SOCIETIES RARELY BENEFIT IN THE LONG TERM.

of the dinner-party hosts who shove all their mess into closets 15 minutes before the guests appear.

And this PR exercise never works anyway. When the world’s greatest athletes arrive at the Olympics, they are trailed by the world’s cattiest reporters. The opening ceremony at the 2010 Games in Vancouver provided a case study, with foreign journalists cackling about the immobilization of one of the pillars that was supposed to form the shape of an Olympic cauldron. “You call that a potlatch?” was the general hue of things.

What snafus will bedevil the Rio Games? Hard to say — though I suspect mosquitoes will play a role. One possible scenario would involve some underper- forming athlete or other getting the sniffles, then wailing to the press that she’s been Zika-poisoned. And I fear for the safety of well-intentioned, but naive correspondents who venture off into the dangerous hill neighbourhoods, the better to bring us lurid tales of gangland life. Things could end badly.

I’m not really much of an Olympics fan. Many of the most powerful apparatchiks in the movement have been shown to be corrupt. The ceremonial elements are saccharine and politically correct. And most of the sports are flat-out boring. Since no one really cares about BMX biking, synchronized swimming, taekwondo, handball and “canoe slalom,” it seems odd to get all patriotic about it when one of our own comes home with a medal.

Governments may love the short-term nationalistic buzz that builds up when these circuses comes to town — especially since it is future administrations that typically are left to pay the bill ( just ask Montrealers). But host societies rarely benefit in the long term. Seen on a global scale, the act of building tens of billions of dollars of massive sports infrastructure every two years has effectively become a hubris-fuelled potlatch tax on the entire human race.

If we are to keep the Olympics, the institution should at least be stripped of its most wasteful elements. The most obvious solution would be the creation of permanent installations for Summer and Winter Games, preferably in some place wealthy, stable, dull (in the good sense) and killermosquito-free, such as Scandinavia, Japan or Canada.

Somehow, the ancient Greeks were able to crown the fastest, highest and strongest athletes without setting flame to all their worldly possessions. We should follow their wise and ancient example. Except this time, with clothing.