April 9, 2008
Exactly Why Did They Send the Torch to SF, Now?
Just Monday we were writing about how much we love farce, and here today, San Francisco plays host to a farce of global scale as the Olympic torch--a flash-point for anti-China rallies--arrives in the Bay city. (Follow all the news at SFist.) Regardless of what you think of the hosts of this year's Summer Olympic games, your position on Tibet or Uighur ethnic autonomy, or whether Western nations should symbolically protest Chinese crackdowns by skipping the opening ceremonies, we're sure everyone agrees with us when we ask: who the hell thought to send the torch through San Francisco? The city of a million different protesting special interest groups, right next to UC Berkeley, home of thousands of radical-chic college students. Yup. That was going to go well.
Image of last weekend's Olympic Torch protests in London courtesy of Flickr user stemy.
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I think it's awesome to see the protesters! Any way to get this message across is fine with me! Now if Bush had any balls, he would not attend the opening games!
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To be fair to Mr. Bush (something I'm loathe to do), at this point, it's showing up to the opening ceremonies that takes cojones, rather than vice-versa. I mean, you got to be ballsy to politely pay homage to the people pulling off all this crap, from tainted toys to abusing Tibetan monks. That said, Bush has shown a remarkable capacity for pissing people off, so really, it may just be giving him a challenge to rise to.
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Not only the number of radicals, but also the size of the Chinese population is also notable. I'm sure a good fraction of them left China due to some sort of discontent...
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Someone in the Times today was saying that the first torch relay was back in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics and was thought up by Joseph Goebbels. Don't ya just love history?