Pierre de Coubertin, a French historian and aristocrat credited as the founder of the modern-day Olympic Games, once said the entire point of the games is for athletes to obey in rote ritual the mandated symbols of their respective nations.
Wait. I may have made that up.
But surely somebody said that. I didn't just dream it, did I?
Oh, yes. Here it is. U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, an Arkansas-caliber right-wing Republican extremist from Texas, said that.
Let's get straight on what was said by whom.
The Frenchman said, "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."
Crenshaw, speaking the other day on Fox News, said, "We don't need any more activist athletes. She should be removed from the team. [We'll get around in a few paragraphs to the specifics of the American woman hammer-thrower he wants banished.] The entire point of the Olympic team is to represent the United States of America. It's the entire point."
At this juncture, I will risk banishment from Olympic competition. I must tell you that I agree with the late Frenchman's ode to noble effort over my fellow American's ode to rote obeisance and nationalism.
For that matter, I may as well go ahead and confess that I have rooted for European golfers over American ones in the Ryder Cup. I tend to find the ale-swilling Europeans representing several nations more endearing than our generally less engaging automatons.
Please understand that, on the most important basis, I like our Bill of Rights better than their underlying creeds, in part because ours permits me to put in the newspaper that I like their golfers better.
I suspect strongly that Crenshaw doesn't mean what he says. I figure that he would be delighted with an American athlete's political activism if it came from a celebrity Olympic champion who wanted to campaign for him in south Texas.
It seems to be free American political expression that he disagrees with that he wants to punish.
The point is that freedom is hard. It's actually easier not to be free. Our founders seem to have given us freedom for the arduous challenge of keeping it as much as the joy of exercising it.
That's not because of your own individual freedom. You like that. It's because of your occasional or frequent aversion to a fellow countryman's.
My human instinct, for example, is to decree that Crenshaw shall never speak again if he can't beat what he said the other day. But my American obligation is to honor his freedom to keep speaking absurdly.
This is all about that aforementioned hammer-thrower at the U.S. Olympic trials Saturday in Eugene, Ore.
Her name is Gwen Berry. She grew up in Ferguson, Mo. She is Black. There have been deep race troubles in her hometown causing her to fear for the safety of her son.
She finished third, thus making the Olympic team and earning a spot on an awards platform. That's where she was when the Star-Spangled Banner piped up on the loudspeaker.
She says she'd been told the national anthem already would have been played for the day. But it happened to get played five minutes later than the printed schedule said.
It speaks to Berry's natural suspicion and resentment--afflictions caused by oppression or the perception thereof--that, she says, her instinctive thought was that someone had played the anthem at that point on purpose to seek to force her public allegiance.
She turned away from the flag and looked to the grandstand before pulling a T-shirt that was tied around her waist over her head. It said "American activist."
She had been disciplined before by a national sports organization for a political demonstration. But, this year, considering moods post-George Floyd, U.S. officials are letting things slide.
Crenshaw's position is that no one should let Berry's failure to obey slide. It's that either you stand in a position of obeisance to an American symbol or you can take your hammer and, well, you know.
Asked at her briefing Monday to relate what President Biden thought of the affair, spokesman Jen Psaki said, "He's incredibly proud to be an American and has great respect for the anthem and all that it represents ... . He would also say, of course, that part of that pride in our country means recognizing there are moments where we ... haven't lived up to our highest ideals, and it means respecting the right of people, granted to them in the Constitution, to peacefully protest."
Ideally, Berry would choose to honor the flag because her president supports her right not to honor it.
But that's easy for me to say.
It's her life, not mine. It's her American freedom. I have mine.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.