottenham regard the police as a hostile force….A widespread belief that the police are like ?an occupying force,? as Hinds puts it, combined with a lack of any secure future for many young people, lies at the heart of what happened last summer. Neither issue has been addressed since.

The last time London hosted the summer Olympics was in 1948?the year of the ?Austerity Games,? so named for United Kingdom?s postwar economic straits. The build-up to the 2012 Olympics?the Austerity Games, Part Deux?suggests that Londoners might not look back on this summer?s games with the same fondness as many do the 1948 Olympics.

Great Britain?s Home Office contracted G4S, the world?s largest private security firm, to provide police and security services at various Olympic venues. In one of the biggest PR disasters of the summer, G4S revealed on July 11 that it wouldn?t actually be able to produce as many guards as promised. Home Secretary Theresa May responded by calling for additional thousands of military troops to fill in the gap. Along with news that U.S. Olympic uniforms were made in China, the story could be written off as one more outsourcing bid gone wrong. But alongside the image of ?Olympic roof missiles,? the presence of nearly 24,000 security personnel in the British capital has delivered a chilling message about the state of UK policing and security. And those police and soldiers are expensive, as Ruth Stokes wrote in her New Statesman article, ?Whose Olympics Are They, Anyway?? Taxpayers have spent at least £12 billion on the games, and possibly far more, at a time of ?shared sacrifice? and austerity.

Those interested in the complex intersection of politics and sport at the 2012 Olympics will gladly greet the publication of A People?s History of London, written by Lindsey German and John Rees and published by Verso last month. While Paris and St. Petersburg might hold a larger place in the global imaginary of revolution, the Chartist movement long ago put London on the revolutionary map. German and Rees also tell London?s story of trade unionism and pamphleteering, both of which help us to understand the politics of organizing in the United Kingdom today.

Indeed, while the Olympics provide an unrivaled platform for the advertisements of corporate sponsors, they also provide a prominent platform for civil disobedience. The Public and Commercial Services Union has called off a strike threatened for Friday?which would have involved border agents and affected travel plans of Olympic attendees?but not before the maybe-strikers were denounced by Conservative MPs, as well as Labour leader Ed Miliband, who said, “Any threat to the Olympics is totally unacceptable and wrong….This is a celebration for the whole country and must not be disrupted.” The strike was called off after the Home Office agreed to post 1,100 new positions; whether the gesture is merely a fig leaf remains to be seen.

Olympic Games do more than reflect the society in which they?re hosted; indeed, they can leave permanent marks on the host city long after the closing ceremonies. Owen Hatherley, author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and the forthcoming A New Kind of Bleak, is known for his examinations of the architectural residue of social and political ideas. In his latest book, excerpted in Guernica, he wrote this of the new Olympic site:

Everything is dominated by the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a shocking pink entrail laterally curved around an observation tower, famously commissioned by Boris Johnson in the toilets of a fundraising dinner from steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who provided the metal in return for the monument being named after him. There?s a faintly sick irony in this ex-industrial zone being overlooked by an edifice dedicated to a prolific downsizer and asset-stripper of factories, but that aside, there are buildings to enjoy, if you can keep from your mind the town-planning abortion that has been wreaked upon Stratford [the site of the Olympic complex].

Iain Sinclair, who four years ago wrote ?The Olympics Scam? for the London Review of Books, recently declared the Olympic Park ?a future ruin.? The planning fiascoes surrounding the games were the subject his 2008 LRB article:

The tsunami of speculative capital, wanton destruction, hole digging; the throwing up of apartment blocks, dormitory hives, warehouse conversions along the murky waterways. A new development calling itself Adelaide Wharf, and appearing very much like an aircraft-carrier that has ploughed into a wood yard, replaced a long-standing cold-store operation. ?With its 147 units (prices up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,? says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to invest, are rumoured to be buying up entire buildings as investment portfolios; many of these gaudy shells, low-ceilinged, tight-balconied, are doomed to remain half-empty, exhibitions of themselves. The look is mirthlessly playful, Ikea storage boxes gimmicked out of swipe-cards and toothpicks. The urban landscape of boroughs anywhere within the acoustic footprints of the Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley has been devastated, with a feverish beat-the-clock impatience unseen in London since the beginnings of the railway age. Every civic decency, every sentimental attachment, is swept aside for that primary strategic objective, the big bang of the starter?s pistol.

Photo of the ArcelorMittal Orbit, by Andy Wilkes, 2012, via Flickr creative commons