Colorado fire threatens Manitou Springs' livelihood

Colorado fire threatens Manitou Springs' livelihood

MANITOU SPRINGS, Colo. â€" The state's runaway fires have so far spared this mountain resort town, but as the traditionally hectic Fourth of July holiday approaches â€" and the flames loom nearby â€" economic worries hang like wood smoke over the so-called gateway to Pikes Peak.

Much of the Rocky Mountain foothills region south of Denver remains a disaster zone days after the Waldo Canyon fire swept through the Colorado Springs area, killing two people and destroying 347 homes â€" with tens of thousands of evacuees continuing to pack into emergency shelters and overflowing hotels.

But nearby Manitou Springs, which gained fame a century ago as a health resort for tuberculosis sufferers, has a different problem: Hotels like the Silver Saddle, Eagle Motel and Stagecoach Inn sit near-empty at a time when the shops and bars are usually teeming with people. Businesses simply cannot let the holiday pass without cashing in, resid ents say.

"I've got 18 rooms and they're all empty," said Aleece Gronski, owner of the Pikes Peak Inn. "I'm trying to keep my cool, because stress is a killer. But if we don't do something soon to bring the tourists back, people around here are going to panic."

Mayor Marc A. Snyder isn't so sure.

It was only Sunday when the town's 5,200 residents were evacuated. He shuddered as he recounted the craziness that came just after 1 a.m., when deputies began knocking on doors in the darkness, telling bleary-eyed residents and hotel-dwellers they had to go.

Hours later, on Sunday evening, after Snyder moved his wife and two children to a friend's house, the second-term mayor got a call from his emergency commander: The fire had been beaten back; it was time to let folks go home.

"My first reaction was no, and my second reaction was no," Snyder said. "I said 'Everyone is out of town; they're safe. That fire may not be done with us yet.'"

Snyder finally gave in. But like other civic leaders in the fire zone, he remains caught between concerns over caution and commerce: Do you follow the lead of tourism officials and bang the drum for visitors, or let prudence prevail?

"I've learned a lot about wildfires in the last five days: The threat assessment literally changes minute by minute," he said. "We could have to evacuate this town tomorrow. Who knows? And that fact worries me."

Before the fires, Manitou Springs had celebrated a success story. Once considered an eyesore at the bottom of 14,000-foot-high Pikes Peak, years of renovation paid off. Known as "the Springs" for its wealth of mineral springs, the eclectic town â€" where artists thrive and bears and deer are sometimes seen on the main drag â€" was recently named among the "coolest small towns" in America by a national travel magazine.

Still, locally owned businesses here have little margin for the whims of tourists. Muc h of Manitou Springs closes for the winter, with the nearest ski slopes hours away. Summertime is the money-making season.

"July 4 is Manitou's biggest weekend," said Roger Miller, chief operating officer of the visitors bureau. But this year, fireworks displays are banned. The annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, an athletic event that packs the town in early July, has been postponed.

"We're trying to stay positive," Miller said. "We're all going to get together soon to dream up a slogan that would bring people back to town."

When asked how far away the flames raged, Miller added, almost apologetically: "Oh, about three miles."

Nearby, in the heart of historic downtown, businessman Chris Abrams was a one-man welcome wagon. He's the owner of the Mountain Man: Muzzle-loading Outfitters, which is advertising its selection of "long rifles and pistols, knives, tomahawks, hides, furs and fine-trade goods."

"How much fire do you see in Manitou Springs?" Abrams asked one visitor. "There's no fire here, and no fire coming. And I don't believe for a moment that people won't stop coming here."

He singled out another customer. "Where are you from? Oklahoma? Well, you didn't stay away because of any fire warning, did you?"

Across the street at the Loop restaurant, manager Ben Clagett was offering a 10% deal for evacuees. Business was hurting; the restaurant was closed Sunday and continued with shortened hours this week.

"This fire came at the worst possible time," he said. "I don't get it. In the past, the fires have all been so distant, but this one hit close to home. It's right on our doorstep."

Near the edge of town, motel owner George Jones pointed up at the crest of the slope, where the blaze appeared Saturday. Townspeople, including Mayor Snyder, had watched the yellowish flames spread along the ridgeline in the near distance, the trees exploding like firecrackers. Since then, Jones said, s everal customers have called to cancel reservations.

In a way, Jones doesn't blame them. He talked about the infamous Hayman fire of 2002, which raged in the forest about 50 miles away. Back then, tourism shrank by 20%, and it took Manitou Springs years to recover.

