Beijing's preparation for the Olympics are proceeding as well as expected as Friday's opening day approaches. Human rights, such as they were, have dwindled. Pollution has been reduced to a level of not-quite-as-many-chunks-in-the-air-
as-there-were-previously.

The Chinese themselves have not — they repeat, not — proudly assumed the mantle of East Germany and altered underage gymnasts' birth certificates to get them into competition, that is a lie.

More than 1.25 million Chinese citizens have reportedly been evicted and their homes torn down to tart up the city for foreigners. We have a new understanding of green algae and how it can be deep and sucking as opposed to merely unsightly.

The Beijing marathon will be twice as painful to watch as the athletes' major filtration organs give up. Lungs collapsing, livers expanding, kidneys exploding, you'll be able to map the torso damage well before the last stagger.

In other words, it will be like any Summer Olympics but worse.

The real Olympics

The most offensive bit is the International Olympic Committee going on about the Games still being a sunlit upland of all that is good about the striving human etc., etc.

No, they're an international embarrassment, a festival that grinds our failure in our face.

We didn't care for the planet, we will continue not to care to an unimagined degree, the competition will be tainted by cheating, great athletes from the poorer nations will keep losing for nutritional reasons, sports (especially the more naked ones) will get stranger, and medallists will advertise products we'd be wise not to buy, for it was overconsumption that got us to this point in the first place.

Almost every item used, sold and handed out in Beijing will be made of plastic. I give you computer casings, seats, tickets, walls, balls, sneakers, fake grass, sheeting, communications gear, promotional knick-knacks, food containers, garbage bags, shelter … Most of it will end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

You may think you’ll never see that souvenir keychain again unless you’re cruising off the coast of Japan but its broken-down pellets will be in every fish you eat.

Unwelcome criticism

Amnesty International reports a renewed crackdown on "domestic human rights activists, media censorship and increased use of re-education through labour as a means to clean up Beijing and surrounding areas." The Chinese government reacted to this in the same way that small towns do when you call them "hick."

"We do feel that we have problems but they are getting better and better," it said.

Yeah, and Scarborough has many cultural attractions and a safe yet thriving nightlife.

And then Chinese officials say what "Scarberians" will say when this column appears. This criticism is not constructive. It is not helpful.

Journalists are always accused of being unhelpful; the point being missed is that journalists are supposed to be unhelpful by definition.

That said, the complaint that China has blocked journalists' access to Amnesty International website is disingenuous. The reporters who cover the Olympics are in search of medals, not human rights. And they wouldn't be able to read the BBC's Chinese-language site anyway, which has finally been unblocked. Chinese Wikipedia was only going to reach the kind of people who'll be sent to labour camps or shot once the Olympics are over.

The Olympics are a corporate orgy, morally fraudulent on many levels. I have no objection to that; most mass events are. But I do object to people pretending this isn't true.

London's 2012 preparations

The great journalist Iain Sinclair last month wrote in the London Review of Books on derelict East London getting a multi-billion pound scraping in preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympics. (It's beautifully written; who else could call a shrub planted for the Olympics a "horticultural cheerleader"?)

As he reports, the buildings are so pretty in their computer-generated renderings, so tatty in real life, "an explosion of matchsticks, bubble wrap and extruded terracotta control modules." So much for the supposed urban regeneration of Olympic sites; they're windswept waste ground after the crowds leave.

If London was smart, it would have put its Olympic cash into flood barriers, and Beijing its $40 billion on devising new energy sources. The Olympics are going to be another version of the millennium: people standing around saying "We're celebrating what exactly?"

Winter of content

I remember an editor saying to me plaintively once about a profile I had written, "But there must be something about Sean Connery you like." So there must be something about the Olympics that I like. And there is. It's called snow.

People who strap planks to their legs and jump off a frozen mountain are risking their life and health. What young humans can do with snowboards leaves me gasping, I'm not even mentioning ice skates and hockey sticks.

Winter sports entrance me; summer ones seem more like things that people do normally but take to brutal extremes. Like the long jump. Or the discus throw. I'd like to see a weight lifter ice-dance, or a marathoner pause to hit a target with a shotgun. Even I run for a bus occasionally.

In the Winter Olympics, athletes are fighting ice and snow with terrifying speed and grace. In the summer, they're fighting each other and intangible things like heat which leads to sweating, which leads to people looking like something that washed up on the beach weeks ago.

Beach volleyballers are attractive, but that sport is all about the body's sexually entrancing bumps: breasts, bums and things that pop out when athletes allegedly get carried away.

It's sport for Americans and Brazilians, it's all about beauty and that's not Olympic, is it. The honest Olympic athlete just trying to do his or her best — the one without the drugs, the psychotic coach, the teetering ad contract — sometimes seems like the loneliest person in the place, compared to governments and TV networks and us smirking meanly at home. They wring the heart.

In many ways, the Olympics have gone from bad to worse. As the planet is beset, why don't we humans limit ourselves to celebrating something manageable?

Like Christmas. Or an international potluck where every nation brings its signature dish. China might actually win that one, and wouldn't face be saved then!

No need for this sweaty pretend thing, no need for that opening ceremony that always looks like a re-enactment of gym class pep rallies, and everybody's smiling as though they're going to be clubbed if they're not: It's the modern Olympic spirit. Or else.