Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  Sultanova, last Competition’s silver-medallist and this year’s favorite for gold, gathers speed, whizzes by front-row spectators at what seems an alarmingly dangerous velocity, reaches her takeoff point near the rink’s far end, whips herself up into the air, spins one two three yes four times, and manages to get off three shots from her Kalashnikov as she lands. The rotation of her spin is too fierce though: one shot finds its target in an effigy of Tsar Nicolas II, but another splinters wood along the far barrier, and the third hits a janitor sweeping seats way up in the fifteenth row.

  As the janitor receives medical attention, Sultanova heaves a deep sigh, reloads her rifle, and lines up for another attempt. ‘It’s a stupidly hard jump,’ she will tell me later, deep bags under her eyes. ‘This is supposed to be ice-dancing. Tell me, where is it dancing when you just fling yourself into the air as hard as you can, huh?’

  This, however, is all the dissent I’ll hear from young Miss Sultanova because her coach soon arrives. He’s the controversial Icelandic Haldor Gudmundsson who not only guided Butts-Liberty to gold two Competitions ago but also managed gold and silver at the Sixth Competition with, respectively, Germany’s Edwina Kschwendt (now deceased), and Sultanova. He immediately sends the defending silver medallist to her dressing room and provides his own version of her opinion.

  ‘She is much tired,’ he says, lighting a second cigarette while one still smolders in the corner of his mouth. ‘She say big, grumpy thing. She not mean it. What she mean is that she excited for competition and that quadruple Salchow has taken Women’s Ice Dancing And Shooting to whole new level.’

  I ask Gudmundsson about Sultanova’s point that ‘flinging yourself in the air as hard as you can’ can hardly be called dancing.

  ‘What is this dancing that everyone wants so much?’ asks Gudmundsson, waving his hands in the air, two cigarettes now hanging from his lower lip. ‘You call it dancing if you want but IMWGD also want an athletics competition. So which is it? I ask you. You can have arts, or you can have sports. You cannot have both.’

  IMWGD, the International Military War Games Dance Committee - Gudmundsson pronounces this, as do all the competitors here, as a rueful joke: ‘I’m wigged’ - would pretend to be appalled to hear a coach dismiss the Competition’s artistic aims so effortlessly. But Gudmundsson isn’t finished. He proceeds to tick off other events in this year’s Competition:

  ‘You try to tell me that the Singles and Doubles Tumbling and Bayoneting routines are dancing? If you say that, I say you are blind. That is not dancing. That is gymnastics with gunplay, nothing more. The Cheerleading and Tactical Competition? Bah! What’s going to get you a higher score, huh? That you kill more of the opposing teams than anyone else or that you don’t mess up your cheers as you die?’

  Off the record, even IMWGD officials concede that Gudmundsson has a point. Fatalities at this year’s event are expected to exceed the last Competition’s record total of 741. Forty-seven countries have pulled out of the Tap and Jazz Events after an Australian entrant was allowed to enter with an Uzi, something the protestors - keen to keep the competition single-action - are calling ‘legal to the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the Competition’. And the ice dancers, tiny Irena Sultanova included, are risking hip dislocation and permanent disability in pursuit of ever more difficult jumps that turn alleged dance moves into inelegant struggles against dismemberment.

  A Stab at Interactivity

  In a bid to combat what it sees as a ‘plateau-ing’ audience share over the last two Competitions, NBC has introduced Bang!, a tele-video interactive available over their digital cable hook-ups.

  ‘It’s fantastic!’ says NBC President Vivika Summers. ‘You’ve got all the regular digital interactive features - athlete information, Competition history and so forth - but for the first time, you’ll actually be able to compete against real Competition athletes in online gaming!’

  The intended big draw is that the online gaming culminates in the redundantly titled BangBang!, in which the top online gamers from around the world will be brought to Ottawa for a special live ammunition final. The overall winner receives $50,000, and NBC will provide $10,000 to the families of all non-winners.

