The country that celebrates its self-contempt, cont.

In the entry, “The London Olympics opening ceremony; or, the maggots in the corpse of a once-great nation,” Matthew H. writes:

Perhaps appropriately, a significant fraction of this pageant of British history is dominated by Mr. Bean (a character from an excruciatingly puerile and disgusting children’s “comedy” series). At some point Sir Simon Rattle, with a shaggy pouf of white hair, comes out to conduct an orchestral version of the Chariots of Fire theme with a comic turn by Mr. Bean on synthesizer. There are laughs aplenty at his difficulties in wiping his nose, after which he throws his used tissue into the adjacent grand piano. Then there is a cutaway to the scene from the film of the runners on the beach into which Mr. Bean has been magically inserted for comedic effect. In this way a once globally popular but now obscure cinematic tribute to traditional Britain is dug up for no other reason than to mock it.

Also today in that entry, a reader in England writes:

Did you or VFR readers mention that the Olympics Opening Ceremony left out the British contribution to World War I and World War II. Incredible.

Yet, due to British/English theatrical genius (in the blood), the ceremony was still powerful on its own terms. It transcended its own lack of substance and its obviously left-wing bias.

I would have loved for the ceremony to have shown the hard core ’70s socialism which nearly bankrupted the country; the Muslim bombings of 2005; recent black violent crime; and how areas changed from English to Third World virtually overnight. Oh well, nothing is perfect!

LA replies:

But of course the purpose of the ceremony was to trash traditional Britain and to celebrate modern, socialist, nihilist, multi-racial Britain.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 29, 2012 03:00 PM | Send
    

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