She Likes It In A London Fog
Yesterday the US Olympic cycling team arrived in Beijing and were wearing black masks, which they claimed were for heath reasons but I think were a clever form of protest. At any rate, today the gutless twits at the USOC made them apologize. (See link for pictures of the mask.)
The four United States cyclists who wore pollution-cutting masks as they arrived at the airport here this week apologized to Olympic organizers Wednesday, insisting that they wore the masks for health reasons and did not mean to insult the host country.
Track cyclists Mike Friedman, Sarah Hammer, Bobby Lea and Jennie Reed drafted their apology after meeting with Steve Roush, the chief of sport performance for the United States Olympic Committee.
Their statement, sent through the U.S.O.C., said wearing the masks “was in no way meant to serve as an environmental or political statement.”
“We deeply regret the nature of our choices,” it said, adding that the choice to wear the masks was not meant to belittle the Olympic organizers “who have put forth a tremendous amount of effort to improve the air quality in Beijing.”
Uh, no. This is a city where the citizens routinely walk around in surgical masks to avoid breathing in the filth in the air. It’s not like the US Olympic team did anything that, on any given day, you won’t find hundreds of Chinese doing exactly the same thing.
Before I moved to Beijing I lived in California, which has spent the better part of the past 30 years enacting stringent pollution controls to clean its air. I spent time in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, so I’m familiar with “fog.” I used to watch the fog roll in off the ocean over the hills of Sausalito. Prior to that I was in Houston, so I have familiarity with polluted American cities. Beijing is ten times worse than all of these cities combined.
The Chinese government never refers to pollution as “pollution” or “filth,” only as fog. (It needs to be said that Chinese residents of Beijing understand perfectly well that this is pollution and refer to it as such all the time.) Well, this is the “fog” which I could see from my living room at 8:00 this morning.
That big hole in the ground you see on the right hand side is the future site of the Intercontinental Hotel. (Or maybe one of the other major chains, I forget, but it’s going to be a big hotel.) It needs to be pointed out that I live more or less half way between two major Olympic venues, the Bird’s Nest and Worker’s Stadium.
In part I understand why the Chinese did this. They had seven years from being awarded the games to do a total makeover, to turn “the Jing” (as we foreign devils call it) into a gleaming modern city which they could show off to the world. You can’t do that at the same time as you enact serious pollution controls. Then, a few years ago, someone came up with a brilliant idea. “Hey, how about we pollute all we like, then two months before the games we take half the cars off the road, stop all construction, and close all the factories. That should clear the air in time, right?”
This is what the USOC describes as a “tremendous amount of effort to improve the air quality in Beijing.”
Seems insane, but that’s exactly what they tried to do. And, remember, it worked perfectly, because this isn’t filth, it’s fog. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I now have to go take a shower in some of Beijing’s undrinkable water so I can go outside and breathe in this harmless fog during the taxi ride to work.
(Explanation of the title to this post here.)
