by Pico Iyer
By the time he finally secured the record, Aaron concluded that “all that Atlanta had to offer was hatred and resentment.”
The fact of racial division, of course, was not unusual; but what made Atlanta singular, in my experience, was its hope that growth rates and slogans alone could make inequities go away. Be good for business, the “Atlanta Spirit” kept telling its citizens, and business will be good for you: “more people want to relocate to Atlanta than to any other major city,” it reassured people in no position to move at all, and Fortune magazine has declared ours the fourth-best city on the planet for doing business, it reminded desperate souls hardly inclined to savor the Dow-Jones listings.
After a short while in Atlanta, I began to feel that the city’s greatest energies went into covering up the wounds it could not heal (as it had done with myths of racial brotherhood from Brer Rabbit to Driving Miss Daisy). As I drove around the city of megamalls and superstations, I found locals telling me, over and over, how Alonzo Herndon, the founder-president of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, had started life as a half-black slave—the owner of a barbershop. I got reminded, again and again, that Herman Cain, the head of Godfather Pizza, had been born to a black chauffeur, who drove Coca-Cola chairman Robert Woodruff around. I heard how Atlanta was the site of the National Black Arts Festival and home to the alternative black spring break, Freaknic. Why, not only did it house “the largest concentration of black colleges in America” but in one of them—Morehouse—there was even an Institute for Managing Diversity.
It began to seem, in fact, as if the deepest division here was not so much between black and white as between those who were willing to buy into the belief that profit curves could be the answer to suffering and those who were not. In the Atlanta Daily World (“the oldest black newspaper in America,” its offices on Auburn Avenue), I read vivid accounts of black debutante balls, and in the Atlanta Tribune, a magazine devoted to the needs of go-go young black executives, I read, “In a business sense, Dexter [King] could succeed in managing, marketing and advertising ‘The King Legacy’ to heights possibly equaling the heirs and business associates of Robert Woodruff [the Coca-Cola Co.] and Walt Disney [the Disney Co.]” For those who endorsed the Atlanta vision, it seemed, equality could be packaged like Mickey Mouse.
For those who did not, though, it must have seemed as if the Civil War had never ended (and one reason why so many civil rights victories were won in Atlanta, of course, was that so many civil rights battles had been fought here). In the local paper, letters every day raged against “occupied Atlanta” and staunchly opposed the removal of the Confederate Stars and Bars from the Georgia flag (while want ads nearby solicited “old Ku Klux Klan outfits, burnt Klan crosses and other civil rights memorabilia”); meanwhile, in the main mall in town, Underground Atlanta, stores were selling signs that said PARKING FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANS ONLY and mementos from the National Negro Baseball League, where the Black Crackers had been the answer to the local minor-league power (run by Coke), the Crackers.
Atlanta had, in fact, been thrashing out the Olympics’ central theme—“Can we all get along?”—since the time when Charles Maurras, visiting the first modern Olympiad, had said, “When different races are thrown together and made to interact, they repel one another, estranging themselves, even as they believe they are mixing.” Yet the debate that had begun here exactly a hundred years before, at the grand Cotton States and International Exposition—Booker T. Washington suggesting black and white work together but apart, like the fingers of a hand, W. E. B. Du Bois denouncing that as the “Atlanta Compromise”—was still going strong after the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Atlanta regularly reminded us that it was the “Capital of the New South”; less often did it recall that the term the New South had been coined in 1886.