  After 24 years, and on the eve of the Seventh Competition, has the world’s largest and most popular international war games dance event lost its way?

  Ideals That Surprised Everyone By Working

  As envisioned by its founder, Jackson Grant Lincoln VI, the ebullient if short-tempered former Governor of Tennessee, the Competition is ‘a place for the world to set aside its politics and historic rivalries, and to compete against each other in fair and equitable war games dancing competitions, held under the banner of international freedom and with the aim of as little excessive bloodshed as possible.’

  No one, of course, upon hearing such idealistic sentiment - spoken by Lincoln at the Opening Ceremonies of the First Competition - took them at face value, especially not after Lincoln himself became one of the First Competition’s 134 fatalities. (He was killed in an accidental grenade blast while competing in the Wheelchair Formation Drills, though the American team did go on to win gold, dedicating their victory to Lincoln’s memory.) The general assumption was that countries would, as they had on the world’s battlefields, use the dance provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the Geneva Convention as cover for all manner of aggression and atrocity.

  But then a strange thing happened. The First Competition’s very first event was Modern Interpretive Artillery (Light-Armoured Division). After an incident-less opening round (Finland v Malta), the world held its collective breath as Israel faced Syria in a randomly selected match-up. Would Israel unveil its long-rumored handheld smart bombs and use the opportunity to vaporize eight fit Syrians? Would Syria, as also long-rumored, base its routine on a day in the life of a suicide bomber and not only obliterate itself but the Israeli team as well?

  Tensions were high. The audience removed itself to a safe distance. The music began (Kander & Ebb’s ‘Two Ladies’), and dancing commenced. Four minutes and thirty-one seconds later, it was finished, with only a single Syrian casualty so clearly and artfully within the rules that the Syrian coach publicly shook the hand of the Israeli coach. The dancers and coaches had taken the Competition seriously as a competition, not as a further excuse for more war. Maybe Jackson Lincoln had a point after all.

  And aside from a few infamous incidents (the Chilean germ-warfare ‘accident’ of the Third Competition; the shortlived Canadian fashion of choreographed self-genocide in the Fifth), the Competition has remained broadly true to Lincoln’s founding sentiments of providing a place for international fairness and healthy competitive spirit. Which makes it all the more ironic that the greatest current complaint about the Competition is that it has now become too competitive, losing all sense of fun and beauty in the quest for gold, gold, gold.

  Keeping Things Heep

  IMWGD’s President disagrees. As he does with most things.

  ‘The Competition, it evolves,’ debonair and surprisingly tiny President Argento Conetti tells me later in the tasteful offices rented for him in Ottawa’s premier business district for the duration of the Seventh Competition. ‘Just like society has evolution. Things are, eh, how you say, sharper in the world than in Jackson Lincoln’s day. They could afford things to be a little fuzzier then, more, eh, the expression in English is “laid-back”, I believe. Now, you have hundreds and hundreds of channels on the television dedicated to war sports, not just dancing. You’ve got film festivals and rival competitions that, eh, gather to themselves the impression of hipness.’

  Conetti pronounces this heepness, and it is a theme to which he warms. ‘Heepness, fair or not, is what the Competition must keep up with if it is to survive. We cannot be accused of being un-heep or that is the end of us, no? We must be as heep as the next fellow and so that maybe means the Competition gets tougher. It gets faster and harder. Okay, okay, okay, so maybe some of the artistry su
ffers maybe a leetle, but if that is the price for heepness, than I am willing to cough it up.’

  ‘Faster and harder’ the Competition certainly is. Take the Synchronised Swimming Subterfuge, as a random example. In the First Competition, Sweden won gold with a four-minute routine to Handel’s ‘For Unto Us A Child Is Born’ in which their high marks for artistic perfection overcame low technical marks for only upending four of six target minisubmarines. In the last Competition, the US team scored gold for a ninety-second routine to ‘Lady Marmalade’ in which they achieved middling artistic scores but a set of perfect technicals for exploding eighteen full-size floating mines with potassium grenades. Much like the ice dancing, more artistic routines barely got a look in. Faster and harder, indeed.

