Winter Olympics as a Reflection of GDP

A perusal of the final medal count of this month's Winter Olympics looks a bit fishy. These podium-hogging nations seem to have something in common.

Why is it that the world's wealthiest countries dominate the Winter Olympics? Why does the medal total for events like luge and ice dancing so closely resemble this list?

The Olympics purport to host a contest for amateur athletes. In reality, producing elite athletes requires a substantial corporatist investment. Promising children must be culled from the hinterlands and isolated in frosty, impersonal training academies. There's plenty of snow in Chile, but that nation lacks the capital and social structure to give potential champions the means to refine their talents.

But money alone does not explain why Saudi Arabia and Brazil do not yet produce top skiers. Sure, there are factors like geography and custom. But to grasp the link between wealth and winter sports, you need to take into account just why homo sapiens decided to go out there in the snow, exerting himself.

Man's conquest over winter could not have taken place without the search for fuel that obsesses the global North. In the cold, rich countries, to survive means constantly hustling, gathering firewood, scavenging, accumulating resources at all costs.

Our sporting triumph is a highly technocratic one, involving advances in speed-skate design and skintight outerwear. In ageless competitions like running, the playing field is truly level, and underdeveloped economies like Jamaica and Kenya dominate.

Braving cold temperatures and the accretion of wealth are and forever will be intertwined. Perhaps an indicator of real national athletic achievement should account for the tremendous economic gap between competing nations. This formula divides the number of medals by trillions in GDP per capita (2009, according to the International Monetary Fund).

1) Slovenia: 65.79 medals per trillion dollars
2) Latvia: 58.65 mpt
3) Norway: 51.11 mpt
4) Belarus: 49.83 mpt
5) Estonia: 43.10 mpt
6) Croatia: 42.86 mpt
7) Austria 39.02 mpt
8) Slovakia 33.33 mpt
9) Czech Republic 27.27 mpt
10) Sweden 22.92 mpt
11) Finland 18.52 mpt
12) Switzerland 18 mpt
13) Canada 17.33 mpt
14) Korea 15.22 mpt
15) Poland 11.32 mpt
16) Netherlands 9.09 mpt
17) Russia 8.93 mpt
18) Germany 8.17 mpt
19) Kazakhstan 7.69 mpt
20) France 3.83 mpt
21) Australia: 2.97 mpt
22) United States: 2.57 mpt
23) China: 2.54 mpt
24) Italy: 2.17 mpt
25) Japan: 1.02 mpt
26) Great Britain 0.37 mpt

Of course many participating countries did not medal. Still, it's remarkable that the UK spent 2.6 trillion dollars for one lousy gold (Amy Williams in women's skeleton). It's also illuminating to note that China and America have near identical ratios--another indicator of the unification of Chimerica. Finally, it will be intriguing to see if the former Eastern bloc countries can continue their overachievement in winter sports as their economies grow.

For a hockey roundup, check out N+1.

Muslim Non-integration

French laïcité has arguably advanced a specific kind of intolerance for Muslim identity. The tradition of keeping "ostentatious" religious symbols out of sight while in the public sphere (a sphere that includes pretty much all of France) has translated into a ban on the hijab.

To my mind it's a reasoned objection, even if it can get a little hysterical and xenophobic. I have a Parisian woman-friend who says she feels "violated" when she sees a veiled woman. As an American, I instinctively feel that curtailing personal expression in deference to "national identity" is a bummer. But of course it's complicated--veils mean stand for more than just modesty.

Switzerland has recently taken the attitude a bit farther with a ban on minarets. Carlin Romano seems to understand that fashion and architecture traffic in symbols, and this backlash to Islamic co-existence is more than just symbolic. Immigration restriction and societal exclusion are daily realities for Europe's millions of Muslims.

Hence that without policy change, building codes mean little more than that, and just end up inflaming opinion. It reminds me of when American Indian activist Russell Means stealthily installed a response plaque at Little Big Horn as a means of symbolic terrorism. Means wanted a more truthful memorial than the existing paean to Custer. It wasn't an assault on a source of power, it was an assault on a symbol.

A Crush on Italy

Cinema is a Franco-American invention, but was there ever a country that the movie camera loved more than Italy? The dappled light, the antiquities, the dark-eyed maidens...the script writes itself.

And that's the trouble. With so much to look at, why struggle for any depth? Rob Marshall's Nine assembles an attractive cast and turns them loose on the stylish peninsula, then expects the audience to stay interested for three hours.

Nine's screenwriter Anthony Minghella was the man behind The Talented Mr. Ripley, a darker examination of Italy's seduction of innocents. Patricia Highsmith's source material was better adapted by homegrown Liliana Cavani in Ripley's Game, possibly because she didn't think to lean on the landscape.

Because when foreign filmmakers head south to where it's easy on the eyes, you can expect the scenery to pick up slack.

Spanish Civil Warriors

Maybe time to take another look at that infamous disaster that so diverted the international left wing. Because certain have claimed that this war that was really a revolution was just an opportunity for Soviet insurrection, or for the aggrandizement of Ernest Hemingway.

James Neugass' recent memoir puts the human cost at the forefront. Like Orwell's famous missive, Homage to Catalonia, he has no specific agenda other than his own truth. Also like Orwell, he was way in front of Britain and the United States in recognizing the global threat of fascism. Even if World War II was worth fighting (it was), the '30s and '40s contained a level of political violence that would seem atrocious to anyone born afterward.

