M i c a h   R u b e n s t e i n
What A Wonderful World

Each nation and race on earth has something unique and beautiful that distinguishes it from other nations and races. Nowhere can this be better seen than during the Olympics. I love watching the Games… and especially the opening ceremonies, when the teams parade into the Olympic Stadium, country by country, athletes smiling and waving at the crowds, and bursting with pride to be representing their respective nations.

According to legend, the ancient Olympic Games were founded by Heracles, who is better known to us today as Hercules, the strongest man of the ancient world. The first Olympic Games for which there are written records took place in 776 BC. A naked runner named Coroebus, who was a cook by trade, won the sole event, which was a dash of about 210 yards. This made Coroebus the very first Olympic champion in history.

The ancient Olympic Games grew and continued to be played every four years for almost 1200 years. Then in 393 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, abolished the Games because he considered them pagan.

The modern Olympic Games were revived in April, 1896, by a Frenchmen named Pierre de Coubertin. The poorly-publicized event was held in Greece, and contestants weren't nationally chosen but rather came individually and at their own expense. Some contestants were tourists who happened to be in the area during the Games. Winter sports weren't added until 1908.

The International Olympic Committee produced a statement of values to describe the mission of the Olympic Games. That statement says, in part, that the Olympics are:

… the greatest expression of sport, and opposed to every barrier or border, and an occasion for the meeting of different ways of life and cultures, founded on common observance of rules and on mutual respect.

The statement continues, clarifying the fact that the competitions are not between countries, but rather between teams and individuals. To me, there's always been an inherent contradiction in the Olympics, whose statement of values, as you just read, says they are opposed to every barrier and border, and yet they select contestants from candidate pools that are in fact highly regulated by barriers and borders.

How can we make sense of this seeming contradiction, and is there anything wrong with geographic and nationalistic borders? The whole point of the Olympics is to promote international acceptance and understanding. This isn't as easy as it sounds, though, because our prejudices often run deep

There's a wonderful joke that gets right to the heart of differences between peoples. It's a description of heaven and hell, in which heaven is described as a place where the police are British, the mechanics are German, the cooks are French, the lovers are Italian, and it's all organized by the Swiss. However, in hell the police are German, the mechanics are French, the cooks are British, the lovers are Swiss, and it's all organized by the Italians.

Are these nationalistic descriptions mere stereotypes? Well, yes and no. While Britain is known for their capable, civilized and unarmed police force… yet you'll nonetheless occasionally find examples of British police brutality. The French, known for their excellent cuisine, are not all chefs extraorindaire. And while Italy is famous for being the land of amore, love, there are, undoubtedly, some awkward Italian lovers.

So nations do, in fact, seem to have certain propensities or characteristics. And this isn't a bad thing. The detail-oriented, fine-craftsman Germanic mind is perfectly suited to producing mechanical products, like automobiles, that far surpass similar products from other countries in terms of their design, reliability and engineering.

But what happens when we start to mix or imitate foreign cultures…what then?

When Czech composer Antonin Dvorak came to America at the end of the 19th Century, he was hired to lead the newly founded American Conservatory of Music in New York. It was his hope to help American composers find their own musical identity. Unitl this point, Americans simply imitated European styles and music, composing music that sounded like second-rate European works. Dvorak urged young Americans not to try to imitate anyone else, but rather to find their own identity or voice, which he said they would find on their own, not foreign, soil.

Shortly after I graduated from college, I went on a Traveling Fellowship that took me throughout Europe to meet with symphonic composers and their publishers. After being in Rome, Italy for two weeks, I was starved to hear live music in concert, and saw a poster that said a local orchestra was playing an outdoor concert that very evening, in one of the palace courtyards designed by the great Leonardo da Vinci. So I went to the concert.

The first piece the orchestra played was a suite of movements by an Italian composer named Ottorino Resphigi. Resphigi's music is colorful and demonstrative… just like the Italian people, but it's also very demanding of the musicians. They did an excellent job for an amateur orchestra.

Then the group played a work by Czech composer Antonin Dvorak called "Symphony #9: From the New World." This was a musical diary, of sorts, inspired by Dvorak's extended trip to America in 1893 and 1894. And although the orchestra's rendition was very good, the piece didn't sparkle like the Resphigi.

After intermission, the concert concluded with a performance of American composer Aaron Copland's ballet suite called Rodeo. At this point I had been away from home for almost two months. I was homesick, and in spite of eating wonderful foods, I was aching for a cheeseburger and a hotdog. So I was really looking forward to hearing a taste of home with the Copland piece.

But during the performance, I had to stop myself from laughing many times because the orchestra, although able to play the notes, couldn't portray the essence of the piece… it's bright, toe-tapping rhythms, it's sashaying phrases, and it's fierce sense of independent spirits that could tame a wilderness.

If you've ever had the experience of hearing someone recite a passage in a foreign language-and they don't know how to speak that language-you'll have an idea of what it sounded like. Because they didn't understand the musical language, they couldn't portray the meaning, and, to put it bluntly, the acCENTS were conSTANTly on the wrong sylLABLES.

So what does all this have to do with the Olympics conundrum which began this essay?

Even though the Olympics is not a competition between countries and national teams, it is a competition between individuals and individual teams. And while the United States or Russia or Japan may win a high number of medals, no one country can lay claim to having the best athletes. When athletes from different nations compete side by side, barriers do fall because we see that the competition is between two human beings, no matter where they're from, and they stand next to each other on totally equal footing. And that's why I think it's important for the contestants to come from different countries and races… otherwise, there would be no barriers to break.

It seems to me, then, that cultural heritage and identity is a good thing. The world would be a sadder place if there weren't, for instance, Kung Po Chicken, or Wiener Schnitzel, Pasta Bolognese or Coq au vin…. And while some restaurants make Wiener Schnitzel better than others, it's not that Wiener Schnitzel as a dish is inherently better than Kung Po Chicken.

In the song What A Wonderful World, made famous by the great Louis Armstrong, some of the lyrics go:

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin' hands, sayin' "How do you do?"
They're really saying "I love you"

The Old Testament describes a flood that destroyed and purified the world. When the waters subsided and the new world was ready for every different species of animal to re-populate it, God put his symbol in the sky, a rainbow, made up of all the different basic colors in a light spectrum. It seems to me, then, that the world that Louis Armstrong described is supposed to have many different colors in it, and it's the variety and individual identity of each separate part that makes this world a truly wonderful whole.