Jones lit a Marlboro. "With that fire, we couldn't see the flames," he said. "With this one we could. They were right up there."

Locals know that in this punishing fire season â€" the worst in state history â€" other cities and towns have suffered more direct damage. Compared with others, the town has been lucky.

Manitou Springs waits for Independence Day in a state of suspended animation. "We love you firefighters" signs hang in many storefront windows; tiny American flags grace the outside of the American Legion hall.

But residents keep their bags packed â€" in case the fire once again shows its malevolence toward a small town that can't afford any more bad news.

john.glio nna@latimes.com

No rest for President Obama after healthcare victory

No rest for President Obama after healthcare victory

WASHINGTON â€" The day after the Supreme Court dealt him a major victory, President Obama moved on to fighting other fires â€" literally â€" as he traveled to Colorado to check on a blaze that has destroyed hundreds of homes.

The moment captured a truth about Obama's tenure: From the day he took office in the midst of an economic crisis, he has rarely had the luxury of a victory lap.

Instead, in a stubbornly lackluster economy, the most that administration officials generally can claim is credit for avoiding disasters, achievements typically followed by questions about when that sad state of affairs will improve.

When the health law passed in 2010, White House officials toasted the victory with champagne on the Truman balcony. By contrast, since Thursday's decision upholding the law, the mood has been decidedly heads-down.

One staff member, in an account typical of others, said he had allowed himself a sigh of relief before turning to other business â€" including the vote in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to hold Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress.

"We don't really get a chance to celebrate," said the senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly. "We have to keep moving on the battle plan."

That plan doesn't call for much talk about healthcare between now and November, further dampening any urge to celebrate.

White House and campaign aides have pretty much conceded that the law will remain unpopular with large swaths of voters, at least for now. A Gallup poll earlier this year, for example, found that only about one-quarter of Americans thought that the law, once fully in place, would make their family's healthcare better, while about a third thought it would make no difference. Almost 4 in 10, including most Republicans, thought it would make things worse.

Administration officials hope that when the health law is fully up and running in 2014 â€" assuming it survives â€" Americans will warm to its coverage guarantees and its subsidies to help people buy insurance. They predict, sometimes through gritted teeth, that if they prevail, the law will start becoming popular somewhere around the middle of the decade.

For now, though, while they plan to push back against Republican attacks, Obama's team doesn't expect to win a lot of votes by talking about healthcare â€" at least not in English. Spanish may be another story. Among Latino voters, healthcare has been a top priori ty, and the Obama campaign has advertised the benefits of the law extensively in Spanish.

Two sets of figures help explain why: Among all Americans, 16% lack health coverage and therefore stand to benefit directly from the new law. But among Latinos, roughly a third do. And Latino voters, by 48% to 20%, believe the health law was a good idea, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed this week.

At the moment, however, it is Republican leaders who seem thrilled to talk about healthcare, even though they were generally viewed as the losers on Thursday. For them, the issue provides an opportunity to intertwine two favorite attacks against the White House â€" the healthcare law and new taxes â€" into one argument, even if doing so leads away from their more straightforward focus on jobs and the economy.

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate's Republican leader, said Friday that the court "blew the president's cover" on taxes by labeling as a tax the la w's fine on people who don't obtain coverage. The decision "turns the president's campaign rhetoric on its head," McConnell said.

"They're going to say it's time to move on and not want to talk about it because it's so unpopular. But guess what? We're going to talk about it," said Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican.

Obama, meantime, spent a good part of the day talking not about healthcare but wildfires. Accompanied by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), he flew over charred mountaintops before landing in Colorado Springs, where he visited a badly burned area, praised firefighters and offered disaster assistance to a state that happens to be a key electoral battleground.

In the Mountain Shadows neighborhood, Obama saw homes burned to their foundations, with water still spewing from exposed pipes and cars in the driveways melted down to their frames.

"When natural disasters like this hit, America comes together," he said. "We've got to make sure that we have each other's backs."

Washington, of course, tends more toward stabbing backs than watching them, and on healthcare, both sides have weapons in hand.

House Republicans have set a July 11 vote on repealing the healthcare law, a symbolic move since the Senate has no plans to follow suit, but one very popular with Republican voters. They will aim to convince voters that undoing the president's signature domestic achievement will help the economy.

Democrats plan to dismiss these Republican efforts as just more politics. Senior administration officials said they wouldn't try to dodge discussion of the healthcare law's unpopular individual mandate because they know they can't. But the answers to those questions will inevitably point to two words: Romney and Massachusetts.

