Imagine this. You’re competing at the Olympics. You’ve won a few gold medals and you’ve left the Olympic Village to have a few drinks with your team mates one night. You end up pissed out of your skull – or at least pissed out of it enough to allegedly do a bit of vandalism and pee up the wall behind the petrol station you ended up in. You forgot you were in a country where security guards carry guns, even though you come from one where anyone above the age of five is allowed to, and when stopped at gunpoint and told to pay for the damage you opted for an alternative solution.
The alternative you chose was to claim you were robbed at gunpoint and add some stuff that made you out to be Rambo. However, you were too dumb to consider the possibility that CCTV might be operating in the store where it allegedly happened. After changing your story several times, the CCTV was seen and you were identified as the cowardly liar you really are.
Lochte managed to escape back to the States after his false claim. Bentz and Conger had almost made it when they were removed from their flight by police. Feigen has ended up agreeing to pay around $11,000 to a Brazilian charity so that all charges can be dropped. The full story is somewhat confused and Feigen, at least, appears totally innocent. Lochte would appear to be the least innocent.
True American Heroes they ain’t. And at least one of them should be stripped of any medals he won. He’s already lost a lot of his sponsorship.
If Lochte and his gang of masterminds represent one stagnant pool of humanity, their actions certainly have highlighted another.
Most of America is appalled by what they did. Unfortunately, some of these “appalled” Americans don’t have a limiter on the pendulum which determines how they feel about something, and they allow it to swing freely from one absolute extreme to the other.
The simple truth is that Lochte and co. are merely a bunch of over-privileged assholes. That’s all there is to it. But this is the internet age, and things are never that simple when there is a whole heap of conspiracy theories to run with. Therefore, the events in Rio have stirred up the usual crowd of web loonies.
Loony #1 – Tariq Nasheed tweets:
If Black athletes pulled that… stunt, the headlines would read “Black Lives Matter Thugs Caused Terror At The Olympics”
Loony #2 – WendyBrandes tweets:
If Ryan Lochte lied about that robbery, how can we ever believe any man’s allegations of robbery?
I reckon that second one is a certifiably insane man-hater (I admit I’m reading into it with “man-hater”).
On a related note involving a different story, Ellen DeGeneres posted a tweet a few days ago showing herself piggybacking with Usain Bolt, with the comment:
This is how I’m running errands from now on.
Ms DeGeneres, who I have always liked and still admire, is married to another woman, and is probably all too aware of the problems that come with prejudice. I don’t think for a second that she was referring to anything other than Bolt’s speed but I seem to be in a minority on that. You see, American historical media libraries contain numerous images from the 19th and early 20th centuries of white people sitting on the backs of black servants and slaves. Many images simply show white children sitting on the backs of black servants playing “horsey”, though there are some unsettling ones of adults treating black people as furniture. The net loonies have drawn an immediate parallel and pilloried Ms DeGeneres.
But Ellen DeGeneres couldn’t win on this. If she’d have posted a picture of Usain Bolt riding on her back, these lunatics would accuse her of parodying those archive images.
A few months ago, Ms DeGeneres got caught up in a similar fiasco when she collaborated with clothing firm Gap. The advertisement had a simple and innocent photograph of four children, and yet the net loonies managed to read into it and declare it “racist”. Why? Simply because a taller white girl was apparently resting her arm on the head of a smaller (and younger) black child. The loonies had a field day over that – even the fact that the black child was shorter than the white one was somehow “racist”. No one mentioned that by the same token it was also sexist, since it showed four white girls (or possibly three and one boy). The loonies reckoned it was “passive racism” (their new Big Phrase). I charge – with my tongue in my cheek – that is was “active sexism”.
Although it is ugly and wrong, racism is something which on the whole just happens – it isn’t calculated and constructed like a complex machine, and to suggest that a company like Gap (or Ellen DeGeneres, who has had to endure prejudice herself). Most racists couldn’t explain the mechanisms involved in their prejudice if they tried (which is probably why “passive” is used to describe it). Most would have trouble writing their name, though they could probably just about manage to put an “X” in the “Leave” box on a voting form.
But that’s a different subject.