After I posted my wonderment about how and why the torch was in San Francisco so soon after the start of the "relay," I got my answer in a newspaper article accompanied by a world map showing the route of this year's torch relay.

The Olympic flame is being flown all over the world, on an apparently random zigzag course, visiting major cities only. It is by no means the traditional relay whereby the torch is passed from one runner to the next along a route from Mount Olympus more-or-less directly to the current site of the Games.

I hate to say anything nice about the Nazis, but the original concept of the torch relay had some positive symbolic meaning and appeal. After 1936, when subsequent Games were held on contnents other than Europe, of course, the torch had to be flown across an ocean or two on part of its journey, but its route was basically point-to-point, and all overland segments of the journey involved hand-carrying by volunteer runners. No skipping and jumping from one capital city to the next.

I don't know if the current abbreviated and watered-down version of the torch relay is new this time around for Beijing, or if this has been going on for a while without my having noticed. But transporting the flame primarily by airplane, and by runners only for brief stretches in and around a few cities, completely negates the original athletic aspect of the relay and reduces it to an exercise in pure public relations.

And, of course, while the Chinese government may have hoped that the torch's puddle-jumping world tour would grant them positive PR, it has instead become very little more than a focus for protest. The Olympic flame touches down and disembarks from its airplane only at large population centers where activists can easily gather and try to dusrupt the exercise.

I suppose it serves them right (the bureaucratuc serrvants of the totalitarian state).