A Modest Proposal for World Peace

A gate on the ground of Beijing's 700-year-old Confucius Temple & Imperial Academy.
Photo by: Linda Robertson

A story on the Olympics – that was the assignment. But really, haven’t we had enough of those for awhile? Instead, here’s a modest proposal for world peace: Every president, prime minister, petro-potentate, sheikh, king and crown prince, every guerrilla leader and tinpot dictator, all the Fourth World despots, every goofball president-for-life, every bug-eyed mullah with an army, every Dear Leader, every Lion of the Savanna, all the fundamentalists foaming at the mouth, the Pope, the secretary general of the United Nations, the head of Mossad and Osama bin Laden – they should all be made to come to the Summer Olympics.

They’d have to fly coach, in the middle seat on a full flight, with no wives, mistresses, aides, entourages or security goons. They would pay for their own tickets and their own crappy hotel room. They’ll catch the shuttle buses, which will be late and crowded, and which will drop them three kilometers or so from wherever they’re actually going.

They’ll get to stand in line with the sweaty body politic. They’ll sit in the hot metal bleachers, cheer themselves hoarse and wave their little flags. They’ll do the wave, or try to. They’ll buy their own hot dogs and nachos, and the fat guy from the Congo sitting behind them will spill beer on their backs. They’ll trade lapel pins, talk some international smack and wear funny hats, like the Dutch.

And mostly, except for Osama, Fidel, Kim Jong Il, George Bush and the Dalai Lama, nobody will know who the hell they are. Vladimir Putin in some Rafael Nadal clam-diggers, with wraparound Oakleys and a beer helmet – who’s to know? Angela Merkel could get into some baggy jeans and show off those Teutonic abs. For 17 days, they’d all be sweaty, tipsy and nobody special.

In the process, they’ll see that a Georgian judo player can kick the hell out of his Russian opponent and the world somehow manages to stay on its axis. This actually happened, by the way, in Beijing.

They’ll see that a North Korean archer can stand on the shooting line right next to a South Korean – again, this happened, in the women’s competition – and suddenly the notion of a unified, nuclear-free peninsula doesn’t seem so utterly impossible. They’ll see facepainted Cuban and American baseball fans taunting each other, then trading high cincos, just as they did in Beijing, and suddenly that 90-mile embargo starts to look silly. They’d see Serbs and Croatians gamely bashing away at each other in their national pastime, water polo, and maybe the indignities of the 14th century start to seem appropriately antique and forgettable.

At the beach volleyball, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could split a BLT and a plate of chicken wings with Ehud Ohlmert. Between the dressage and the show jumping, Bush and Osama could arm-wrestle, loser buys the Bud Lights. Little Kim, since he’s not exactly a joiner, might have taken a solo bike ride out to the Great Wall, and he’d have seen that it works much better as a tourist trap than a foreign policy. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe could score tickets to the synchronized swimming and then sit next to each other in matching “I’m With Stupid” T-shirts.

They’d have a blast. You know they would. And we’d all sleep a little more soundly. That’s the Olympics for you.