As the Games Go On

What is most surprising about the ugliness in Atlanta, oddly enough, is its inability to surprise. This is not to suggest detonation of a deadly bomb in the middle of an Olympic crowd is an everyday event. Our listing ship of state has not yet taken on that much water. Still, the incident cannot be described as absolutely novel, either.

After all, this was not the first act of violence unleashed on the modern Olympics. That bloody threshold was crossed a generation ago, in Munich. “They are dead, they are all dead,” I recall Jim McKay reporting after the tarmac shootout. He meant the nine Israeli hostages, of course, but the list of the dead might as well have included the innocent notion that the Games existed in a realm apart from worldly mayhem.

Ron O’Brien, the U.S. diving coach both in Munich and Atlanta, put it most plainly on Saturday: “I don’t think there’s anyone who comes to an Olympics anymore and walks around thinking something can’t happen.” It can. It does. It just did.

That a “terrorist” attack might occur on American soil also ranks as old news. The World Trade Center attack demonstrated that our borders can be penetrated by hard-core terrorists. Many people believe the loss of TWA Flight 800 will prove to be an updated version of the same lesson. And attacks on U.S. embassies and military bases overseas only pound the point deeper: Isolation from international terrorism no longer is an American option. Ready or not, we’re in the game.

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Yes, but what if initial FBI suspicions are correct? What if this turns out to be a case of an American “terrorist” bombing Americans? Again, it’s ground that has been broken before: Oklahoma City, to name but one example. For that matter, the carnage of crime experienced every day in U.S. cities also can be viewed as a form of terrorism. It certainly has many Americans living with fear no less palpable than that found in Belfast, say, or Tel Aviv.

The word “terrorist” is placed in quotes, because at this point the designation--a loaded one--is only a law enforcement theory. The bomber might just as easily turn out to be a plain old crackpot with a grudge against the Games or host city. This, too, has precedent. Remember Jimmy Wade Pearson? He was a Los Angeles Police Department officer who in 1984 planted a pipe bomb on the Turkish team bus. He then “discovered” the device and disarmed it. Why? Well, he was upset with his supervisor and figured a heroic act might hasten a transfer.

That the Atlanta assailant chose as his killing field a place where people had come to dance and party sets no new standard for outrage. This is a nation that has seen schoolchildren on a playground raked with automatic weapon fire, and churches bombed and burned down by the score. There are no sanctuaries anymore.

And let no one be surprised that on the morning after the bombing, athletic competition--and the television commercials--were resumed on pace. They also played professional football the first Sunday after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And after the Munich bloodshed, Avery Brundage, the Olympic leader, had announced--to some criticism--that “the Games must go on.” Not stopping the Games, he suggested, would expose the uselessness of terrorism and discourage future attacks. This point must have been lost on the person who planted the bomb in Centennial Olympic Park.

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That the bomb attack happened specifically in Atlanta constituted less a surprise than it might have only a week or two ago. From the start of the Games, it appeared the Atlanta organizing committee was not in control of its event. That the buses hadn’t been running on time and computers kept freezing and traffic was hopelessly jammed, in the end, might have no tangible connection to the bomb. Nonetheless, the breakdowns created an impression of chaos and ineptitude, and this--in hindsight--made a deadly security breach seem all the more plausible.

And what now?

Well, no surprises are expected here, either. The nation will rally around these Games, wrapping them even more tightly in red, white and blue. Chins will jut out. Smiles fixed. The world will be shown that, despite calamity, America in general and Atlanta in particular can hang together and prevail.

No, these Games will go on, and might well flourish, and why not? All that happened was that someone exploded a bomb in the middle of an Olympic park where thousands of people had come to dance: Nothing novel or surprising about that. Which, more than anything else, is what makes it so powerfully awful.