BOSTON (CBS) – Why do we love the unfolding saga of the Boston Summer Olympics bid?
Let us count the ways.
First of all, it’s a soap opera, with all the necessary ingredients for vintage Bostonian melodrama.
Read: Boston 2024 Olympics Coverage
You’ve got the downtown crowd, titans of industry and finance, big-name architects, an occasional academic thrown in to add gravitas. Because they have money but don’t play a sport we like, they are cast as villains, we’re not sure why but will figure it out later.
Photo Gallery: Proposed Olympic Venues
For once, the one-percenters share bad-guy status with the International Olympic Committee, a shadowy group of mostly foreigners who seem to have a habit of milking their host cities dry. We aren’t quite sure if we want these people kissed up to in our city’s name.
Artistic rendering of aerial view of Olympic Stadium. (Image from Boston 2024)
Targets like this are too tempting for the local townies, or even yuppies with a bit of townie in them, to let pass. And now that some veterans of the Occupy movement have joined the anti-Olympics fun, you are really going to see what Bostonian nimby-ism, 2015-style, looks like.
And what about the biggest townie of all, hizzoner Mayor Walsh, whose political break-dancing on the Olympics is worth the ticket right there.
Walsh wants to make his mark, and to the former head of the local Building Trades Council, all those Olympic construction jobs are hard to say no to. But if you think Walsh might end up a patsy for the one-percenters and foreigners, you don’t know him.
This story is better than “All My Children,” better than DeflateGate even.
And we’ll be dining out on it for months to come.
Listen to Jon’s commentary:
You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.
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