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Enough with the self congratulating and the big money. Let us search for the simple, the humble and the virtuous

The London Olympics – celebrating socialism, shopping and sentimental societal justice



London, England-It’s the morning after the night before. The games are open, national pride is in full bloom and Danny Boyle, the Oscar winning director Slumdog Millionaire and the deeply disturbing Trainspotting is the hero du jour. The creative mind behind the opening ceremony has got a unanimous national pat on the back for his efforts as a global audience of 4 billion got to watch London awash in a sentimental lovefest of its cultural touch points. The papers are orgasmic with reports of the “best ever opening ceremony” amidst calls for Boyle’s knighthood.
But scratch the surface beneath the parade of iconic double decker buses, Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and you will find that ruling the night was a worship of socialism, wrapped up in a creed of sentimental societal justice, all laced with sinister elements that made this viewer cringe. If Labour’s Tony Blair were still PM he would have dubbed it the ‘People’s opening ceremony’. Boyle’s vision was of the great revolutions in British society, starting with an agrarian idyll of country cottages and village cricket of yesteryear, complete with maypole dancing and ladies tossing apples into one another’s apron, in meadows filled with well behaved ducks and geese. I have lived here for 30 years and have never heard of the apron apple toss. The commentators in Luanda or Ashgabat were surely scratching their heads over this simplistic nostalgia that grips the heart of every Brit every time it is wheeled out, despite reflecting hardship that much of the world yearns to leave behind.

