I certainly don’t want to underrate the power of the banners hung on the Golden Gate Bridge or the sheer numbers of people that showed up for the torch protests. In a time that Americans are being given questioning glances by the world because of our bifurcated voting, the results of our last election and administrative choices that seem out of our control, it is important that we are matching the rest of the world in causes that are internationally significant.

That being said, there is always a different power in a message by someone that works from the inside to subvert an event or takes an expected role and turns it on itself. This is why culture jamming has become such an important method of media and protest in the last decade.

Enter Majora Carter, a South Bronx activist who was chosen to be a torchbearer in San Francisco. After she received the torch, she brought out a Tibetan flag, which she hoped to carry with her while she carried the torch. From news accounts, it appears that Chinese security with assistance from SFPD took the flag and the torch from her and pushed her into the crowd.

Of course, I do not know what Majora Carter’s intentions were, and based on what she said just after the incident, she may have simply wanted to carry the torch while holding solidarity with Free Tibet message and the pro-Tibet protesters.

The end result of her actions (and the response) was the surfacing of a secondary message about free speech right here in the good ole USA and in this Olympic ritual itself. This message is that freedom of speech can only be accepted secondarily to the spectacle of the experience itself. The only torch run that was allowed to occur was one that was whitewashed and flawless in its own imagination.

The speech at the opening ceremony can be viewed, at least in part, on SFGate and symbolizes the level of denial that this ritual has come to. The speaker says that he sends the torch off with good wishes “as we allow it to pass through the streets of this beautiful city with harmony and unity.” If it seemed like they guy had a sense of humor, I would have thought that he was being intentionally ironic.

Instead, he simply enacts the absurd theatrics that carry denial forward along with our attachment to nostalgia.