The Chinese Olympics

will go down in history as worse than Chinese Democracy. Sonny is right. Over eight-inch-tall glasses of gin and grapefruit, my knowledgeable friend Binky, who grew up in China, declared last night that the Chinese Olympics would be forever known as a “shit show.” They may dry up the clouds and unplug the World Wide Web and shut down every factory within 500 kilometers, but they cannot stanch the flow of rotten, jaded publicity that will flow out of Beijing and across the world like a fetid river of sulphur and garbage. Anyone who has to strap on a facemask to attend an athletic event will attest openly, without paid compensation, that the premise behind the Chinese Olympics has all the charm and common sense of a command economy. This is a shame in some ways, but poetic justice in others; as everyone should know in the age of e-mail and e-commerce, if you presume to take away the e, you are disentitled to complain when a shame becomes a sham.