The combination of a mandate and tax was a central element of Mitt Romney's healthcare overhaul when he was governor of Massachusetts. Maryland Gov.Martin O'Malley, the head of the Democratic governor's association, was eager to share that fact on Friday.

The tax penalty in the Obama law "would only affect 2% of the entire public," he said, "and was a penalty provision that was also in Romneycare."

christi.parsons@latimes.com

michael.memoli@latimes.com

Kathleen Hennessey and Lisa Mascaro in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

Romney's critiques of Europe raise some questions

Romney's critiques of Europe raise some questions

BRUNSWICK, Ohio â€" It is Republican tradition to portray Europe as a socialist haven where high taxes and extravagant public spending on healthcare and retirement benefits show the folly of Democrats' big-government agenda.

But few have used the tactic as aggressively as Mitt Romney. For years, Republican crowds have applauded his scathing critique of Europe. As Europe's fiscal turmoil has posed a growing threat to the global economy, Romney has made it one of his main lines of attack against President Obama.

"He's taking us down a path towards Europe," Romney told supporters at aFather's Daybreakfast in this Cleveland suburb. "He wants us to see a bigger and bigger government, with a healthcare system run by the government. He wants to see people paying more and more in taxes."

The road to Europe, Romney said, leads to chronic high unemployment, low wage growth and massive debts that can trigger fiscal calamity.

But Romney's presentation ignores aspects of the European crisis that critics see as an illustration of how his own plans to shrink government could threaten the sputtering U.S. recovery. In Greece, Spain, Ireland and other Eurozone nations, unemployment has soared amid steep government cutbacks under austerity measures championed by Germany.

In Britain, critics of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron blame the country's recent slide back into recession on his austerity agenda of scaling back government.

Obama has rejected austerity, calling instead for new federal spending on short-term stimulus measures, such as road construction and state aid to stop layoffs of teachers and other public workers, followed by long-term budget cuts to reduce the deficit once the economy recove rs.

Facing diplomatic constraints, the president has avoided comparing European austerity to Romney's economic plans.

Former President Clinton, however, has been blunt about drawing political lessons from Europe â€" saying that Romney's vision of smaller government would kill jobs, both private and public.

"Who would have ever thought that the Republicans would embrace the austerity and jobless policies of what they used to derisively call old Europe?" Clinton told Obama campaign donors at a fundraising dinner with the president June 4 in New York City.

"I never thought I'd live to breathe and see, here they are, saying, 'Let's do the Eurozone's economic policy. They got 11% unemployment. We can get up there if we work at it.'"

The U.S. unemployment rate, which peaked at 10% in October 2009, dropped to 8.1% in April, then bumped back up to 8.2% last month.

Romney's digs at Europe are not just economic; they are also cultural. A December 20 06 blueprint for his first presidential campaign, disclosed by the Boston Globe, featured Romney attacks on "European-style socialism" â€" aimed especially at France, even though Jacques Chirac, the French president at the time, was a conservative.

Foreseeing a race against Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, the PowerPoint blueprint included Romney saying the European Union wanted to "drag America down to Europe's standards," adding: "That's where Hillary and Dems would take us. Hillary = France."

Romney has used attacks along those lines ever since. Having lived in France as a Mormon missionary for 2 1/2 years in the 1960s, Europe is delicate turf for Romney. As head of the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he spoke French for two minutes in a video to welcome volunteers. "Bonjour, je m'appelle Mitt Romney," he began.

In March, Romney mocked Europeans at a rally in Wisconsin. He accused Obama of blocking oil, coal and natural gas projects, saying, "That's of course so that you can have the applause of the Europeans for all of the wind and solar that you're using."

Other Republicans have tried to keep the debate over austerity from muddying the party's political narrative on Europe.

In a recent speech at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, House Budget Committee ChairmanPaul D. Ryan of Wisconsin said Democrats were overspending with borrowed money, just as he said European nations had.

Ryan's calls for deep tax and spending cuts, which Romney has embraced, are premised on a need for immediate steps to reduce debt â€" just as European austerity policies are. Yet Ryan distanced himself from the word "austerity" as he laid out his fiscal plans.

"We must avoid European-style austerity â€" harsh benefit cuts for current retirees and large tax increases that slow the economy to a crawl," Ryan said, noting that tax increases, too, are part of Europe's contr oversial debt reduction plans. "But too many in Washington are repeating Europe's mistakes instead of learning from them."