On my first few days in town, I simply couldn’t get over how small the new Olympic host was. I knew it was sometimes referred to as a “forest in search of a city,” and that part of its charm lay in its proximity to nature, its roads following the zigzags of ancient Indian tracks; but still I was amazed to find that downtown itself scarcely stretched for five blocks in any direction: it felt to me as if San Jose were preparing to host the world. Yet there seemed no point in seeing Atlanta only in its worst light, and so, after a few days, I moved out of Perimeter Center and into Buckhead. Buckhead is the center of gold-fixture Atlanta (an “extremely competitive hospitality atmosphere,” as the locals have it), and the center of Buckhead is the flagship hotel of the Ritz-Carlton chain, built next to the company’s global headquarters. The Ritz issues a full-page treatise on “Guest Attire,” which it places in every room, noting that “ladies may wear dresses or evening suits” in the Dining Room and that jackets are “preferred” for gentlemen even at the breakfast table. It serves afternoon tea every day in its white marble and mahogany lounge, and guests are reminded that “sterling silver strainers” are deployed, and “fine English bone china and tea cups.” To pick up his sugar cubes, a visitor is offered “silver tongs.”
Just five minutes away from the Ritz, as I drove down the leafy, gracious lanes that house Atlanta’s most established powers, edging past Tuxedo Road and the other areas sometimes known as “Coca-Cola Row,” I saw real estate notices pointing to EUROPEAN VILLAS and advertising ENGLISH TUDOR AND CARRIAGE HOUSES. I went inside the Governor’s Mansion and was shown, by gracious docents, its English fireguards and Italian marble, noble paintings of Confederate heroes looking down on us. In Swan House, nearby, I was introduced to faux marble in the bathroom and, instead of electric lights, fake candles; copies of the English magazine Country Life were scattered, as if carelessly, around the tables, and in the place where ancestral portraits would be hung in the English country house it was designed to resemble, the 1928 confection had put up generic pictures of old people.
Back in the Ritz, I found that one magazine in my room (“The Guide to the Civilized South”) was devoted almost entirely to costume parties and charity balls, with a special pull-out section on “The Women of Polo”; another, The Season, consisted of picture after picture of lily-white women in their coming-out dresses (in between ads for cosmetic dentistry), one of the girls actually graced with the name of Memory.
Yet Buckhead’s grandest claim to international status seemed to reside in the two large shopping malls that guard the Ritz like tutelary lions. One of them placed itself in a list of the world’s most important squares (“St. Peter’s Square, Union Square, Red Square, Trafalgar Square, Times Square, Lenox Square”); the other simply announced, “World Class City. World Class Facilities.”
The malls were certainly spectacular—the equal of anything I’d seen in Bangkok or Cape Town—and in one of them I came upon a Snooty Hooty and Co. outlet, in the other a Successories franchise. Phipps Plaza seemed to stand for the very notion of mass-market exclusiveness, with its sweeping staircases and polished brass, a concierge standing amidst the white columns of Monarch Court to direct me to the Nail Elite outlet and a Hair Artisans salon, the Civilized Traveler shop and the Silver Spoon Café.
A DIVISION OF A 150-YEAR-OLD FRENCH COMPANY said the signs all around. JEWELRY IN THE SOUTH SINCE 1887; A TRADITION SINCE 1985.
It would be silly to make too much of this—silly, even, to make as much of it as Atlanta does—but the fact remains that it was at the Ritz (where “shirts must be worn at all times” even in the Fitness Center, and “name-badges must be removed in the public areas of the hotel”) that my sixteen-dollar Payless Shoe Source loafers were filched within seconds of my placing them in the corridor to be cleaned.
Such petty mishaps can happen anywhere, of course, but they strike a less happy note in a city that is constantly reminding you of how civilized it is (and, in a lifetime of traveling, I had experienced such thefts only in South Africa). When I checked out the next morning, hopping shoeless to the reception desk (in violation of every tenet of the “Guest Attire” credo) and being ushered, in my socks, into a stret
ch limo to be taken to a Benny’s outlet in a nearby mall to repair my loss, I noticed that the friendly young bellboy deputed to accompany me was the first black person I’d seen around the Ritz.
I remembered then, thinking back, how, going into a fish restaurant downtown for an expensive business lunch, I’d seen homeless bodies huddled on the spiral staircase, seeking shelter from the winter cold; and I thought back to the ragged men who’d come up to my car at red lights, as they do in Addis Ababa and Calcutta, to clean the windshield.
