Welcome to the Thunderdome!

Some of us from The Daily Wenzel were taking a break at the nearby Lina's Italian Supermarket and Deli, and over espressos talked about a recent article in Sports Illustrated with some of our neighbours. The article in question was SI's coverage of the Asian Games, recently held in Qatar, and at one point makes reference to a competition between India and Pakistan in which the crowds were whipped up in a frenzy of excitement prior to the match. Describing the scene, the author summed up the situation with the remark, "Welcome to the Thunderdome". One of our party felt that this was a "derogatory remark" in keeping with "prejudiced, colonial notions" about Asians, and particularly the citizens of India and Pakistan, as little more than barbarians. To this we disagree, though we admit that on the surface it may seem that our issue is little more than semantics.

We are moving into an age where people may recognize the phrase "Welcome to the Thunderdome" as coming from the Mel Gibson movie, "Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome" without having seen the movie itself. This presents some problem as people have a tendency to confuse images of the Mad Max film with impressions of the film, compounding this with several terms that have an unfortunate tendency to be used interchangeably. For example, a barbarian is someone who has not been acculturated into ancient Greek civilization while a pagan was someone, specifically in later stages Gaelic, who refused to be incorporated into the Roman empire. This is not the same as a savage, a person who had not been exposed to the Christian theology, while an infidel was someone who refused to accept the Word of God and a heretic being a person who deliberately distorted that Word.

What we have in Beyond the Thunderdome is a population of once civilized persons rendered uncivilized; a people at one time rational and willing to follow a legal code reduced to lawlessness and emotional brutality. This is the terror of the thunderdome, not the encounter with some kind of primitive and violent culture, but rather that that culture could be us. Nowhere in modern life does that occur more frequently than in riots and large scale sporting events such as the World Cup, the Olympics, College Sports, and yes, it would appear, the Asian Games.