Try to remember the kind of September when grass was green and corn was yellow. Or, if yours was an upbringing blessedly free of musicals, try to remember being little enough to have had an eternally stubbed toe and only scabby brake-pads for knees. Try to remember having jam on your forehead and burrs in your hair.
Now remember sitting on the sandpit wall, sucking processed cheese out of your cardigan as you observe, with what will one day become morbid ennui, a brutish seven-year-old beat a tiny girl on the head with his lunchbox. Remember your detached horror as he makes for you. Recall the outrage as the lunchbox crashes down upon your own burr-crowned head, reeking of fermented orange-juice.
And then the final shock: being told by Teacher not to fight, monkey-boy and your sweet, innocent self being handed identical punishments, being told that it’s not important who started it, that you’re both being wicked. Remember the moment. Remember when you first realised that aggression is never punished, that innocence is ignored and that people who espouse tolerance and inclusiveness are uptight, passive-aggressive, sociopathic, frigid, vegetarian, Nazi hippies.
But an uptight, passive-aggressive, sociopathic, frigid, vegetarian, Nazi hippie’s gotta make a living, and so most of them have left education and gone into the world of lucrative indolence known as ‘marketing”. And the most zealous egalitarians among them are currently selling us the Paralympics.
Celebrate the triumph of the human spirit, they urge. Ignore the clank of titanium knees and the ponderous swimming races and our own instinctive (and confusingly insensitive) pity for beautiful, magisterial bodies broken or truncated. Look past the blunt unheroic opinions of the owners of those bodies, people whose lives have been focused as much by necessity as by a competitive drive. Look past it all, because sport makes us all equals!
Well, okay, we make a heap more money that you, but marketing salaries are market-related so really that’s not our fault. We’re all equals in spirit, and that’s what counts. Except for conservatives. They’re pig-dogs.
But the trouble is that triumphs of the human spirit aren’t generally open to the public. In fact, usually only one or two human spirits are involved, and they’re too exhausted to do much celebrating, whether they’re on the summit of Everest or on a deserted bus homeward bound from a night shift at a factory. And in sport you can’t sell discipline and control and fiercely private triumphs over fiercely personal demons.
The reality, despite the rhetoric of equality, is that there is no vicarious pleasure in disabled sport, except for those families and friends who have borne a portion of the histories and exceptional efforts involved. We are simply not that evolved, and nor should we be: that much empathy can only lead to migraines, dizziness and death.
Which is why we need an Olympic tournament for athletes afflicted with disabilities simultaneously sensational and banal, where champions can carry our dreams in their clammy hands, our hopes in their fribulating hearts. In short, games that recognise that most sport isn’t a celebration of the human spirit but a polite wait for catastrophe.
Just imagine the riveting spectacle of the final kilometre of the consumptive marathon, the effete field of writers and painters dabbing at the corners of their mouths with silk handkerchiefs. Consider the dramatic value inherent in the leprosy hammer throw, where it is common for contenders to give their left arm for an extra few yards of distance.
True, events like the Ebola steeplechase might tax more sensitive constitutions, but for those willing to put aside their squeamishness, sporting intrigue abounds: is that a water hazard or the Honduran contestant? When the Congolese runner collapses on lap four, should one take out a stretcher or a hosepipe?
Eczema beach volleyball would be slow and irritating for players and spectators alike, but there’s always osteoporosis judo, by all accounts a cracking sport. And aesthetes could hold their collective breath as little Lala Vcsvrcsu of Romania swerves wildly to port on the beam in the inner-ear infection gymnastics discipline, her life unwittingly saved as an errant .22 slug from the nearby hay-fever pistol shooting range skims by and ricochets off the gelled coif of the Ukrainian judge.
Motion-sickness yachting, gout-and-jerk powerlifting, epileptic table-tennis: the voyeuristic hypochondriac would be spoiled for choice. In this turf war the Crips have already staked their claim. It’s time for the Bloods to do the same.