The impression I was beginning to form of Atlanta was perilously close to the first impression I’d had of it, coming down into Hartsfield: of a futuristic, globally linked web of terminals surrounded for as far as the eye could see by untamed wilderness.
One night, as I was driving back towards Buckhead, the bright neon towers of downtown behind me (and the sign for EQUITABLE, as always, saying only ABLE), I passed a sign informing me that the interstate was closed. Instantly, I took the next exit off the expressway, and felt myself falling through a crack in the Chamber of Commerce’s brochures, into some unlit no-man’s-land. Girls were walking along the unpaved highway in cutoff shorts. Men were huddled in the empty parking lot of a fast-food joint, gathered above some figure crouching in the dark. A policeman’s red light was turning, turning, turning outside a run-down motel (couples: $14), and, in the middle of the street, for no reason I could discern, small fires were burning.
The liquor stores with bars across their windows, the ribs shacks that looked as if they’d been looted long ago—none of the places here looked eager to welcome visitors. Rough music was pumping out of Harem Lingerie (ALL-GIRL STAFF) and another such place called Lady Relax, and, as in some night-town inversion of Buckhead, every face I saw was black. I needed to get directions, though, so I pulled into a vacant lot, and walked into a bar. Girls were sitting on stools in the near darkness, their nipples bare for customers’ inspection.
In terms of exposure and global influence, the Olympics probably enjoyed their heyday, ironically, during the darkest days of the Cold War, when many of the world’s most bellicose powers realized that the Games were a perfect forum for showing off the strengths of their systems and conducting war in peacetime clothes (“Military Patrol,” after all, had once been an Olympic sport). Thus, twenty-one nations staged a noisy boycott in 1976, because a New Zealand rugby team had visited South Africa, and the U.S. led sixty-five other nations in a boycott of Moscow in the next Summer Games; in 1984, the Soviet Union returned the favor by leading its friends in a boycott of Los Angeles. At that time, many nations became more or less full-time Olympic factories, to the point where East Germany, with twelve thousand professional trainers and scientists generating brilliant new methods of cheating, won more gold medals than the U.S. in 1976 (thanks, in part, to a cunning Machiavellian rereading of the Olympic spirit, whereby they concentrated on individual sports instead of team events so as to get the most bang for their buck). The East Bloc supported its stars with state-sponsored salaries and sinecures; the Western nations did the same with advertising contracts and television gigs.
These days, in the Games as everywhere, power politics have been translated into hard cash—the Games have been seen as highly lucrative ever since Los Angeles made a profit of over $200 million in 1984—and the IOC has added MTV-friendly sports like snowboarding and mountain biking, while hushing up (its critics claim) potentially damaging violations of its doping policy (because asthma-medication stimulants are allowed in the Olympics, 60 percent of the U.S. team in 1994 claimed to be suffering from asthma).
And as loyalty has been privatized and affiliation has begun to be conceived in virtual ways, the Games have had to adapt to a new world, in which markets cut through all national distinctions. This was evident in Barcelona, where a group of not very like-minded athletes marched out behind a straggle of twelve flags, as part of the so-called Unified Team of the Former Soviet Republics. It was even clearer a few days later when Michael Jordan, the most celebrated Olympian on the planet, threatened not to stand before the American flag if he was forbidden to wear his Nikes. The corporation had become the defining nation-state.
It is dangerous to make too much of all this—in ancient Greece, too, the best athletes routinely hopped between cities, going where the money was, and no ideals of “amateurism” ever prevented them from being rewarded for victory with jobs for life and statues in their honor. Yet what quickens our sense of modern athletes selling themselves to the highest bidder—classic commodities in a very free market—is that sports has become as great a force as Hollywood, almost, in working the global market (to the point where few of us think twice nowadays about seeing the Miami Heat take on the Detroit Pistons in Tokyo, or hearing that Washington’s team is led by a seven-foot-seven Romanian movie star who can dunk over a seven-foot-six Dinka tribesman). In 1998, the National Hockey League actually interrupted its season to send its stars to participate in the Olympics (having seen the National Basketball Association gain huge worldwide exposure in the Summer Games); the only trouble was that the North American league now contains so many Russian and Swedish and Slavic players that neither the Americans nor the Canadians reached the finals in a sport they professionally control.
