The Olympics feels like one big metaphor for life in America right now, doesn’t it?
Everything was supposed to go our way these Games. Just as this summer was promised to be the great, sunny, super-fun reward for our past year-and-a-half of lockdown.
But Team USA is cratering. Our top stars are becoming dwarves of their once-brilliant, unstoppable selves. The Olympics itself feels bereft of pomp, circumstance, or any real joy.
NBC can’t even get worked up enough to produce fun profiles and packages. You watch Lester Holt reporting from Tokyo in the rain, standing nightly in front of what looks like the Verrazzano Bridge, and think: Why did they even bother?
And of course, there are no crowds at the 2020 Olympics — and the IOC’s choice to backdate the games to our most miserable year surely contributes to this epic, collective hangover. Seriously, fire whoever made that call. No one wants to feel stuck in 2020. Yet it seems we are. American optimism is down by 20 percent over the last two months. Fifty-five percent of Americans say they are actively pessimistic. That’s a sharp reversal from early May, when Americans were more optimistic than pessimistic by a 28 percent margin.
For a nation that takes pride in our inherent optimism — the pursuit of happiness consecrated in our original mission statement, if you will — these are strange days indeed.
Our big, hot, hedonistic summer is a dud. Our national avatar is Ben Affleck going through the motions of Bennifer 2.0, looking disaffected and miserable on a luxury yacht. Nobody is having any fun, it seems, anywhere.
We should be through the other side by now. Most of us are safe. If you are vaccinated, your risk of getting the virus or a variant is minimal, and if you do get it, your symptoms will not be life-threatening. We are long past the worst of this.
Yet the CDC says even the vaccinated may need to mask up again, proving the only thing they’re consistent on is inconsistent messaging. You know what that breeds? Fear.
And the national news media, with very few exceptions, is all too happy to stoke this hysteria, to great national harm, because nothing generates eyeballs, clicks, ratings spikes and ad revenue like fear. It’s why extreme weather events get the wall-to-wall hype.
We should be ashamed. This is the greatest American crisis since 9/11, yet we rebounded from that within months. New Yorkers especially took pride in not hiding under the bed.
What has become of us? What would the Greatest Generation think? When did fortitude and resilience become less admirable traits than subjective truths, victimization and the fetishization of anxiety? This is the wave that noxious celebrities like Harry and Meghan ride, all for personal profit, and it’s beyond tiresome. It’s a self-pitying, never-ending navel gaze that runs counter to our very DNA.
So why are we not hearing encouragement to go out and live our lives, to seek and find and spread joy again, from the White House? Like all organizations, the tone comes from the top. Or, as the obverse goes, the fish rots from the head.
America needs to get it together. We need to reclaim the determined optimism that has made us the envy of the world. We need our current president to snap us out of what our 39th once identified as “a crisis of confidence,” a great national malaise that threatened our way of life.
Jimmy Carter was right, of course. He also lasted only one term.
