Is It Ethical to Enjoy the Games This Year?

First things first, let’s state the obvious: These Olympics are a disaster, and they’re a disaster on every level, from the micro to the macro, the personal to the institutional, the societal to the global. Name a level, and I’ll show you a disaster. The latest news is that yet another prominent Olympic figure in Japan has been fired. This time it’s the opening ceremonies director, and the crime was holocaust jokes he made on TV. Somehow, that’s less horrific than the composer who was forced to resign over egregious acts of school bullying against disabled children that he bragged about in interviews, and those two are just the tip of the iceberg:

Kobayashi’s Holocaust joke and Oyamada’s resignation were just the latest issues to plague the Games. Yoshiro Mori resigned as organizing committee president over sexist remarks. Hiroshi Sasaki also stepped down as creative director for the opening and closing ceremonies after suggesting a Japanese actress should dress as a pig.

This doesn’t even get into alleged bribery by Tokyo officials to secure the Games from the IOC (which, to be fair, likely happens at every Olympics since the IOC is wildly corrupt), and careful readers will also notice that I also have not mentioned the word “COVID-19” yet. Writ large, Japanese efforts to get their populace vaccinated have been an absolute disgrace, and that’s being generous. Prior to a last-minute push, in May, the national vaccination rate was 1.6%. You did not read that incorrectly: One point six percent. It’s now around 20%, but only because of a desperate attempt to undo what can only be called bureaucratic mismanagement on an historical level. Between the government holding out for a homegrown vaccine (it never came), an anti-vax culture that somehow puts America’s to shame, the internal difficulty in getting approval for a foreign vaccine, and the absurd belief that Japanese people might be largely immune to COVID, heel-dragging was the order of the day. Today, the island is being ravaged by the virus, very few are actually protected, and the end result is that no international fans are allowed to come, no domestic fans are allowed to attend any event, and already we’re seeing athletes test positive and have their Olympic dreams dashed anyway. Yoshihide Suga, the prime minister, is rightly taking flack for ignoring medical advice that suggests canceling the Olympics, all while milking the public for billions of dollars just to make sure the games go through despite a public health crisis.

Keep in mind, as you read this, that Japan has known it would host the Olympics since 2013, and were gifted a one-year delay when the games were postponed from 2020 to 2021. Considering that, the lack of preparation is gobsmacking.

We are not done with Olympic-bashing, unfortunately, because we also have to consider the Olympics writ large, divorced from COVID. I’ll keep this part short, but basically, many smart people,…