The Olympians, meanwhile, find themselves not always knowing whether they’re coming or going in a world where the flag is being eclipsed by the logo and the strongest Kenyan runner is not in evidence because he’s in the process of becoming a Dane. Many an Olympic city these days is dominated by the latest Nike Town (though Nike is not an Official Partner), and in Nagano, for example, the whole world was warmed by the sight of two Kenyan skiers, complete with colorful Olympic stories (neither had ever seen snow till two years before), until it was revealed that both were, in fact, Nike constructs, having been discovered and sponsored by the giant shoe company as the hottest novelty item this side of the Jamaican bob-sledders. “An Olympic athlete running in a Hertz uniform is a generation away,” Mark McCormack, one of the strongest agents in sports, has said, and a festival that depends for its very existence upon the rivalry between nation-states (and the contradictory wish to show that we’re all one under the skin) is being forced to push its square pegs into the round holes of a world drawn by Jackson Pollock, in which, people say, there will soon be “no Japan, only Japanese.”
In 1996, the entire Canadian 4 × 100 relay team came from the West Indies (and was competing, of course, against other teams from Britain, France, and Trinidad, full of West Indians); Mark McKoy, a Guyana-born, English-bred product of Canada (living in Monaco with his German wife), was somehow running for Austria. And China’s age-old supremacy in table tennis was being challenged only because the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Japan, and Austria (again) were all being led by Chinese players.
“An athlete is always competing for himself,” I heard Bart Veldkamp say unapologetically after becoming the only athlete to break a Dutch monopoly in five-thousand-meter speed skating. Veldkamp, too, was Dutch, as it happened (and passionately cheered on by ranks of orange-clad fans with a nine-piece brass band), but he had figured out that his best hope for success lay in becoming a Belgian—in fact, the entire Belgian Olympic team.
“I was born in Holland,” he told the world’s press, while flanked by Dutchmen. “I skate for Belgium. But if you start looking at the moon and ask, ‘Where do you come from?’ I come from earth.”
As I got ready to leave Atlanta at the end of my reconnaissance trips, driving past the “Complete Apartment Communities” for the final time, and taking my leave of the faux antique villas, I began to wonder how it would ever get on with the world, given that its sense of internationalism seemed such a local one (a true cosmopolitan, after all, is not someone who’s traveled a lot so much as someone who can appreciate what it feels like to be Other). The most global thing about it, in fact, seemed to be its divided nature: Atlanta did not know what it was exactly—even what it wanted to be—and so had ended up as a model of the a
spiring city at the end of the millennium, high-rising office blocks coming up at its center, and wasteland all around. Half generic office park and half slow-moving backwater, it seemed too northern for most southern tastes, and too southern for most northerners (a mix of “Northern charm and Southern efficiency,” in JFK’s unforgiving put-down). To me, it looked mostly like a small-town innocent done up in a three-piece suit.
For postmodern theorists like Rem Koolhaas (who first called Atlanta “a new imperial Rome”), the city was a model of “the real city at the end of the 20th century” precisely because of its absence of character and weight. It was a posturban place, he wrote, “post-inspirational” and to all intents and purposes posthuman, a “ghost of a city” built around the corporate “void space” of the atrium (invented by Atlanta’s own John Portman as a modern version of the ancient Roman courtyard). Its great beauty for him lay in the fact it had no traditional beauty, no center or community. For those condemned to live with this emptiness, however—especially for those in the black “hole of the doughnut”—such rococo notions probably offered less solace, and, as I looked back on what I’d seen, all I could think of, beneath the cosmetic pretensions, was the “Satellite City” of the Evelyn Waugh story, to which “Mr. Plastic the Citizen” gets sent, with a “Certificate of Human Personality.” Its impersonal blocks covered up an empty, broken heart.