Like Ryan, Romney argues that tax cuts â€" and smaller government â€" will spur business investments that create jobs. When questioned on whether austerity might worsen unemployment, Romney has conceded that slashing government spending too fast would slow the economy.

But his emphasis remains on what he describes as the excessive spending and borrowing at the root of Europe's crisis.

"You know how many people are unemployed in Spain?" Romney asked the crowd in Ohio. "Twenty-five percent of the population. That's where European-style policies lead. I don't want to transform America into Europe."

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

Court's healthcare ruling gives Obama a political boost

Court's healthcare ruling gives Obama a political boost

WASHINGTON â€" The Supreme Court's surprise healthcare ruling was a lift for President Obama, preventing what would have been an embarrassing setback in an election year. And it came from an unexpected source â€" a conservative jurist whose confirmation Obama voted against as a senator.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s majority opinion could well alter voter attitudes on a landmark piece of social legislation that, up to now, has been dimly understood and largely unpopular. At the very least, it enables the president to go before the voters in November with his signature legislative achievement intact.

"The big criticism of him has been that he hasn't accomplished a lot," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "This will certainly prevent further criticism that he has not accomplished much from taking hold."

Republican strategist Karl Rove, co-founder of a $300 million campaign effort for presidential nominee Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates, agreed that the ruling was "a boost for the president." But, he told Fox News, "It doesn't make the controversy go away."

The decision seemed unlikely to alter the basic contours of a tight presidential election that will be a referendum on the condition of the U.S. economy and Obama's handling of it.

Still, the justices did reset the debate on a major campaign issue â€" and there were signs that a more nuanced, and complicated, political dynamic may now be coming into play. Less clear, though, was whether the ruling would move many voters Obama's way.

The "losing" side, led by Romney, immediately declared its intention to relitigate the issue in the fall election. The "winning" Democrats, including Obama, said that it was time to move on, a sign that they consider a continued focus on broader aspects of the law to be unhelpful.

Obama, in a nationally broadcast address from the East Room of the White House, maintained that instant analysis "about who won and who lost" completely missed the point. Many Americans will live more secure lives because the law had been upheld, he said. He went on to outline specific benefits of the law, some of which won't take effect until 2014 but that, polls show, enjoy much wider public support than the unpopular requirement that Americans purchase insurance or pay a penalty.

"It should be pretty clear by now that I didn't do this because it was good politics," Obama said.

Poll after poll over the last two years have shown that while Obama and the Democrats success fully rammed the healthcare plan through Congress, they lost the battle in the court of public opinion. In his speech, delivered about two hours after the decision was handed down, Obama said that "what the country can't afford to do is refight the political battles of two years ago."

But Republicans, hopeful of drawing swing voters their way, plan to do exactly that, trying to boost their ranks in Congress, recapture the White House and then attempt to repeal the law next year.

Avoiding its popular provisions, Republicans are framing the choice around the issue that is at the heart of the fall election â€" unacceptably high unemployment and a weak economic recovery â€" as well as what they contend is overreach by the federal government.

Romney, speaking in Washington with the Capitol dome as a backdrop, described the healthcare law as a "job killer."

"If we want to get rid of Obamacare, we're going to have to replace President Obama," he said.

Most voters have told pollsters that the healthcare issue is important to them, but when Americans were asked in a recent Gallup poll what they considered the most important matter facing the country, only 6% said healthcare, while more than half mentioned the economy and jobs.

David Winston, a Republican pollster, said, "The challenge for Republicans is to make sure that they present the repeal in the context of getting the economy going again."

The court setback will only increase Republican voter intensity this fall, GOP strategists say, but Democratic pollster Celinda Lake countered that "Republicans are already as energized as they can get." Opinion surveys have shown that Republican voters are already more motivated to turn out than Democrats this year.

Strategists will be closely watching the effect of the court's action on public opinion in coming days and weeks. But there is some question as to how much it will move.

Analysts have sa id that heavy TV ad spending by opponents of the law â€" coupled with the lack of an effective sales job by the president â€" helped mold what has become a largely unchanging public attitude toward the healthcare overhaul.

paul.west@latimes.com

Colorado Springs fire destroys at least 346 homes

Colorado Springs fire destroys at least 346 homes

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. â€" At least 346 homes burned when flames raced unchecked into neighborhoods in and around Colorado Springs, making the Waldo Canyon fire the most destructive in the state's history, officials said Thursday.

Evacuation orders have forced more than 32,000 people in or west of the state's second-largest city from their homes. Local officials held a meeting Thursday evening to tell residents on 35 damaged streets whether their homes were still standing.

