By
Steve Sailer
Why were the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah a triumph of
efficiency, while the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics were
plagued by snafus? Here's just a part of Olympics
spectator
Ronald DuPont Jr.'s hilarious account of his
experience in Atlanta:
"On my first night at
the [1996 Atlanta] Olympics, the bus driver taking me
and about 35 other people back to our cars got lost. Our
half-hour trip took 1 1/2 hours, and we joked that we
got the "scenic route." On my second night, another bus
driver prepared to get on the wrong highway until a
chorus of Atlanta natives on the bus yelled in unison,
directing him to the correct road. Last night, on my way
to the Olympics, our bus took the sideview mirror off a
merging Jeep. (We pulled over to the side of the road
and sat for a half-hour while police filled out their
reports.) Then, when we got on the bus to head back, an
Olympics representative got on the bus and publicly
asked if there was anyone who could give our driver
directions on how to get to the drop-off point. On the
same night, a bus driver pulled to the side of the
highway and promptly quit, saying the job was too
dangerous. The lines to get on the busses are often
thousands of people deep, and I've waited as long as an
hour in the sun to board a bus. Welcome to what is being
called the Glitch Games. The transportation problems
have gotten so bad here that many foreigners and the
foreign press are calling this one of the worst-run
Olympics in terms of logistics. Take a look:
London Daily Mail
-- "Olympic Chaos."
Mexico City News -- "Atlanta Reels"
Los Angeles Times -- "Bum steers in Bumfuzzled
Atlanta"
France-Soir -- "Africa has been deprived of the
Games since their creation with the pretext that African
countries don't have the necessary infrastructure. After
Atlanta, any country in the world can apply to host the
Games."”
Ironically, it appears diversity—a
purported lack of which was supposed to be the downfall
of the Utah Games—played a big role in Atlanta's
chaos. Interestingly, Atlanta was chosen for the
Olympics in large part to "celebrate diversity." (Here's
former mayor Andrew Young on the Olympics and Atlanta's
diversity.)
Race relations in Atlanta have been relatively good.
It was the home of Martin Luther King Jr. In the early
Sixties, Atlanta coined the admirable PR slogan,
"the city too busy to hate." It has led the South in
working out a profitable relationship between the white
corporate world, attracted by Atlanta's superb location,
and its black political class. (See Tom Wolfe's novel
A Man In Full for an inside picture.)
This has made the Atlanta area the nation's most
attractive place for blacks—especially those feeling
squeezed by immigrants in other regions. In the words of
demographer
William H. Frey, "It is clear that greater Atlanta
is the premier African American magnet in the country."
Atlanta attracts some of the most
upwardly mobile African Americans. But what
"celebrating diversity" really means in Atlanta—as
everywhere else—is that some people get jobs they
wouldn't qualify for without racial preferences. Not
surprisingly, that means that at the Atlanta Olympics,
things tended to go wrong—incompetent bus drivers got
hired, their supervisors failed to give them maps,
schedules weren't planned correctly, etc.
We shouldn't be too harsh on Atlanta. It wasn't the
only Olympics where the buses didn't run on time. The
1992 Barcelona Games were also plagued by lackadaisical
workers. Still, the world gave Barcelona a pass because
if you were left standing on a corner in Barcelona
waiting for a bus that was late, you could always sit
down in a charming sidewalk café and enjoy the breeze
wafting off the Mediterranean. In Atlanta, though, the
stranded were pretty much limited to watching the road
tar soften in the July sun.
Nor should we condemn out of hand the Atlanta
modus vivendi. In places such as Atlanta, where one
ethnic group has the political power and the other has
the wealth and earning capacity, history shows that
there are all sorts of ways for them to interact, most
of them awful—slavery, pogroms, apartheid, riots, etc.
Perhaps, somewhere out there, there exists a better
system than the Atlanta Way. But Atlanta's kind of
moderate race-based corruption and favoritism might
be about the least-bad solution feasible. Note that the
black elite in Atlanta is fairly reasonable in its
demands. They know about how much they can extract from
the business community without killing the goose that
lays the golden eggs. Even the mordant Wolfe was
surprisingly respectful and sympathetic toward his two
fictional black power brokers, the mayor of Atlanta and
Roger Too White.
Is the Atlanta Way immoral? Hey, it's a democracy.
Atlanta's black voters use their voting clout in their
own self-interest. Put yourself in their Air Jordans for
a moment. How fast would you voluntarily give up your
affirmative action privileges? Especially if some of the
rich white folk in Atlanta had great-grandparents who
owned your great-grandparents?
The point is not to demonize Atlanta, but simply to
note that ethnic diversity within a democracy
leads to trade-offs. One of those things that
gets traded off is
efficiency.
In Atlanta, public life revolves around race. That
complicated Olympic organizing immensely. In Utah, in
contrast, organizers could pretty much ignore racial
politics in assigning jobs because there isn't much
racial politics ... because there isn't much racial
diversity.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]
March 20, 2002
