Dance Like No One Is Watching?

I will be honest – if deploring the excessive nationalistic tendencies and taxpayer funding for national sporting teams was an Olympic sport, then I would be a gold medallist.

The amount of attention which faux (or ersatz) break dancer Raygun has received for her rather underwhelming performance at the recent Olympics has got me thinking.

We often enjoy watching people fail.

For example, there are those sadly deluded people who make fools of themselves during the early auditions on Australian Idol, deliberately chosen by the show producers to entertain the home audience with their cacophony.

Then there are those appalling people who appear on the Australian edition of Married At First Sight, who are always hooking up and breaking up and feuding with each other. Who does not relish the moral and intellectual failings of those folk?

It seems to be something that has been with us as a social species for a very long time, given that the main entertainment in Ancient Rome involved either feeding people to wild beasts or gladiatorial contests.

Now Raygun has her, to borrow from Andy Warhol, 15 minutes of fame (or is it infamy?) as a breakdancer manque, and everyone is piling on. There are those, like the rather tiresome commentators on Skynews, who are going out of their way to denounce her. Then there are those who just make fun of it – the vast majority. And there are the woke ones who claim that she is being unfairly belittled.

What do I really think? The algorithm on Facebook is feeding me a disproportionate number of posts about the matter (I do have a cover photo of this event at the moment on my page), so I assume that artificial intelligence is trying to tell me what to think about it.

I’m very skeptical about the Olympics and about our win at all costs national obsession with gold medals. I’ve been like this for over 30 years, even since I was passing through Canberra at the time of the 1994 Commonwealth Games and saw the mania expressed in our nation’s capital. I don’t really care too much if we win medals or not.

For me, Raygun doing her act at the Paris Olympics is the greatest highlight in Australian Olympic history since the men’s 4x100m freestyle team played air guitar after beating the seppos in Sydney in 2000.

Or perhaps when Bradbury, the journeyman speedskater, fluked Australia’s first gold in the Winter Olympics when his competitors all tripped over themselves just before the finishing line and he went from last place to gold. Although of course, in this instance, there was no going from last place to gold.

As for Raygun herself? She seems to be someone who has a very strong love of life and who is very good humoured and fun loving. I hope she continues to love life, and that perhaps regardless of the joyless sour commentators like Peta Credlin on Skynews that she becomes a folk hero, complete with product endorsements and TV hosting gigs.