The "Journey of Harmony" for the Olympic torch proceeded yesterday through India, where it took only 15,000 police, soldiers and commandos in New Delhi to protect the flame from being hijacked or drenched like the Wicked Witch of the West as it wends its way toward ignition in Beijing come August.

That ideal of the Games as symbol of peace and international brotherhood?

It was left in the starting blocks a long time ago.

The Olympics, truth be told, are a bloated, overcommercialized, drug-addicted mess, and plunking them amid the stale air and oppressive rule of China only underscores the massive hypocrisy and futility of the event.

If the Games were about only flip turns and bell laps and shuttlecocks and epees and corner kicks, that would be one thing (and still overdone).

But they're not.

They're about product. And flag-waving. And clandestine labs. And medal counts. And marketing to the nth degree.

They're about swifter, higher, stronger and cha-ching.

Cha-ching as much as anything.

Do they include magical moments and examples of great courage and beauty? Absolutely.

But they come with a price.

The IOC, then, knew precisely what it was doing when it shuffled the Games to Beijing on June 21, 1996. Did the lords of the rings believe China would be all dewy-eyed and grateful over this magnificent, welcome-to-the-club bequest? That it would get religion and automatically become Liechtenstein or Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in the ensuing 12 years?

Not on your Coca-Cola billboard, they didn't.

The IOC honchos aren't diplomats and activists, they're brokers and wholesalers. They took a look at China's (now) 1.3 billion consumers and that muscle-flexing economy and all the potential for corporate wheeling and dealing and came to a sound, practical business decision:

This must be the place.

Never mind brutality and planting boots squarely on the neck of human rights. Tiananmen Square was 1989. The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. So repression and Tibet aren't new issues when it comes to China's government. They've been around -- festering, costing lives, staining the world's largest country and its massive population (all that purchasing power!).

The crisis in Darfur and China's sugar-daddy role for Sudan's rulers? That's a more recent development and the reason Steven Spielberg gave for withdrawing as artistic adviser for the Games' ceremonies.

But the show will go on.

And on and on and on, till NBC has milked the last human-interest drop from its bazillion-dollar investment (actually, a mere $5.7 billion to televise the summer and winter Games from 2000 through 2012 -- but no live shots from Tiananmen or Bob Costas gets shipped home on the first Shanghai Airlines flight to St. Looie).

Whether Tiananmen is off-limits or not to prying cameras, politics obviously has intruded on these Games -- as it has with most others. In Beijing's case, various public officials have said they won't attend the opening ceremonies to signal their opposition to China's policies, but no full-scale boycotts are planned, other than the U.S. team's intention to avoid the local cuisine and import its own food supply.

That's called Yankee take-out.

The Beijing Games' official slogan of "One world, one dream"?

Judging from the torch's progression of daily demonstrations and the Games' frayed backdrop, those words swing and miss like a strikeout.