The Olympics: Opening Ceremony

After the Beijing Olympics, everyone wondered what the London Olympics would look like. Well now we know: they went literate, cerebral, and humorous. And the response in proudly anti-intellectual America was "huh?" and, even worse, edited heavily in one part by an uncomprehending NBC.

 What many missed was that this show was a century of UK history from the point of view of its people. That’s different from the monarchy, the culture, and the empire. The people are the ones who had to live and endure through the rest of it.

 We saw the idealized village life with sheep, cricket, and dancing--nostalgia that sometimes grips Britain about its lost agrarian past. This gave way to the Industrial age, which literally ripped up the villagers’ sod and drove them into cities. Great technological achievements followed, represented by the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (not Abraham Lincoln as some in the US ignorantly guessed) who built railways, bridges, and steamships, the mainstay of Victorian industry.

 Faced with the Dickensian horror of factories that made a handful of barons rich and chained people to repetitive, dirty work, unions and protest movements emerged (including the push for votes for women), many of which were brutally repressed, although that wasn't emphasized nor were the wars that beggared Britain.

 What followed was what NBC chose to cut out. It was a sequence dealing with terrorism, which the US, of all places, should understand. I watched the deleted part on BBC television. It was framed as a tribute to London victims, but it could just as well have been 9/11 or any other bombing for that matter.

 We may like to pretend that our brutal pasts have no place in the celebration of world athletics, but Britain has endured the mayhem for many more years than the US--think IRA, blown-up buses and underground, and dead horses lying in the road. Shame on you, NBC, particularly for substituting a silly interview with US swimmer, Michael Phelps.

Now came the part of British history that the US might like to ignore. After World War II, Britain made the deliberate decision to develop the welfare state. The National Health Service was a major part. The major beneficiary of NHS? None other than the children.

 Inevitably, the show turned to the digital age, a time of noise, bombarding images, instant access to the world, multiculturalism, and people connecting with one another through social media. It was the sort of multi-media confusion that is our daily life. This was my least favorite part--but maybe I am Luddite at heart and just too old to get it anymore.

 Threaded throughout all this was a list of all the things the British Isles have given the world: the greatest writers, children's literature, television shows, music, the world-wide web, and industry among them. British movies provided a pointed reminder of these (not surprising because the director of the show is a movie producer) done with comic relief: a spoof of the (British) James Bond franchise and of (British) Best Picture winner, "Chariots of Fire."

Now if I can get this—why not NBC and the supposed “experts” sent over to report on the games? Hadn’t they done their homework? I guess not. It’s probably just arrogance and ignorance, but the British will see it as just one more example of US unwillingness and inability to give the UK its due.

 Yes--the show was British all right. It was the history, the mood, and the thoughts of a people. NBC commentators need to remember that in the UK, they still think it's OK to be literate. How quaint. How modest. How utterly British.