Playing Host A Sure-Fire Way To Ruin A City

It’s almost 2 in the morning and a stiff breeze is cycloning trash in loose swirls. The dank smell of stale beer, old sweat and a day’s worth of garbage hangs with the humidity.

Two days into the Olympics, Atlanta looks like an aging street walker at the end of another bad night. It is all lipstick, makeup and bad perfume. It looks tired and old.

This is the price you pay for playing host to the world.

These have been called The Coca-Cola Games. The joke here is that Pepsi is on the banned-substance list.

But that’s unfair. These really are the Budweiser-Nike-Nikon-Hanes-Reebok-Champion-etc. Games. Sponsors have taken over this town and tattooed it with logos and tents, inflatable beer bottles, faux statues of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley and trash.

Not to be outdone, small-time, get-rich-quick schemers have set up retail tents, cashing in on the carnivorous appetites of souvenir shoppers.

Every parking lot has become a tent city. It seems as if every square inch of asphalt has been sold.

This is the uglification of a city. Atlanta has been gutted. Its heart has been taken from it. It sold its soul to have these Games.

There is no downtown anymore. Seemingly everything has been converted into a corporate shrine. Every sidewalk has become a gauntlet of hustlers and hucksters.

Imagine if Kmart took over Nordstrom. This is the new, Olympian Atlanta.

What do you get if you cross the infield of a NASCAR race with a flea market and a county fair?

You get the host city of the Centennial Olympics.

This is Dogpatch on steroids. Atlanta should be drug tested.

“Free Soul Food With Minimum Purchase,” offers one tent selling gifts, merchandise, water and pins.

This is what Atlanta was willing to do to itself to get the Olympics. This is how you afford the Games. What you can’t sell to big business, you sell to small business.

Mom and Pop meets the Multinationals at the crossroads of these Centennial Games.

Of course none of this will affect the performers. The insatiable spirit of the Olympics is in the stadiums, the arenas and the swimming pools. The joy comes from watching the hundreds of triumphs and tragedies.

Television will assure you pretty pictures. The Olympic Games still will look good on your Sony Trinitron. At night, Atlanta will glitter when it is pictured from the blimp.

The athletes shouldn’t be concerned with the soul of the city, but the people who will be here after the athletes leave should be concerned.

Any city wanting to host an Olympics should come to Atlanta and see what it has become. You’ve got to be crazy to get involved in the craziness of these Games.

Imagine a modern Olympics in Paris. A neon Coke bottle winks from the Eiffel Tower. The Left Bank is clogged with T-shirt shacks selling Elvis dolls. The Budweiser World Party rocks in front of Notre Dame. The Arc de Triomphe is rented to Reebok.

Are you listening, Seattle? Do you really want an Olympics in 2008 or beyond? Do you want to surrender your city to the crude and commercial?

Do you want a giant Nike logo shooshed across Mount Rainier? Do you want the Space Needle to look like a giant Coke bottle?

The Olympics changes a city. The Games take over a town.

The buses don’t run well. The parking lots are gone. The city is transformed. It doesn’t belong to you.

In a local television interview Sunday, Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell said, “I think they should take all the critics to the shooting site and shoot them.”

Considering the recent terrorism in the world and the heightened security at these Olympics, the mayor’s suggestion seemed tasteless at best.

But maybe the mayor was feeling defensive. Maybe he was feeling a little host-city remorse. Maybe when he looked at this city in the mirror at 2 a.m., he didn’t like what he saw.