Let the (Wile E. Coyote) Games Begin

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You don’t have to worry about gravity or reality or any of that stuff if you just don’t look down….

What will be the trigger that detonates the final implosion of the industrial age? The betting is always changing, and a new and unexpected candidate has just presented itself as a possibility. The traditional destructors — scarce and/or expensive fuel, shortages of food and/or water, rising sea levels, spreading drought, violent weather and the like — are lined up like dominoes and will eventually fall onto each other in a final wave goodbye. But who will go first? With such musings do we beguile the time as we wait. This is how to get Dallas, and New Orleans, and Nice off our minds, we’ll think about Rio de Janeiro and the Olympics. 

This is the power of Business As Usual: The engines of our industrial universe are all running at full speed in exactly the way you and I drive a car whose gas gauge is on empty. “Driving on fumes,” we say as we hold the accelerator down, refuse to think about what could happen any second,  and scan the road ahead for a gas station. We know one will appear in time. It’s the same faith that keeps Wile E. Coyote aloft after he has run  off the edge of the cliff. But even in the cartoons, it only works until the coyote looks down.

In our real, increasingly cartoonish world,  it is possible for example to levitate the stock markets to ever new highs as long as no one looks down at the hideous price-earnings ratios, the bloated inventories, the cancerous debt, the rising flood of defaults and bankruptcies. Admit those realities, and coyote falls. Same with the oil bidness, with quantitative easing, negative interest rates, rotting infrastructure. They are all coyotes, windmilling desperately in mid-air, trying not to look down.  

So wouldn’t it be a hoot if the whole global edifice were cracked accidentally by a sporting event? Specifically, the 2016 Olympics, about to open in Rio de Janeiro? I’m not predicting it, I’m just saying…

They are about to open despite the fact that everybody in the world with a lick of sense is saying don’t do it, it’s not worth it. If it were a normal Olympics in a normal place and time, it still probably wouldn’t be worth it. The notion that hosting the Olympics is good for the host city and country has been thoroughly discredited.  [See “Does Hosting the Olympics Really Pay Off?” The New York Times, and “Nobody Wants to Host the 2022 Olympics,” Business Insider.]

Yet despite the lack of an obvious payoff, the Masters of the Olympics Universe — which is to say the select few who will make billions from the games — are determined that the games begin, despite a rising sea of troubles. Let’s review:

1. Often touted as a way to showcase triumphant emerging economies and societies, these games will showcase a country whose economy is tanking, whose president has been impeached, whose crushing deficit will be almost doubled by the cost of these olympics. So they are hosting the games to showcase what, again?
2. Brazil is a hotbed for the newly dangerous zika virus, spread via mosquito bites and associated with ghastly birth defects. The half million visitors expected at the games will risk zika infection themselves, and risk spreading the virus around the world. The fact that it’s winter in Rio reduces the mosquito threat somewhat, but on the other hand it turns out the virus is spread by sexual contact. Point counterpoint.
3. Rio de Janeiro dumps raw sewage into it waterways, which flow into the ocean and onto the beaches. The waters on which olympic athlete will sail and row, in which they will swim, are very badly polluted, with everything from human fecal matter to human body parts..
4. Make that very, very badly polluted. Scientists have discovered super-bacteria — resistant to antibiotics — teeming in the waters off Rio’s spectacular, and soon to be teeming, beaches.
5. And what may we infer about the infrastructure? A new railroad line to move tourists to the famous beaches and back opened June 1 and was closed down a few days later when the power failed. They’re working on it. And an $3-billion-dollar subway extension considered critical to moving people among venues, residences and attractions will probably be open in time but it will not have been tested. So what could go wrong?  A section of a spectacular new bicycle-racing track broke off and fell into the ocean.
6. As for public safety, travelers arriving in Rio by air have recently been greeted with large signs saying “Welcome to Hell” and warning them that the police and firefighters cannot protect them, for lack of money. The signs were put there by the police and firefighters. The province that pays them has declared a “state of catastrophe”

But the Games are an enormous industry, and as long as they continue to pay huge dividends to the select few, they will continue. Until they precipitate a disaster so murderous, destructive and pointless that the coyote falls. That could be the moment that, shocked into reality, all the coyotes fall.