Citius, Altius, Fortius, Xenophobius

1936 Opening Ceremony (top), smog envelopes Beijing Olympic Village

I don't know the point at which the Olympic Games began morphing from being a spirited quadrennial contest for the world's best amateur athletes into an orgy of bribery, propagandizing, chemically enhanced daring do and crass professionalism.

But I suppose the 1936 Berlin Games is a good enough place as any, and an appropriate bookend to the 2008 Beijing Games, the most controversial-in-advance Olympics since then.

While I was born well after the games in which the magnificent Jesse Owens shamed Hitler with nary a U.S. official, let alone the president, in attendance, the Olympics retained a certain goodliness through the 1960s and 1970s when my parents would plan vacations around them so we wouldn't miss the feats of the next Dawn Fraser, Mark Spitz, Billy Mills, Olga Korbut or Nadia Comaneci. Yes, we cheered for athletes regardless of whether they were Yanks and that brought a world that I was to travel extensively a little closer to our modest ranch house.

The Cold War boycott games in 1980 and 1984, the growing prevalence of doping and the dropping of any pretense that the games are amateur events, have dimmed the Olympic flame for me.

The Beijing back stories -- political suppression in Tibet, Internet censorship and stifling smog -- will dim it further still, I suppose, as will the presence of that great human rights champion, George Bush, the first U.S. president to ever attend an Olympics and whose in-house torturers have torn a page from the very book his hosts used to extract false confessions from captured U.S. airmen during the Korean War.

Some pundits have gone so far as to say they won't watch the Olympics as long as the broadcast media obeys the Beijing regime's directive that they not cover any human-rights angles. So since when have the networks stood up for anything? And since when have the members of the corrupt International Olympic Committee stood up for anything other than walking across a hotel room to get an envelope filled with bribe money from the representative of a host-city wannabe?

So I'm not holding my breath. And will park my butt in front of the tube for a goodly number of hours beginning with the opening ceremonies on Friday. I will smile when the tiny teams from say Turkmenistan or São Tomé and Príncipe enter the stadium and feel a burst of pride when the U.S. team marches onto the oval while giving my dear president the finger.

But byond what happens in Beijing's magnificent new Olympic Stadium and other venues, the big story will be China as emerging superpower.

While China is still very much a work in progress and the many millions of people who have perished or suffered mightily under the Communist yoke since the revolution are not to be ignored, the transformation of what was a feudal society a mere 60 years ago into the world's fourth largest economy is one of the most extraordinary chapters in history even if Mao Zedong and the people running the show since his passing should creep anyone out.

Some 22,000 journalists will be reporting first hand on the fruits and failures of that transformation, including the enormous infrastructure improvements, environmental degradation and the balancing act between authoritarianism and the freedoms that the hybrid form of Chinese capitalism have wrought.

And if they look really closely beyond the xenophobic leadership, they will see 1.3 billion people who have gotten a taste of freedom, like it a whole lot and yearn for more.

Beijing photograph by Jason Lee/Reuters