The Summer Olympics are back! With the 28th Games opened in Athens on Friday night, people everywhere -- Japan included -- are experiencing that familiar little buzz of ambivalence. Enthusiasm on the one hand, ennui on the other: Yes, it is possible to feel these conflicting emotions at once. The Olympics, if you count both summer and winter versions, proves it every two years.
We don't really want our televisions taken over for the next two weeks by an endless athletic spectacle, mediated by jingoistic commentators. But in a summer so hot it has already killed off most of our brain cells, there is something to be said for temporary surrender to the mindless physicality of it all. No calculations to make. Just sit back on the long August evenings and watch superb specimens of humanity run, jump, vault, swim, pitch and wrestle themselves ragged in the sure-to-be-impressive setting of summertime Athens. It's almost as good as exercising ourselves -- and a lot cooler.
Then there are the mixed feelings inspired by all that scripted Olympic pageantry. Nobody actually wants to hear the speeches, watch the ethnic dances, hear the massed choirs or experience yet again the bombastic sentiment of the lighting of the Olympic flame, capped by the kitschy symbolism of the release of the doves (or as one Web site less poetically calls them, "pigeons.") And don't even get us started on the Olympic poem. Suffice it to say that nothing can redeem its hilarious awfulness (Here is the last stanza, loosely translated from 19th-century Greek: