Olympics 2012 opening ceremony: Oscars all round for a spectacular feelgood fantasy of modern Britain

Melanie Phillips
The Daily Mail [UK]
29 July 2012

…we had for starters a bucolic scene of merry medieval peasants, and men playing cricket — giving way to a stunningly produced but deeply tendentious image of cloth-capped workers slaving in the inferno of the Industrial Revolution.

But life in the Middle Ages wasn’t a rural idyll of dancing round maypoles, it was marked by ignorance, savagery and terrible poverty and hardship.

The Industrial Revolution, in turn, wasn’t a hell of harsh-faced bosses and oppressed workers, but happened to be the engine of progress and modernity that produced the affluence we all enjoy today.

The idea that industrialists are heartless tyrants and workers are helpless victims is, frankly, a fantasy that belongs to crude Left-wing agit-prop.

It sits particularly ill with a Britain plagued by irresponsible trades union activity, and where the Mayor of London recently resorted to bribing railway workers to induce them to call off strike action which threatened the smooth running of the Games themselves.

Perhaps most eyebrows were raised, however, over Boyle’s sequence celebrating the NHS. Not only did this seem a piece of gratuitous political propaganda, but it embodied the most painful fantasy of all…

… the NHS has long been collapsing under the weight of its own misplaced founding faith — that health care, no matter what its constantly spiralling cost, can be available free at the point of use for all people at all times.

The result is that for too many, a British hospital is a place to be avoided if you are old (in which case you may be starved to death) or too inarticulate to insist on proper treatment, or simply want to avoid infection…

Read the entire article at The Daily Mail.

Update: Olympic opening ceremonies and the death throes of a civilization

…Watching the ceremony last night, I had a profound sense of sadness for the hollow revelry.  There was no dignified memorializing of the greatness, uniqueness, and courage of Britain’s past.  There was “irreverent, idiosyncratic” entertainment, and a very long segment of writhing self-abasement before the shibboleth of socialized medicine.

We seemed to be looking last night at a moment frozen in time before a great upheaval, like the last days of lingering sunlight before World War I.  A civilization based on entertainment and ritual political worship is headed for a fall.  But then, a civilization that singles out some humans, like Israeli Jews, to show less care for – less solidarity with – is a weak and unsustainable one.  Nothing else will go right with it.

Britain is not alone in her shallow, artistic commemorations of a dying culture…

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