Boston 2024 thinks Bostonians care what other cities think about us, and they couldn’t be more wrong. (Morry Gash/IOPP Pool/Getty Images)
Boston Globe – [T]hese days, it seems like whatever Boston 2024 says or does is the absolute wrong thing. Spruce up Franklin Park? No! Deval Patrick as global ambassador? Not for $7,500-a-day?#$! Sponsor a referendum? Those guys are co-opting the ballot process!
It’s as if we’re witnessing the last stages of a broken marriage.
Now, we can sit here, Bostonians being Bostonians, and have a good chuckle. But know this: We’ve become the laughingstock of the world. Papers in France, Italy and Germany are having a field day chronicling Boston’s self-implosion. Respected Olympic watcher Alan Abrahamson posted a scathing piece on Monday titled “Boston 2024 is doomed: be done with it,” urging the United States Olympic Committee to give the Games to LA. …
At stake is nothing less than Boston’s reputation. So far the world knows we’re great at taking people down, making sure nobody gets too big. Instead we should be showing how a city that pulled off the Democratic National Convention is now emerging as a life sciences capital and undergoing a wholesale makeover of its skyline.
With this Olympic civil war, we risk damaging our city on a rise, not so much with the possible decision to bid on the Games but in the way we go about it. We’re at an important moment here, bigger than any one person.
Once again the Globe proves it’s got its thumb firmly on the pulse of its readership. Nobody gets us like the Globe does. It’s not even like the Globies can read our thoughts; it’s more like an Elliot-E.T. relationship where they feel our feelings. And now they’re using that emotional/psychic connection to try to shame us into wanting this Olympic boondoggle.
Because nothing hits a Bostonian where he lives like the opinions of people from other cities. Wait, you mean they’re saying snarky things about us in Le Monde? We’re being mocked in L’Osservatore Romano? Der Bild is having a laugh at our expense? Please! By all means let’s rehire Deval Patrick and double his pay! Get the backhoes rolling so we can get to work on that 80,000-seat stadium! Get a move on; that brand new water polo pool and state-of-the-art fencing venue aren’t going to build themselves!!!
Riddle me this, though: Where were all these Europeans whose opinions we’re supposed to care so much about and respected Olympics watchers (now there’s an occupation I’d like to see listed on a 1040A form) when we were getting repeatedly bent over and violated by the well-connected, influence-peddling bandits that will be making a killing off of Boston 2024?
Of course I’m talking about the Big Dig, but it goes way beyond that particular money grab. The same system that awards projects and hands out jobs to the relatives and friends of politicians around here is what’s going to run the Olympics. Because it’s the only way business has ever been done around here.
And the International Olympic Committee might be the only organization in the world more corrupt than FIFA. The IOC makes the government of the Commonwealth look like the Jedi Council. Invite them into our world, mix the two together, and you’re just begging them to rip you off.
Boston 2024 organizers want us to trust them because they’re not like all the others? Tell it to the people who were forced to trudge in the snow up train tracks because so many T employees were banging in sick to work on snowy days. They want us to believe it won’t be a huge inconvenience? Try to convince the working people who were trapped in their cars for hours by a dozen or so patchouli-soaked narcissists who brought the city to its knees with some 50-gallon drums and cement mix. They’ll assure us all the jobs to be had will strictly be a meritocracy. Which is what they said about the court’s probation department right up until the head of it was convicted of corrupt hiring practices.
The bottom line is if the people like those with Boston 2024 and The Boston Globe want us on board with this thing, they’re doing a pretty piss-poor job of convincing us. They’re giving us zero assurances this will be anything other than all the other fiascos we’ve had to endure. And if they think we care what any other city thinks — beyond just the satisfaction of knowing all the championships we win drive them freaking insane — then they haven’t the first clue what Bostonians are all about.
@JerryThornton1
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