That quadrennial nationalistic orgy known as the Olympics is once again upon us. Exactly what the Olympics are about has always been a touch unclear. This year’s extravaganza – if that is a good enough word for something that costs $17 billion – has the snappy motto “One World One Dream.” Maybe this means something in Chinese. In English it might as easily translate to “One World – One Can Only Dream.”

Of course, the Olympics are supposed to be about amateur athletes competing on the world stage. Ha ha ha. The host country has been snatching promising children away from their parents for at least a decade, locking them up in training facilities where they work out seven days a week, and letting them know that only gold medals are acceptable performance. That well known amateur basketball player Yao Ming will be leading the Chinese team, and the U.S. will again be recruiting their basketball players from the NBA.

The athletics are all about gold medals and standing on platforms when your national anthem is played and your flag is raised. The league tables list medals by country, and everyone is anxious to see if China can wrest the gold medal title away from the U.S. I’m putting my bets on the Chinese, who are sending a record 639 athletes to the Olympics.

Plus, China gets something called the host nation advantage. If you look carefully at the rules of many of the more obscure sports, you see that when you get to the semi- finals, the officials have an obligation to insert a Chinese competitor if none has gotten that far. The rules for rifle shooting state that “If not otherwise qualified, the host nation automatically qualifies 1 place in each singles event and 1 place for each Team event”.

Rifle shooting, kayaking, table tennis, fencing, badminton, taekwando, beach volleyball, and similar sports are where the real medal haul is to be made. Some purists argue that these aren’t sports at all – they are more like hobbies or recreation. I suspect these sports are designed to encourage smaller nations to go to all the trouble and expense of participating in the Olympics. Scandinavian nations seem to excel at rifle shooting, and we all know who is going to dominate table tennis.

The International Olympic Committee doesn’t try hard to make an argument for these sports; the official IOC description of rhythmic gymnastics is that the history and purpose of the sport are “hazy”. This is one of the truly discriminatory sports in the Olympics; it is only open to women (maybe no one is willing to pay to watch men attempt to be rhythmic at gymnastics).

Rhythmic gymnastics won’t be the only hazy thing at these Olympics. One of the star performers at Beijing this month will be the famously opaque skies of China’s capital city. To have any hope that the sky will be anything other than its typical brown or grey, the Chinese government has gone to extraordinary lengths to set up a Potemkin village, not just an Olympic Village. One third of all cars have been banned from Beijing roads this past month, and almost all construction and a lot of manufacturing have ceased. So much industrial production has been halted across China that the GDP is expected to decline this summer as a result.

Still, independent tests have shown that as of this week particulate matter in Beijing’s air is ten times the acceptable international pollution standards. This is way, way down from the norm for a Chinese city, but still too dangerous for outdoor competition. The U.S. cycling team entered the Olympic Village wearing medical masks, and we should expect some of the outdoor athletes to compete this way. The Chinese government is going to be very prickly about this, since the Olympics are designed to showcase China in its rightful role as a major world power.

Why China thinks the world is going to be fooled by this Potemkin Village exercise is beyond belief. The Chinese government wants the world to see athletes competing in harmony, world records being set, and shiny new sports facilities on display. To be sure, there are some spectacular architectural venues arranged for these Olympics, starting with new stadiums in Tianjin and Shenyang. But the architectural stars of the show are in Beijing – the National Stadium (known as the Bird’s Nest) and the Aquatics Center. We should all enjoy these amazing buildings while we can, because once the Olympics are over they are going to disappear in the daily murk that constitutes Beijing’s skies.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on China’s government. The Olympics are now so grandiose, and so expensive, that only a government can put them on properly. The IOC has become the sporting arm of the United Nations, and one of the goals of the host nation is to have the most impressive list of world leaders attend the opening ceremonies. Everyone is anxious to see what George W. Bush is going to say about China’s appalling human rights record, but he may well say nothing. The White House has already made it clear it is not going to offend its principal banker.

All this nationalistic hype leads to inevitable contretemps. One typical flare-up occurred this week when the Chinese government welcomed the Macedonian team to the Olympic Village as from the “Republic of Macedonia.” As we all must surely know, the official UN name of this country is “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, since Greece insists only they have the right to use the name Macedonia.

Greece and Macedonia won’t be the first countries to battle over nationalist rights at the Olympics. The Olympics seems to attract these petty little controversies, and it is as if the countries that participate never read the Olympic Charter. The charter talks a great deal about the spirit of the Olympics, which is all well and good, but then it proceeds to label this spirit “Olympism”, which sounds like some horrible erectile dysfunction disease. Maybe that’s why no one pays attention to the spirit of the Olympics.

I’ll be watching some of the Olympics, because there are bound to be some thrilling and memorable athletic moments. I do draw the line at some sports, however, especially women’s gymnastics, which no longer has anything to do with women, but instead features pixie-like pre-pubescent little girls who apparently will never naturally pubesce as long as they expose their too-young bodies to the rigors of gymnastic training. The Chinese gymnastics team has already tripped up when it was discovered one of its stars, officially listed as 17, has a passport indicating she is only 14. She’s going to compete anyway. Another form of host nation advantage, and yet more proof that China uses child labor.

I’ll have to watch the Olympics through the filter of U.S. television, which is jingoistic and features stories mostly about U.S. athletes. When this gets to be too much, I'll take a break by tuning in to the Paralympics and the Special Olympics, which are running in tandem with the Beijing main stage events. You’ll be pleased to know that while the Paralympics does include a rifle shooting event, the Special Olympics do not.

And did you know that this is the first ever, official “green” Olympics? So far the only thing green about these Olympics is the algae that has been clogging up the water lanes that will be used for such crowd-pleasers as the “two person dinghy for men”, the “skiff mixed” event, and the “keelhaul for women.”

These won’t be the only people being keelhauled at the Olympics. Every Chinese official responsible for any part of the Olympics knows the penalty for failure. These Olympics are going to succeed, no matter what. So get your Olympism pumped up – the fun is about to begin!