The Bite in the Apple
Winning without humility – that’s what the American motto for the Olympics should be – said Malcom Gladwell, English born Canadian journalist and writer, and staff writer for the New Yorker since the 1990s.
Gladwell said this in an interview on NPR as the Olympics began. Before gold medalist Ryan Lochte and three other swimmers drunkenly vandalized a Rio gas station bathroom and complained he was a victim in the incident.
Gladwell wasn’t talking about gross public behavior by American athletes. He was speaking about the general American attitude that continually exalts the better-than-anyone-in-the-world image we Americans assume about ourselves and celebrate as confirmed in each Olympic gold medal.
Nightly, a parade of American medalists standing while our flag is hoisted and our anthem played. I, for one, am sick of it.
As sick, I think, as Jesus told his hearers God is sick of our endless self-congratulatory dinners, events in which we extol each other, our bloodlines, and the rich and accomplished. Of course, we begin these meals with a perfunctory prayer, the piety equivalent of anthem-and-flag.
There is a pious self-congratulatory atmosphere about our participation in the Olympics. We feast on our own greatness, and in the awards ceremonies, marry ourselves again and again to the notion that we are the best humans in the world. Our gold medals must prove it, isn’t that so?
Poor nations, who send one or a dozen athletes, know that a medal will be for them, a miracle, a glorious gift in the midst of their perennial humility.
And large nations, like China, send athletes who maintain a modesty and composure even in winning. Such dignity is unseen in ours.
Jesus’ bamquet advice: sit among the lowly; invite the lowly to sit in the seats of high honor; honor an equality of humanity, that wealth and power always defy.
The nation of immigrants we are has grown to be suspicious of foreigners – that they may be unworthy to sit among us.
Doesn’t the man with dropsy deserve to be healed on the Sabbath?, Jesus asked? And no one answered, because the general thinking was and still is, No, he should come back tomorrow. But it is to God’s house that this afflicted man has come.
It is the common idea of God that Jesus is challenging. The common notion is that God does not like the ill, which is why they are ill. God is punishing them for something or other, and who are we to annul that sentence? The righteous are obvious, and so are sinners.
Poor, sick little nations, well, they too must be doing something wrong. In fact this is a general belief, as is the idea of the obvious superiority of the US
I had to look up dropsy. No, it is not a condition in which someone falls down a lot. In fact, the word means edema. Swelling. Bloating. A condition Jesus heals in one man, and reminds the crowd they, too, may suffer: swollen egos, pride.
America, the nation that feasts on everything, addictively seeks to be greater than ever. We hardly celebrate silvers, let alone bronzes.
And we find gold to be a wealth that is impossible to share.
All of this, as Malcom Gladwell indicated, makes a mockery of our culture.
It is not, after all, the presence of Islam that is harming American culture. It is the presence of false Christians, who have slipped into the worship of gold and glory, as if these were the things that make America great.
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Image: Brazil entering the Rio Olympics in the Procession of Athletes. en.wikipedia.org
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