IDEOGRAMS AND IDEOLOGY

“If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.” - Confucius

The word for today is ideogram.

ideogram |ˈidēəˌgram| noun
a written character symbolising the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it, e.g., numerals and Chinese characters.
ORIGIN mid 19th century: from Greek idea ‘form’ + -gram from gramma ‘thing written, letter of the alphabet,’ from graphein ‘write.’

With the Beijing Olympics almost over the world’s attention will be drawn to the excesses of the closing ceremony – as if the opening one weren’t enough. We have been overwhelmed with excesses of all kinds since the Moscow Olympics began the slip-slide down into a special effects extravaganza that overshadows the sport. A fairground instead of an arena, a congregation of drug cheaters instead of noble athletes, a venue for nationalistic propaganda instead of an ideal of world peace and brotherhood of man. I pity the young athletes who go there with dreams of sporting glory and get embroiled in the star system of international competition with immense pressures to deliver gold medals and mental and physical strains on their health that often cause their downfall.

So another Olympiad almost over. A rash of ideograms on my TV monitor every time I see the news announce details of the games on posters, signs, illuminated displays from Beijing. An ancient and great civilisation wishing to prove to the world that it can surpass the organisational abilities of even the most advanced of Western nations, a giant economy flexing its muscles in order to show its dominance to the world, the most populous nation in the world wishing to dazzle with its athletic prowess and almost inexhaustible supplies of resources, human and otherwise.

These are critical times, worldwide. Times full of dangerous opportunities that will favour the courageous and the bold. However, these are times that demand upon the bravest of us to maintain our level-headedness and exercise restraint. Restraint is the mark of the truly strong and the lack of it characterises the coward. It is no accident that my choice of illustration above is the Chinese ideographic representation of “crisis”, made up of two separate components the first indicating “danger” and the second “opportunity”.