Earlier in the day, some evacuees tried to glean bits of information from the Internet. Penny Carroll, who had escaped to the town of Monument two days earlier, pored over an aerial photograph of her ravaged Mountain Shadows neighborhood. That's when she found what appeared to be a roof â€" an intact roof.

"I have a roof. I'm going with that. Oh, thank God," Carroll said, allowing joy to enter her voice for the first time since she fled Tuesday afternoon, when she stood on her back deck and watched trees explode into flames as the fire raced over a ridge toward her house.

Cooler weather and rising humidity helped firefighters make significant progress, establishing containment lines around 10% of the fire. The 18,500-acre blaze grew only minimally during the day.

"The weather cooperated with us today like it has in no other day since the fire started," said Jerri Marr, supervisor of the Pike and San Isabel national forests. The cause of the blaze is under investigation by the U.S. Forest Service.

More than 1,200 firefighters were battling the Waldo Canyon fire, considered the highest priority in the nation because of the potential for winds to again drive the flames into neighborhoods around Colorado Springs.

Ae rial photos published by local media showed entire blocks of neighborhoods reduced to piles of charred rubble.

Barb Palmer's college-age children figured out their home was gone by counting the smoldering foundations on their block from one such image online.

"My son and I were sitting on the couch and he said, 'Mom, our house did burn,' " Palmer said, her voice wavering.

Though Palmer had not received official word from the city by Thursday afternoon, she had already begun to grieve.

"I am trying to process the reality of not having a home," she said. "I'm OK. We got the kids out, we got the cats. The rest is just stuff. Some of it is irreplaceable, but it's still stuff. We'll get through this."

The blaze is one of several churning through Colorado and across the West. The region has been scorched by triple-digit heat, making its dried-out brush, grass and forests ripe for fire.

Until Thursday, the High Park fire burning west of Fort Coll ins was the most destructive in Colorado history, destroying 257 homes.

That fire, which broke out June 9 and grew to become the state's largest, at 87,284 acres, was 75% contained by Thursday afternoon. A storm that dumped water on the blaze aided firefighters, and most of the 2,000 people evacuated had been allowed to return home, said Kathy Messick, a spokeswoman for the Larimer County Sheriff's Office.

Colorado Springs officials lifted evacuation notices for some residents Thursday evening and warned that the count of destroyed homes could rise as authorities made more thorough inspections. No injuries have been reported, though officials were looking for about 10 people who were unaccounted for.

President Obama plans to visit the area Friday, and has already pledged federal help.

The Waldo Canyon fire started Saturday, and authorities expect it will be weeks before it is fully contained. It spread furiously and out of control Tuesday, when 65-mph winds sent it racing down a hillside and into Colorado Springs subdivisions, nearly tripling in size overnight. In all, the blaze has threatened more than 20,000 homes and 160 commercial buildings, authorities said.

The flames burned some local institutions to the ground, including the Flying W Ranch, a Western-themed tourist attraction known for its chuck-wagon suppers.

It has left locals worried about other landmarks, such as Glen Eyrie, a 67-room castle built by the founder of Colorado Springs. Though initial reports indicated the castle escaped the flames, a message on the facility's website read: "Please keep praying."

At the U.S. Air Force Academy, where the Waldo Canyon fire jumped perimeters and charred about 10 acres, more than 2,100 families evacuated from residential areas of the installation still had not been allowed to return Thursday.

But a ceremony welcoming 1,045 new cadets went on as scheduled Thursday to help hold onto some sense o f normalcy, even as ribbons of smoke rose from the nearby foothills.

tony.barboza@latimes.com

M83 to score Tom Cruise sci-fi epic 'Oblivion'

M83 to score Tom Cruise sci-fi epic 'Oblivion'

When we interviewed M83's Anthony Gonzalez earlier this year, the French epic-electronica producer mentioned film work as a major new goal. Recounting a trip to Joshua Tree, he said: "You just drive for an hour, and it's like being in a sci-fi movie out there, which was perfect for the kind of music I make."

He can now check "sci-fi epic score-writing" off that list -- he's been tapped to compose original music for Tom Cruise's new thriller, "Oblivion."

The Playlist reports that the film's director, Joseph Kosinski, who previously helmed"Tron: Legacy"(which had an original score by another French electronica act, Daft Punk), is a longtime fan of M83's synethetic enormity, listing to "Before the D awn Heals Us" and other of the band's albums while working on the story. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where Cruise plays a drone repairman whose life is upended when he rescues a mysterious stranger.

