It’s almost not parody.
As my friend Tam says, the torch relay is the best Olympic event of them all; it has the most drama….
Incidentally, I would like to point out that the whole Tibet situation, at least from the Chinese perspective, is somewhat more complicated than the West makes it out to be; while I am most emphatically not endorsing the activities of the PLA in Tibet at the moment, the fact is that from the Chinese perspective, the question of Tibetan sovereignty was settled sometime in the Ming Qing Dynasty, if not before. For the Chinese, the question of freedom for Tibet is a bit like the idea of returning the Great Plains to the Lakota for most Americans. Like I said, I’m just pointing out that the issue is somewhat more complicated than it may seem at first glance.
As a side note, it’s worth looking at Global Voices’ China page to get some feel for what people on the ground in China are thinking about this whole thing.
Indeed, the Tibet situation is MUCH more complicated than we might think, regardless of one's point of view. But to claim that Tibet has long been part of China is an exercise in truthiness. Historian would point out that the only times "China" has ever exercised any kind of authority over Tibet (and it was VERY weak and more proforma than anything else even at its strongest) was when "China" was part of a non-Chinese empire--the Mongols and later the Manchus. Alas, Paul, the Ming didn't have much to do with Tibet. An inconvenient truth.