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My neighbour and my other half, normally a savvy interpreter of cultural shifts, got all misty eyed over a time and place that is relegated to old BBC series like All Creatures Great and Small. Yet women’s magazines and TV shows like Escape to the Country thrive on selling an image of home baked bread, organic gardens and green and pleasant fields that are in reality being eaten up with wind farms and high speed trains at whatever the cost--financial or aesthetic. We were then treated to a celebration of the workers industrial revolution with Soviet style blackened faces and arms hammering iron into Olympic rings. We had the bridge building, tunnel digging engineer Isambard Brunel glorified, but this too is in a past that has no present relevance. Industry has left for India and China where its people yearn to grow and develop, while Brits yearn to equalize and mete out social justice for all in a misguided sentimentality devoid of thought or reason. Some of the most celebrated justice mongers carried the Olympic flag, so called peacemakers, like the UN’s Ban Ki Moon, and Shami Chakrabarti, a leftist human rights advocate, known for their grand words and gestures and ineffectiveness in any constructive sense. The highly selective trawl through British history notably excluded even a hint of the largest empire the world has ever known. No colonies mentioned or the civilizing force Britain brought to all four corners of the world. It is far too politically incorrect to suggest that native peoples did not invent the parliamentary system. Not a whiff of Magna Carta, or dare I say any of the great saints and martyrs that stood and died for real principle. Instead we had Queen Elizabeth II agree to star in a short film alongside Daniel Craig’s James Bond, who ‘escorted’ her by helicopter before parachuting into the stadium, her stunt double’s skirts flying up to reveal long knickers. Britain is feeling all warm and fuzzy about their Queen again this morning, cooing approval of her sharing her personal space and being a great sport, oblivious to the demeaning of monarchy obliging to Boyle’s populist demand. The Queen’s ancestors will be rolling in their graves. No child I know in this country is educated enough to neither understand the role of a constitutional monarchy, nor do their teachers care to instruct them in their cultural heritage. This ceremony was not about fact but a good wallow in the great socialist ideals of modern Britain epitomized in the National Health Service. With a work force of over 1.5 million – almost the number in the Chinese Red Army, it is the one thing Britons cling to as a source of great pride in a country in serious decline. Last night 600 NHS staff pranced and danced around sweet little beds filled with sweet little kids representing the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Earlier in the week the Daily Mail ran a special investigation into the story of a 22-year-old that died of thirst after a routine hip operation in a top NHS teaching hospital. Kane Gorny in desperation dialed 999, while a policeman watched him ask staff for water. He had a form of diabetes that hampered his body’s ability to retain fluid, yet the response was to sedate him without intravenous fluids. The investigation revealed hundreds more are dying of thirst by nurses who consider themselves above the ordinary needs of patients. This kind of insane abuse is reported on almost a weekly basis, yet the population coos and develops brain fog when presented with a sentimental ode to an idea of social justice rather than the hard reality that nothing from centralized planning ever works. Beneath the auspices of celebrating British childrens’ literature lurked the moral rot no one will speak of in the happy clappy lovefest of British talent. JK Rowling, the author responsible for turning a generation of impressionable minds onto the occult in her Harry Potter books, introduced this segment with the famous opening lines of Peter Pan, while we witnessed a colossal assembly of villains from Cruella de Vil and the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Child Catcher to Voldemort and an assortments of evil ghouls running around the sweet children still in their hospital beds. Mary Poppins came flying in to save the day, but the segment ended with a weird giant infant head in a bed with no visible body. It looked dead, although it was probably meant to be peacefully sleeping. Ironically the NHS provides 90% of abortions in this country. We are all forced through our tax money to pay for this whether our conscience allows it or not. Whether Boyle intended it or not, the assault on childhood innocence in a figurative and literal sense came across strongly. How can you celebrate childhood hand in hand with an institution that carries out about 500 abortions each day? It is schizophrenic in a way that even Ban Ki Moon or Shami Chakrabarti could not rationalize. Britain is so socially savvy, no stone was left unturned, even climate change and ecological sensitivity. The costumes contained 40,000 recycled plastic water bottles and 10,000 plastic bags. Plus, this will be the first Olympics that will monitor its carbon footprint. I wonder how many units of carbon the 50 tons of sound equipment used last night. The psychosis is so deep, it’s like giving an obese person a diet soda with their supersize hamburger and fries. Sure, fella, you’ll keep the pounds off with the calorie savings on that soda! It was, nevertheless, a spectacle that did have some very moving moments, like when 205 copper petals carried in by each team during the athletes’ entrance, were assembled on the tips of a huge open flower-like sculpture and lit before rising to close and form one enormous cauldron of many flames. Or how about those impressive 640,000 LED pixels set in over 70 thousand small panels mounted between the spectator’s seats that erupted in a magnificent display of colour and light that gave Piccadilly Circus a run for its money. While a Danny Boyle can craft an excellent and imaginative stage production, Britain has run out of real ideas that work. Even one of yesterday’s funniest moments, the comedy character Mr Bean was from a TV show that sold to more countries than were represented at the games, was a product of the '90s. This week our illustrious PM David – just call me Dave – Cameron hosted a conference of international business people hoping to sell Britain to the world. Of the £15bn spent on two weeks of sport, he hopes somewhere between £16bn and 26bn of revenue will come in due to all the trade other countries will be fighting for once they have watched these wonderful games. Games where the souvenirs and fireworks come from China and the ticket printing is done in the US. There was a time when the Olympics was about sport. You went to a stadium that had a track, some toilets and maybe a hamburger concession. Today the London Olympic Park is a giant shopping mall with big brands present and credit card advertising covering a huge wall enticing a population already burdened with £1 trillion of personal debt, to spend more. The torch used to be carried from the airport straight to the Olympic stadium, but this year it was carried for 69 days and covered 8,000 miles. Everyone who has done anything in their community was hauled out to carry the thing, throwing off the shackles of humility and basking in a worship of self. All kinds of money was spent locally on bands and parades to greet the torch in every high street across Britain. The opening music to the games, Elgar’s Nimrod, was unintentionally pertinent. Nimrod was the king who, in ancient near-Eastern texts, is associated with the Tower of Babel and was rebellious against God just as British culture is today rebelling against godly virtue. I say take this thing back to where it belongs, which is a celebration of sport. Period. Enough with the self congratulating and the big money. Let us search for the simple, the humble and the virtuous.


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Anna Grayson-Morley -- Bio and Archives

Anna Grayson—Morley is a London based freelance journalist.


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