  Critics blame this dominance of technical perfection over artistic aims on three key developments that seem to be coming to a head in this year’s Competition:

  Exhibit One: Cheating, Letter vs. Spirit

  As already mentioned, 47 countries have removed themselves from this Competition’s Tap and Jazz Events after Australian Jason Coolibah won the right to use a multi-shot Uzi. The event is described in the Competition’s bylaws as ‘a classic event taken directly from the battlefields of World War I in which contestants display the beauty and poetry of tap and jazz in hand-to-hand combat.’ This was interpreted for the first six Competitions as limiting the event to single-shot handguns. Coolibah pointed out that the rules only list maximum measurements for barrel length and contain no actual reference to single-action guns.

  Despite cries of this being unsportsmanlike - in the Australian National Qualifiers, Coolibah won a place on the international team after killing every single one of his fellow single-action competitors in the first round - the Competition Steering Committee reluctantly admitted that Coolibah was correct. He and his Uzi have been allowed to proceed, but since every other country in the world had only had single-action qualifying rounds to find their own competitors, no one else stands a chance, hence the mass withdrawal. Only very small countries like Benin and French Guiana remain, hoping to earn themselves posthumous silvers and bronzes.

  ‘Tap and jazz in the Eighth Competition is going to be one quick, boring bloodbath,’ complains one of the withdrawing contestants.

  No Nukes! Yet.

  What IMWGD hasn’t allowed this year is the use of so-called ‘body nukes’, small, shoulder-mounted launchers used to fire low-payload, specifically-targeted nuclear weapons.

  ‘There are limits,’ says Doctor Conetti. ‘I don’t think anyone would seriously consider body nukes sportsmanlike.’

  Nevertheless, up to seven unidentified countries (thought to include the US, Iran, and Luxembourg) filed formal requests for their use.

  ‘We just can’t get the insurance,’ says Conetti. ‘Besides, you’d need a playing field of about 400 square kilometres that you’d never be able to use again. Ottawa has declined to agree to such a request.’

  Maybe next Competition in Kuala Lumpur, then?

  ‘I have no comment at this time,’ says Conetti.

  This is not an isolated case. There was a similar uproar at the last Competition over Bulgaria’s use of a tank in Cheerleading and Tactical, and this year, there have been complaints about Japan’s laser-guidance systems in the Salsa Single Elimination event.

  ‘What’s the point of feeling the music in your soul if all you’re able to do is put off death for an extra ten or fifteen seconds?’ asks defending Salsa gold-medallist Karen Cupitt, who retired over the summer after losing her sixth partner in three years to competitive fatalities. ‘It’s just stopped being any fun.’

  Exhibit Two: Amateur vs. Professional

  The Competition was started as a meeting place for the world’s best amateur war games dancers, intending to catch college competitors before they entered the lucrative professional leagues, but this division began to blur early on. Members of the US Professional Ballroom Martial Arts League, the world’s most profitable professional sports league, were naturally banned from the First Competition. However, members of the Chinese BMAL were allowed to compete as that League was state-run and therefore, arguably, still amateur since no one profited.

  Then, in the Fourth Competition, Armament Actors Equity argued that its members should be allowed to participate in the mime events, pointing out that India had been allowed to enter several Bollywood stars only because India’s equivalent actors’ union did not have a mime division and therefore the otherwise professional actors were, according to a loophole, only amateur mimes.

  The floodgates were opened. The USPBMAL had its members competing in the very next Competition and nearly every event this year is filled with various levels of world professionals in every conceivable permutation. The athletes argue that this is merely a levelling of the playing field, but there can be little doubt the Competition loses some of its naive charm when the man you’re rooting for on the High Dive Napalm Springboard is already a millionaire many times over.

