SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

<body><BASEFONT SIZE="4"> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" link="000088" alink="CC6600" vlink="CC6600"> <center>     </center> <Pre> </PRE> <center><a href="../banners/button.map"><img src="../banners/button.gif" width="461" height="14" border="0" ISMAP></a><br> <img src="../banners/newsreal.gif" width="95" height="111"></center> <blockquote> <p><font size="+2" color="#663399"><a name="one"><b>Life outside the golden rings</b></a></font> <p><img src="greene960729.gif" alt="" align="left" hspace="12" width="180" height="196" border="4"> <b>In the first of two reports from the Olympic city, Atlanta native <font color="#663399">Melissa Fay Greene,</font> author of "Praying for Sheetrock" and "The Temple Bombing," writes of aerial visitations, missed encounters and murders overlooked.</b><br clear="all"> <p><hr noshade size="0.5"> <p><font color="#FF6600"><b>A Blizzard of Blimps</b></font> <p><font size="+2">L</font>ate at night, with the windows up, lying in our beds without blankets while the cicadas and fireflies perform their sound-and-light show outside the house, we wait for the blimps to return. We see them every day around noon -- the Budweiser blimp, the Goodyear blimp, the Kroger blimp, an official Atlanta police blimp and an unidentified blimp we think maybe is the CIA -- gliding enormously just overhead, their noses pointed downtown. <p> From gas stations and street corners we look up, entranced. Children in public pools cease their splashing. For a landlocked citizenry, it is the closest we come to spying whales off the coast. "Look! the blimps!" we cry. If this were an era in which men still wore hats, they would respectfully remove them at this time. "Hmmmmmmm," hum the blimps, a high, unworldly sound like the chant of Eastern worshippers in meditation. <p> At night we wait for them, under our sheets. "The blimps!" sharp-eared children cry, and at all hours we tear to the windows, sometimes out back to the deck. At night the blimps are less like whales than festive ships -- sparkling with colorful lights, they motor just above the tree line. We gaze at them through a canopy of oak, pine and tulip poplar, like bottom-dwelling creatures marveling at some higher form of life. <p><hr> <font color="#FF6600"><b>Dashed Dreams</b></font> <p> We've been waiting <i>years</i> for them to come. Since the day Olympic spokesman Juan Antonio Samaranch announced, "It's AT-lanta" (where the '96 Games would be held), we've been waiting for the foreigners. We didn't even <i>call</i> them foreigners anymore. We called them "international visitors," as in: "If we can get international visitors to lease our house for $2000 a night, we can remodel the basement." <p> No flowerbed has been planted, no guest towels purchased, no art posters framed, no porch repainted, no chair upholstered in the five-county metropolitan area in the last five years without some variations of the following thought: "I've got to get this done in time for the Olympics." I myself mail-ordered a sofa slipcover. And repainted the porch. And overhauled my office filing system. I even framed a couple of posters. <p> I pictured athletes bunking in our guest room. Ethiopian runners, Russian weight-lifters, French swimmers. I imagined the hearty laughter of physically imposing non-English speakers around the breakfast table. I might have pictured our four children helpfully cleaning and polishing the houseguests' goggles/riding crops/javelins out on the (freshly painted) back porch. <p> Stunned by the announcement that the athletes would be housed in the Olympic Village, I shifted my fantasy. There would be wall-to-wall sleeping bags for two weeks as brothers and old college friends, and high school friends, and elementary school friends -- hell, people we'd barely said two words to in our lifetime -- drove, flew and hitchhiked to our four-bedroom house, conveniently near a bus stop which takes you right downtown. <p> No one. <p> No one even <i>asked </i> if they could bunk down. <p> One cousin called from her hotel room downtown. <p> Is it us? we worried. Our friends reported similar empty-nest emotions. <p> In search of foreigners, or even out-of-towners, my husband and I, and two of our kids, drove to Centennial Park last Thursday, the day before Opening Ceremony. Georgians, Georgians, Georgians as far as the eye could see. Not Georgians of the former Soviet Union, but Georgians USA. It looked, and felt, like Six Flags. Without the rides. We stood in a pack of a hundred sweltering, sticky people wearing Atlanta '96 T-shirts, waiting to get into the GM Pavilion where we