The opening ceremony for the 2016 Rio Olymic Games had a pretty big portion dedicated to a global warming narrative and sea level rise. They should have had Al Gore ride in on his private jet and land in Maracanã to show how bad emissions are for the planet. (Cough, cough! He really should walk the walk and use Skype. I’m sorry, but he really does look alike a hypocrite when he flies all over the world in a private jet and tells us not to fly on crowded commercial flights.) What’s wrong: don’t they want to be able to swim in the streets? People everywhere love Venice, and global warming could make everywhere just like Venice! Who could ask for anything more? (Oops: I forgot their water is a polluted toxic stew. Sorry. But the rest of us will love having the ocean invade our streets, I’m sure!)
I especially liked the part when the favelas sprung up, the people all started break dancing, and then the bulldozers invaded and knocked all the poor housing down, and anyone who protested got shot by the military police. Then they built a big wall so that the athletes in the Parade of Nations couldn’t see Rio’s poor people, and the police shot tear gas into any remaining protesters. I've never seen such an honest opening ceremony.
Oh, wait: they only did the global warming thing? I guess I must have imagined the part about the honest presentation of the situation in Rio. But at least the Olympic committee didn't make them chop down part of the rainforest to build a huge stadium and vast parking lot for a venue that only hosted a couple of games and was then abandoned, like FIFA did for the 2014 World Cup that Brazil ended up losing anyway.
But seriously, the opening ceremony was very silly. It started with ocean waves, which made me think of Rio's sewage-filled water (We didn’t see it on TV, but I heard the resolution of the projected images was so great in the stadium that they see all the poop floating in the water.), and then they showed something that looked like bacteria reproducing and taking over, and then there were these enormous puppets of a crab and a centipede, which made me think of viruses, and then everything started turning green, which made me think of illness, because people turn green when they're sick, and then it looked like the diseases were infecting and taking over a whole human body. Maybe they should have thought about how it might look to people bombarded with negative news stories about their poop soup water for so long.
I liked how Russia got a huge cheer out of the Rio crowd. They obviously like cheaters there. Maybe they should make doping mandatory for Brazilian athletes.
And shame on Hope Solo for not wanting to catch the Zika virus! Everyone there is mad at her for not wanting to catch it when they engineered it in a lab especially for her. What ingratitude! Maybe they can put it in her gold medal to infect her then, when she is not expecting it!
