Watching the Olympic Flame running the gauntlet in London the other weekend was a slyly amusing activity. I spent a lot of that Sunday loitering on News 24, hoping that someone would get one of the flame-holders in a full-on rugby tackle. I felt a strange stirring of pride to see the main mischief taking place in Ladbroke Grove, so close to the Canongate London office, as one gentleman tried to wrest it from Blue Peter non-entity Konnie Huq and some other brave soldiers attempted to douse it with a fire extinguisher. I was riled by the representatives of the Beijing regime flanking the torch in sky blue tracksuits, communicating by earpiece like a mob of Secret Service heavies. I laughed as one of the runners, paid-for by one of the sponsors, turned on his tail and fled down Fleet Street, extinguishing the flame before deciding to take the bus. I enjoyed it all from my sofa. Civil unrest: 2008-style.
The Olympic Flame's journey through London, Paris and San Francisco has thrown up many questions of how best to voice disapproval of the Beijing regime, tarnished as it is by its appalling human rights record, its occupation of Tibet and its support of the janjaweed in Darfur. It begs questions of who we are to judge, a country guilty of extraordinary rendition, the occupation of Iraq and colluding with questionable regimes in Libya, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. It presents the difficulties of the conflation of politics with sport, and whether adopting the Olympics as a vessel for protest is all too easy, when instead we should interrogate more closely the fact that we endorse the Chinese regime in our rampant consuming of their goods and our cowardice in facing them down on a diplomatic level. Often the criticisms levelled at China feel like the products of a jealous superiority complex and insecurity from the West; taking pot-shots at the big new kid on the block while we still can. Before he takes over the playground.
Alongside this, I can't stand the inherent smugness of the IOC itself, and its ritualised bestowal of the 'honour' of the Olympics upon a grovelling, grateful candidate. Like many large international governing bodies in sport, such as UEFA, it's ripe for undermining.
What the demonstrations came close to recreating is the heavily mythologised 'spirit of '68'. Like the Stop the War demonstration over 5 years ago, when people took to the streets of London on a cold February morning over a million strong, it showed that people were still determined to face up to injustice and a government whose behaviour they questioned. And like that time forty years ago on the streets of Paris and in Grosvenor Square, the protests raise doubts about the efficacy of the safe, middle-class privilege-to-protest, the Mick Jagger model of the Street Fighting Man with a pad in Belgravia from an era when - as described in Peter Doggett's There's a Riot Going On - 'Rock stars posed as radicals, and radicals as rock stars, compromising their idealism but feeding off each other's cultural power.'
In the late sixties the counter-cultural movement was 'a long, dangerous and, yes, sometimes ridiculous trip' but compared to the execrable spectacle of Live 8 three years ago, and today's world - when Bono is revered as 'the hand-in-glove darling of the global political establishment' - scenes like last week's invite commensurate protest in music, film, art and literature. If we feel there's something wrong with the world perhaps it's time to take to the streets. It's not enough for Thom Yorke to edit a special climate change edition of the Observer magazine, or Chris Martin to draw on himself in the name of fair trade. Even premier league agit-rockers Rage Against the Machine were guilty of running for cover when George W. Bush started his presidency and have managed to time their re-emergence just as he departs from office. It's time for these cultural figures to follow the people, and take to the streets. I'll be there, watching it all unfold at home.
