The week that was

Revelations cutting across cultures and geopolitical foundations were the hallmark of the week defined by the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing. New insights and understandings competed with the biggest sporting news of time.

In China, main focus of attention by default because of the dramatic immensity of its coming out party, suffered a certain degree of humiliation along the way as a result of the flap over a young girl's lip-sinc performance on Olympic opening night.

Add to this the admission that the fantastic fireworks display was not entirely real but to a great extent computer-generated and China got hounded again by the demons of a reputation rooted in cheapness and fakery. “Even the fireworks display was pirated,” the critics now say.

The other foot in the shoe, on the other hand, demanded sympathy from being the butt of continued racist behaviors by countries that, apparently, haven't gotten over feelings of superiority born over centuries of colonial mentality.

The Spanish basketball team, in a promotional ad just prior to the Beijing Games, posed for a photograph in which they all pulled back their eyelids to generate the chinky eyes common to the Chinese and other Asians.

Of course we all know the gesture was probably done in jest. And it would have been easy to take it all in stride and good humor had the picture not been intended for public dissemination. But it was a promotional ad meant for the public, thus making it inappropriate.

Now, because of that gaffe, people began digging up past behaviors of Spanish athletes in different disciplines and uncovered and recalled several incidents that, to say the least, truly left a bad taste in the mouth, including monkey chants against black opponents.

Over in America, sleaze and scandal briefly threatened to dominate the headlines when former presidential aspirant John Edwards was exposed as an allegedly two-timing man. But as suddenly as the news appeared, so did it vanish.

More than the Edwards incident itself, questions began to emerge about the conduct of the media itself, about whether it had the right to put the private lives of public officials in a virtual aquarium of scrutiny.

That the dogged hounding eventually paid off when Edwards got cornered in a hotel, more than prove that Edwards was in the wrong, underscored the terrifying reality that media can destroy lives if it really pushed itself into it.

This brings forth the question whether an assertion in the film “Crimson Tide” that America was only out “to preserve democracy but not to practice it” was in fact not really just an assertion but a reality that runs through the gamut of every American's life.

For look at how the Edwards incident dissipated as suddenly as it had exploded. What this tells all and sundry is that everything is really up to the media. If it wants people to know, it will. If not, it will wipe the slate squeaky clean.

And then, thousands of miles away, some sneaky bastards suddenly found the opportunity to grab what it can at a moment of weakness by the world's policeman. Russia stabbed into Georgia to reassert its dominance over its former satellite states and thumb its nose at the US.

Russia knows the US has overstretched its muscles over in Iraq and Afghanistan and is flexing to stretch more in Iran, and ever potentially in North Korea, an impossible situation whether in actuality or in mere will.

Besides, it is pretty obvious even a usually belligerent George W. Bush, now just a few more months in office, is not likely to hand a new area of conflict to his successor. If the eyeball-to-eyeball with Russia goes toe-to-toe, better to let it bug the next US president.