“The Dead Children Were Worth It!”

A friend of mine sent me the following Youtube video and a web link after our discussion about the Olympic Games held in Beijing in 2008 and Vancouver in 2010.

On the web link that my friend sent along, singer Geoff Berner depicts the day that he was asked to write the Olympic theme song by the Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell. He goes on about how Campbell wanted a song that is able to tell the world what was really happening in B.C., what the Olympic games had cost and at whose expense… As far as hilarity goes, I was told by a very “reliable source” that the story that Geoff Berner was telling here about Campbell was nothing but a joke.

“The Dead Children Were Worth It” was written with honesty and imbued with irony. As someone who work with young children, I found the “babies’ corpses rising up from the melting snow” part of the song quite drastic and disturbing. However, I appreciate that this is exactly the kind of emotion that the song is meant to provoke. It makes us think about the things that are considered expendable when it comes to the Olympics.

Geoff Berner lists what had been done in B.C. to pay for the Olympic expenses:

“They closed courthouses, kicked the mentally ill off welfare, got rid of ambulance service in small towns, let homelessness more than double in Vancouver, illegally tore up all the government workers’ contracts … my favourite has always been their decision to eliminate the office that investigates the deaths of children in BC. A 4 million dollar savings!” (Penticton Art Gallery, 2009).

In my reflection National Pride vs. Democracy, I illustrate how the Chinese people thought that spending $40 billion on the Beijing Olympics was “worth it”, and how home demolitions were considered a necessary sacrifice for the Chinese nation during preparation for the Olympics. It doesn’t matter where the Olympic games are held, different hosting countries employ similar strategies to suit the needs of this two-week mega project; and the people of the hosting nations go alone with it. As my friend (who I mentioned at the beginning of this post) suggested during my conversation with her, that nationalism makes the people of a nation radical and irrational.

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