Gonzalez's latest album as M83, "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming," earned wide praise for its mix of titanic electronics and earnest pop vocals. He told the Playlist,  "I'm always trying to push myself and I try to do it with my studio albums, and now this is a new adventure, so I'm going to push myself even harder, and try to surprise people and move people with my music...My vision is really to have a combination of very electronic moments, very M83, and sometimes merge into something more soundtrack-y, but my kind of soundtracks."

The film, from Universal, already has an expected release date of April 26, 2013. The band's next L.A. show is at FYF Fest in September.

ALSO:

Anthony Gonzalez of M83 is finding his place

FYF Fest 2012: Refused, M83 and more booked

Live Nation adds Los Angeles' Hard Events to its playlist

If you think Muse's Olympic song 'Survival' is bad . . .

If you think Muse's Olympic song 'Survival' is bad . . .

Music and athletics are sometimes not a natural fit. Yes, basketball stars hang with hip-hop stars, and X-Games riders hang out with punk rockers, but the worlds of jocks and musicians don't exactly intersect. When they do, it usually results in extremes. In one corner, there's complete camp -- "The Super Bowl Shuffle" -- and in the other, there's complete schmaltz --R. Kelly's "Space Jam"-affiliated "I Believe I Can Fly."

Muse had perhaps one of the more thankless tasks in crafting a song for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. It must write a song that represents the host country and doesn't embarrass it. What's more, the lyrics have to be easily translatable for the entire globe, and it should play OK on TV. 

Muse isn't winning any fans with its song "Survival," which was let loose among the Web wolves yesterday. Some of the attacks are deserved. Muse, as I wrote on this blog after I saw the band perform at the Coach ella Valley Music Arts Festival in 2010, is high-concept music, the rock-'n'-roll equivalent of a special-effects-laden Michael Bay film. 

Muse's "Survival" is that vision at its most extended. The 5 1/2-minute song has a bit of everything -- grand, James Newton Howard cinematic strings, Danny Elfman choirs, a "Glee"-ready chorus line, Broadway-worthy finger-snaps, the requisite lyrical nod to the Olympic flame and gargantuan guitars that beg -- need, rather -- slow-motion action-film clips to have any resonance whatsoever.

As a piece of pop, it's dreadful. Singer Matthew Bellamy doesn't even sound like he's having any fun, twisting his vocals into all sorts of strained contortions as he sings of staying alive and wreaking vengeance. This isn't a song for the Olympics as much as it's a song for "The Hunger Games."

Yet this isn't written to be a song. Muse's "Survival" is meant to be heard in bits -- the guitars in a moment of English triumph, the orchestra in a host nation's introduction. It's as if Muse wrote a symphony of musical cues and attempted to Fra nkenstein them together into a song.

In this sense, "Survival" seems harmless enough. As an Olympics obsessive, hearing 20 seconds of Muse's "Survival" for two weeks won't be as thrilling as, say, Blur's "Song 2," but it sure beats the obsession MLB and TBS have had with Bon Jovi, and it's significantly better than any of the athletic soap operas NBC will create to manufacture drama.

What's more, Blur, one of Brit-pop's most exciting and experimental bands, will close the London games, proving a musical palate cleanser. The band also wrote two new songs for the Olympics, and while those won't be unveiled until next week, they likely won't be any worse than "Survival," unless Blur leader Damon Albarn hasn't gotten his recent opera bug out of his system. 

And to b e entirely fair, the merry ol' U.S. of A. doesn't exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to music and the Olympics. Our fair city of Los Angeles was responsible for an entire cassette of abominations in 1984. Muse's "Survival" is on par, perhaps even better, than the "history in the making" synth-rock headache of this:

The 1984 Olympics also gave us the dentist-office-waiting-room scorcher from Christopher Cross, "A Chance for Heaven." At least Muse had the good sense to stay secular, unlike "A Chance for Heaven," which is doused in American exceptionalism, a musical pat on the head for all the adorable other countries competing. "I know you want ... but someone's gonna take it and I'm the one," sings Cross, adding later that "history is our destiny." 

The 1994 Olympics in Atlanta went a more serious route, using Gloria Estefan's lazy-day-at-the-spa ballad "Reach." That being said, the fact that a Cuban-born artist wrote a song for the Am erican Summer Games is appreciated.

Yet the greatest recent U.S. offender is LeAnn Rimes' parade-float anthem "Light the Fire Within." Two words: children choirs. 

So at least our friends from across the pond are in good international company.