Word: coliseum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What were people thinking in 1932, the last time clusters of Olympic athletes paraded into Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum? The world looked more perilous then; perhaps it wasn't. That Depression year, 34 million Americans were out of work. One day after the 1932 Olympics began, Hitler's National Socialists won a plurality of seats in the German parliament. In 1932 Mussolini told his countrymen, "I foresee a long series of political, economic and military wars." And Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World. And the opening ceremonies of the Olympics came off without a hitch...
...said, "Yeah. Dolls.") The audience for the Games promises to be up a bit: 510,000 in 1932, more than 2 billion now. Saturday's show was brighter, brassier. Still the basic ceremony held its ground. All the excitement generated by seeing the stairway ascend to the Coliseum torch was merely a gloss on the fact that the torch was lighted. Everything was startling, but the same. Tunes were played. The kids marched in and out. Odd to think that 52 years from now people may look back and remark with deep wisdom: How naive they were. How mindless...
They would be right. A certain mindlessness is required by these events. In a way, the entire Olympics constitute a ceremony. All the action is symbolic, inarticulate. What message was delivered in the Coliseum? At the ceremonies, Chief Organizer Peter Ueberroth answered "world peace and understanding," but that was merely a wishful guess. Our reaction is emotional, thus mysterious. All one really knows is the feeling of familiarity the ceremonies engender, the strange, abiding comfort that comes from recognizing that one has been pleased by these events before, and will most likely be again, in another time, in no particular...
Even the rehearsals had their heart-tugging moments. Day after wilting day in the Los Angeles Coliseum, during breaks in the strenuous practice of the opening ceremonies, a touching human exercise would take place. Tubas would be scattered across the grass like the wreck of a brassy train...
Across town another man might vicariously fulfill himself by stepping into Clark Gable's shoe prints on a Hollywood sidewalk, another woman might prove herself Lana Turner's equal in some way on the same boulevard. But these souls in the Coliseum had more action in their dreams: they had beaten the wind in the arena of the swift. Having achieved that, they would step back into the throng and go about their jobs...