Summer in the City of To-morrow

The Olympic torch has finally arrived in Beijing, after being hauled through an interminably controversy-laden circuit around the world. At nearly every leg, the torch was met with protests, counter-protests, media frenzy, brawls, and enterprising hecklers with fire-extinguishers. And if this wasn't enough, the torch barely missed passing through yet another earthquake in Sichuan province just before reaching the capital. All said, one probably ought to look some place other than the torch relay for auspicious signs for the summer Games.

Almost entirely by accident, my friends and I happened to be very near the relay course right when the torch and its elaborate convoy of escorts passed by. I'm pretty sure that the Beijing relay was witnessed in person by an extremely massive number of people, although it turns out to be difficult to judge the scale of a crowd lining the streets, since it is only about a dozen bodies deep and extends far past your peripheral vision on both sides. Onlookers had begun to gather at least an hour and a half prior to the actual procession, and by the time we decided to have a look ourselves, the view of the street was almost entirely obscured. People stood on carts and tried to peer through the back windows of buildings. Somewhat to my surprise (and disappointment, maybe), nobody seemed to be attempting anything improvisationally dangerous in order to get a better angle, e.g. climbing up construction scaffolding, hanging off of building ornaments, or standing on abandoned furniture.

The actual Torch Moment lasted about five seconds, and I was just barely able to see the tips of the Olympic flame poking over the top of the crowd. There was some general commotion as the torch passed by, ambiguous roars of the crowd and shouts of 加油 (jiayou, i.e. basically "Yeah!" or "Go!"), but it was ultimately much quieter and more passive than I would've expected. Maybe it was just the lack of stadium acoustics, but it seemed almost as if most people were concentrating on getting a decent photo.

That tens of thousands of people would want to see an Olympic torch relay with their own eyes seems fairly natural and commonsensical at first, but then consider the overwhelmingly quotidian substance of the actual experience itself: standing in a crowd in considerable discomfort, wearing or brandishing China swag you just bought at a high markup from a merchant shouting "Lemme through, lemme through!", noodling with your cell phone, choking on cigarette smoke or exhaust from the tour buses. In all probability you will not even be able to see the flame when it passes. And when it finally does come, you witness it through the two-inch LCD of your digital camera.

The whole scenario raises to the same question that all tourist activity and live spectacle lead to: in our televisual age, is there a qualitative difference between Being There and merely seeing it on the evening news or the Web? What exactly does one reflect upon when flipping through their private JPEG record of these kinds of moments? And really, what kind of nostalgia would that produce? I Was There? Or perhaps maybe I Was There Wearing Swag And Pressing A Button On My Camera?