For example: Franco's first point of order upon seizing power was to assassinate the greatest poet in Spain. It wouldn't be long before he would suppress all Spanish fiestas and send all independent-thinking people in his nation fleeing to the Americas. His long-lasting brutality makes this story all the harder to believe, recounted to me by my American friend who lives near Madrid:

I was riding my bike in the same little plaza in our town where I ride every day. There was the usual assortment of local seniors enjoying the weather and in general treating the public square as their own living room, in the authentic manner of Spaniards. The difference today was that the street had been monopolized by a fashion magazine's photo shoot. Barriers blocked traffic and our usually calm space was disturbed. I was commiserating with the old-timers about the unfortunate circumstance, and one of them muttered: "This never would have happened under Franco!" I found myself reflexively agreeing, and it took me a minute to realize that this guy was nostalgic for fascism.

Totalitarianism has its perks, after all, but we should be willing to endure the decadent fashion industry if it means no Franco.

The Third Force

Jean-Paul Sartre was the most embattled postwar French philosopher. His serious and original engagement in political affairs brought him the enmity of left, right and center, both in his own country and abroad. He was even haunted by imaginary lobsters. Still, he graciously absorbed the admiration of the world's disaffected youth, while quaffing sherry from his battle station at Café de Flore.

Western Europe was poised between two rival imperial forces. France tended to lean left but of course toeing the Communist line was difficult in the wake of Budapest '56, if not earlier. And so Sartre formulated a "Third Force," and created the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly, designed to keep his country autonomous from the era's two great powers. For this he was accused of demagoguery and blasphemy. Those who saw him as a Soviet agent felt confirmed when he rejected the Nobel Prize in '64.

The Revolutionary Democratic Assembly initially had wide support, including from Sartre's rival Albert Camus. Rebecca Pitt, from the International Socialism Journal:

Sartre's involvement in the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly (RDR): The RDR was formed in early 1948 as a response to the Cold War, the Stalinist PCF and Gaullism, and made clear where its principles lay:

Between the rottenness of capitalist democracy, the weaknesses and defects of a certain social democracy and the limitation of Communism to its Stalinist form, we believe an assembly of free men for revolutionary democracy is capable of giving new life to the principles of freedom and human dignity by binding them to the struggle for social revolution.

Formed as a left wing anti-Stalinist assembly, the RDR was able to "achieve a larger membership than any Trotskyist grouping between 1945 and 1968. However, as Birchall points out, the RDR contributed to its own downfall by failing to provide a clear position on the quickly developing political situation.

Sartre was no coalition-builder. He never got his revolution. But Sartre's radical notion of a European exception--a progressive, humane and powerful society--has indeed come to pass with the rise of the European Union.

Certainly he would have repudiated the taint of "rotten capitalist democracy." If the revolutionary aspect of Sartre's Third Force exists today, it's in the Latin American struggles for autonomy. But global politics is now "multipolar." Europe has transcended the power play between the U.S. and the shadowy East.

Astérix Lives!

BBC man-in-Paris Hugh Schofield has some critical things to say about Astérix, the comic book hero and plucky symbol of Gaullist resistance. To Schofield and other fans, the indigenous warrior with the drooping mustache and magic potion has been phoning it in since 1977, when writer René Goscinny died.

What's revealing about Schofield's eulogy is the allegory to Franco-Belgian exceptionalism, under siege by a homogenized pax americana. Other critics saw parallels to other struggles--deriving from various French premiers, Corsican separatists, and even the Nazis. But the current foe is a loss of aboriginal identity to more powerful sibling nations. Astérix outwitted his cloddish Roman imperialist foes, and likewise sophisticated Europe sees itself as a bulwark against consumer culture.

But if Astérix is treading water, then what does that say for Europe's self-image? If he falls prey to Hollywood, as have his compatriots Tintin and Blake and Mortimer, then would that be an unpardonable cultural capitulation?

No, it wouldn't. Astérix is another distinctively European phenomenon that has become global. Just look at the comments page on Schofield's story: worldwide fans thrill to his antics in over 100 languages. His fiftieth anniversary is being feted in Angola. Lost amid the accounts of Europe's decline or its identity crisis is the view that the world has become European.

The Wages of Fear

Henri-Georges' Clouzot's 1953 masterpiece features Yves Montand and a cast of pan-European ne'er-do-wells in the throes of physical and moral decay in a sleepy Central American town. Montand was a charming nightclub singer in Paris. For The Wages of Fear he had to become an unlikeable misanthrope.

The task for these men, put to them by a morally bankrupt American oil company, is to drive trucks full of nitroglycerine over a mountain range in order to put out a fire. It's a suicide mission, but one they all throw themselves into, so desperate are their straits. This film has a similar resonance to The Deer Hunter--an unflinching gaze into the abyss of human error.

The long prologue establishes the characters although it denies the viewer background information: how did they get to Las Piedras, what drove them here? They banter in a resigned linguistic soup--stateless postapocalyptic vagabonds in an environment of half-naked child-sadists.

You don't have to be a master dot-connector to see the anti-Americanism in the depiction of the oil company's merciless grip on the people and the place. But Clouzot's scorn does not stop there: the European hero/victims are just as cruel and selfish and arbitrary as their American manipulators.

The filmmaker claimed that a brush with death in a sanitarium turned him into an artist, although you've got to think Nazi Occupation and French collaboration were not far beneath Clouzot's bleak view of the world. The director received a lifelong suspension from French cinema for his purportedly anti-French Le Corbeau. It was later reduced and Clouzot returned to his depictions of sinister deeds.

Like so many French movies (Pépé le Moko, Mon Oncle), there is a yearning for an absent French essence. Jo and Mario talk about the streets in Paris they lived as they drive to their demise. The Wages of Fear was actually shot in the Camargue, the arid flamingo habitat in Provence.

Although the scorn may be spread evenly--blame directed at institutions and individuals alike--the demonization of American private enterprise feels like a touchstone in European leeriness. American foreign policy and unchecked industrial capitalism would continue to divide Europe and America.