  Exhibit Three: The Increase of Casualties

  Much has been made of the increase in fatalities at the Competition over the years, but this complaint is perhaps the one that is least justifiable. While it is true that the raw number of deaths has invariably increased over the years - from 134 in the First Competition to an estimated 1,000 this year - the number of athletes participating has also increased: nearly 11,000 are expected to be here this year as opposed to just 1,685 at the First Competition (see chart). The percentage of athletes killed has actually stayed at a fairly steady eight per cent.

  ‘That’s still an awful lot of people killed,’ says Patricia Merton, head of War No Dance Yes, the largest (if faintly heeded) protest group against the very concept of the Competition. ‘I mean, how can you sit there with a straight face and tell me that the 1,000 people expected to die in this year’s Competition is acceptable because it’s part of a historic percentage? Can you even hear what you’re saying?’

  Minority pressure groups aside, it is generally agreed by Competition experts that the perception of the continually escalating body count is worse than the actual fact of it.

  ‘What happens,’ says Hugh Echo, a seasoned Competition broadcaster and commentator, ‘is that the perception of need for a high body count takes over, and I think that is something to be wary of. Fatalities are meant to happen with a heavy heart and with artistic import. I’d start to worry if they became something to aim for for their own sake, rather than just the byproduct of a natural competitive spirit. I do wonder if that’s the hidden reason behind a lot of these new weapons and tactics, and not just a natural need to excel.’

  The Seventh Competition will be watched carefully, and if the fatality count exceeds the eight per cent threshold, President Conetti has promised to look at the current rules. ‘If the fatalities get too high then, yes, I guess, who will be left to compete in future games?’ he tells me while staring out his office window. ‘We don’t want to get to a point where it is more than just the chaff getting eliminated.’

  Whither the Jamboree?

  ‘Oh, God!’ shouts Conetti, ‘Don’t come to me about the Jamboree! If I could get rid of it, I would! The world would be a better place!’

  The Jamboree, never the most popular part of the Competition, has this year been completely delegated to a single evening’s ‘entertainment’, broadcast on the very minor Midwestern Family Love cable network. Conetti puts his head in his hands at the thought of it. ‘All those awful cheeldren dancing around with banners and plastic rifles,’ he moans.

  In addition to the ‘awful cheeldren’, this year’s line-up boasts Cliff Richard, Gloria Estefan, and the Beach Boys. ‘Don’t look at me,’ says Conetti, ‘I didn’t plan it.’ Instead, he’s taken the mildly controversial decision of selling the rights to a production company for a flat fee. ‘Let them take the burden and good riddance.’

  Jerry Spong, the president of Falderol Productions, the company that paid that flat fee, puts a brave face
on things. ‘Well, Dr Conetti is an athlete, let’s not forget,’ he says with a permanently toothy smile. ‘We get a lot of flack from the competitors for being just a fun little party for the kids but hey, it’s tradition.’

  It is indeed. Competition Founder Lincoln envisioned the Jamboree as a ‘fun, family show to inspire future generations of Competitors’. In reality, this has meant brightly dressed platoons of elementary school children waving banners of pastel crêpe paper while ill-matched former stars performed ill-conceived duets. Remember Mickey Mouse and Brooke Shields from the First Competition? Who would have thought it would be downhill from there?

  ‘Okay, I admit there have been some low points,’ says an unabashed Spong. ‘I personally would never have put Pavarotti and Matt LeBlanc in koala suits, for example,’ referring to the particularly derided Sixth Competition’s Jamboree in Melbourne, widely believed to be the trigger for Pavarotti’s subsequent retirement from performing. ‘Although the ratings on that were very high in young demographics even so.’

  Conetti fully admits that the selling of the Jamboree to cable is an attempt to bring the viewing figures below the ratings threshold set in the Competition Charter that will allow him to cancel it once and for all. Spong is optimistic that they’ll easily beat the required twenty share, but with a trained performing moose taking centre stage to symbolise this year’s celebration of Ottawa, the outlook is unsure at best.

  ‘It’s family fun,’ says Spong.

  ‘Tat!’ screams Conetti. ‘Dreck! Unwatchable keetsch!’