I’ve been following the Beijing Olympics with a mixture of awe and disappointment as the amazing athletics and dazzling pageantry is occasionally punctuated by incidents of heavy-handed
political oppression and of athletes who
hacked their biochemistry in hope of gaining a slight edge over their competition. But it seems that the athletes are not the only ones resorting to clandestine performance-improvement as tales of electronic enhancement of the opening ceremony come to light.
Between the digitally enhanced videos of the opening ceremony
fireworks or a lip-synched
opening act that rivaled the exploits of
Milli Vanilli, it was pretty evident that Beijing’s Great Leaders were not above using the electronic equivalent of steroids to project a better-than-perfect image of their nation to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, electronic trickery knows no borders so it’s not surprising that some of our own Great Leaders may have also started using technical means to gain an unfair advantage in the blood sport of politics.
It’s difficult to confirm or put to rest the persistent rumors that presidential candidate John McCain may have somehow violated the so-called
Cone of Silence that was supposed to keep him from overhearing the questions being put to his rival Barack Obama during a back-to-back set of in-depth
interviews at Saddleback Evangelical Church earlier this month. McCain’s smoother, more facile replies to Rev Warren’s pointed questions can certainly be explained away by his greater experience, maturity or black-and-white worldview; but given the high stakes of the situation and the past performances of other candidates, it’s also easy to imagine an operative in the audience simply relaying the questions put to Obama from their Blackberry to a campaign aide at McCain’s side.
Sadly, electronic trickery is often as difficult to detect, and even more difficult to deter, than the doping that continues to plague athletics across the world. As in sports, about all we can do is watch events closely, speculate on what’s really happening, and hope that the efforts of smart people will continue to unmask at least the worst offenders. Perhaps one of those experts will be able to some day tell us whether the odd, halting speech cadence exhibited by President Bush at several of his recent public addresses is an indicator that he’s still using the
wireless prompting device that he used so effectively during the last General Election.
Comments? Questions? Summons for questioning at an Undisclosed Location? Write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net or post your comments on our blog.