would thrill to the experience of three-dimensional car advertising. <p> "Anyone here from out-of-state?" asked the guide, hoping to kill some time. We all looked about eagerly. <p> One man raised his hand. <p> The crowd sighed. <p> "Where you from?" asked our unflappable guide. We craned our necks to see him, this wonder, this Olympic visitor from out-of-state. <p> "Toledo," he said. "Ohio." <p> And he, like the rest of the out-of-staters and the "international visitors," was probably staying downtown. Not in one of our green and shady neighborhoods, and certainly not on my mail-ordered slipcover. Instead, they're all downtown, and we don't know how to get them out of there. It's like when you give a party with food and drinks and dancing in the front room, and the guests never leave the kitchen. <p> They're all inside a three-mile Olympic circle, an unbelievable crush of sizzling humanity, staggering from venue to venue. Pressing in upon them from all sides, shouting vendors wave T-shirts, lemonade, bottled water, scalped tickets and brochures of Christian revival. Don't they know that just three miles outside the ring, normal citizens buy fresh peaches and corn from fruit trucks at shady intersections, and tell their children to hang up their wet swimsuits in the bathroom, and stir sugar into frosty pitchers of iced tea, and grill fresh trout on their back patios for dinner? And we'd all joyfully welcome physically spent and exhausted non-English speakers: We'd feed and clothe them, we'd take them to Lenox Mall, we'd take them to the History Center, we'd invite them to admire our framed art posters and our freshly painted porches and our mail-ordered slipcovers. <p><hr> <font color="#FF6600"><b>Munich remembered</b></font> <p> All the surviving children of the Israeli athletes and coaches murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich are here. There are 14 of them. Their mothers, the widows, symbolically have passed the torch to the children, most in their 20s, to carry on the uphill battle of seeking official commemoration of the only Olympians ever to be murdered at the Olympic Games. No tribute nor mention has ever been made by the International Olympic Committee or by any host city, even though Israel has sought it at every game. <p> The official Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) declined an offer by Atlanta's Jewish community to build a memorial bench in Centennial Park. In Barcelona, in 1992, Juan Antonio Samaranch was captured on tape promising Aruk Spitzer, the daughter of Israel's slain fencing coach, that the IOC would try, in Atlanta, to acknowledge Munich as a part of Olympic history. For this reason, the surviving children gathered here. <p> In his speech at the Opening Ceremony, Samaranch mentioned Bosnia and Sarajevo. He did not name Israel and he did not name Munich. The children, in grief, fury and confusion, stood and left the stadium. According to reporter Art Harris of CNN, Samaranch has since declined to meet with the families. <p> The Atlanta Jewish community has tried to fill the void with memorial services and tributes for the slain athletes and their families at two local synagogues and at the local Jewish Federation. "We did right by our brothers and sisters," said Rabbi Stephen Weiss, host of a service at Congregation Ahavath Achim. "But the world again did not do right." <p> Still, the world is getting wind of the breach. In response to Art Harris's story, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) has called for after-hours speeches on the floor of Congress to memorialize the athletes lost at Munich. The New York Times is planning a story. The hope of those most closely involved is that before the Olympic torch is extinguished, the Israelis' place in Olympic history will be acknowledged. <p><hr noshade size="0.5"> <p><b><font size="+2"><a name="three">Quote of the day</font></b></a> <p><b>Journalism 101</b> <blockquote> <p> "Everything is about notoriety and attitude now. We used to get reporting from several different reporters -- it was from the ground up. Now reality is all in the eye of the original beholder -- who is a columnist or a byline reporter, and it comes with minimal reporting." <font size="-1"> <p>-- Unnamed former Newsweek editor, on the growing use of celebrity and "star" journalists in weekly news magazines. (From "Star Wars Stir Controversy at News Magazines," in Friday's <a target="_top" href="http://www.wsj.com">Wall Street Journal</a>).</font> </blockquote> </blockquote> <pre> </pre> <center><a href="../banners/button.map"><img src="../banners/button.gif" width="461" height="14" border="0" ISMAP></a></center>