The Olympics, Russia, Ukraine, and Beijing

The Moving Finger Writes Even in New Mexico

Fallen Russian skater Valieva

An Omen?  How Will Vlady Look During the Beijing 2022 Summer Games?

Olympic medal counts are assumed to be symbolic weathervanes about the world's pecking order, and perceptions can influence decisions.  That's why dictators try to rig them.  So we can imagine Vlady doing what he needed to do to assure that Valieva would be allowed to skate in spite of the rules--rubbing his hands at the prospect of seeing smiling Russians accepting medals on a global stage, a pleasing backdrop against the larger, more macho-imagined global backdrop of tanks and missiles and electronic chaos rolling with a double axel or two for style points onto the winter ice of Ukraine.

But the best laid plans can backfire.  In1936, with Hitler promoting theories of "Aryan" superiority while planning to invade Poland, Jesse Owens, son of a black Alabama sharecropper, took away four gold medals at the Berlin Games, shooting a symbolic arrow toward the eventual triumph of the United States as the reigning superpower, not Germany.  Two years later Joe Lewis underscored the point by demolishing German Max Schmelling in two minutes of the first round in a heavyweight boxing match heard by radio around the world.  With similar poetic justice, Valieva fell on the ice four times in her last round. 

The world can't wait to find out:  is this a portent of what will become of the kleptocracy that rules Russia?  Or, by the Summer Games will US Republican medal winners raise their fists and take a knee during the national anthem in protest against the Biden-NATO sanctions while Xi and Putin allow themselves to be photographed negotiating over the colors of the changing maps of the world?  This is a quickly shifting global and domestic scene, and anyone who predicts in the short run is simply guessing.  What will happen will depend on what happens between now and then, not on what we see today..

Does any of this matter to New Mexicans?  From the lack of discussion about it one would conclude that it does not.  Or, perhaps more realistically, few New Mexicans can even find Ukraine on a map, or locate Beijing in China, much less follow the dots connecting New Mexico to the maneuverings of the most powerful actors in the world.  I'm beating a dead horse, but this, too is a sorry commentary on the quality of our educational systems in the state.  It might have been better to use the excess cash to create a cabinet agency for global affairs, and for New Mexico to design a foreign policy for state government, instead of raising salaries for teachers.  What happens out there, like it or not, will affect us, and we should level with our citizens about those connections.

Imports and exports through the El Paso-Santa Teresa border crossings add up to  well over $100 Billion, and until the pandemic, growing quickly.  How vulnerable are these numbers to interruptions, say, from China?  How would they affect New Mexico?  The state apparently has no systematic way of understanding the impact of foreign trade on our state's economy, or digging down into the data.  The international order is changing quickly.  Does the state understand what these changes might mean for job markets in the state?  Or how we might adapt to changing conditions?