I
scrammed out of London a few days before the Olympics began, but after getting
an earful on what the locals make of it. On the whole, the residents of that
great city would rather the honor of hosting the world's most disruptive
sporting event had gone to some joint that needs the publicity more – Alma Ata,
or Ouagadougou, or Oakland. In 21st century London, traffic moves at fewer
miles per hour than it did before the internal combustion engine was invented
without the added complication of fleets of Third World thug bureaucrats and
the permanent floating crap game of transnationalist freeloaders being dumped
on its medieval street plan. Nevertheless, having drawn the short straw of
hosting the Games, Londoners felt it a point of honor that the city be able to
demonstrate the ability to ferry minor globalist hangers-on from their favorite
whorehouse in Mayfair to the Olympic Village in the unfashionable East End in
time for the quarter-finals of the flatwater taekwondo.
The psychology of the traffic cop enters
into the opening ceremony, too. One becomes inordinately fearful that the giant
Middle Earth trash compactor will not arise on cue, or the dry ice machine will
fail to blow smoke up Voldemort's skirt, or one of the massed ranks of
top-hatted mutton-whiskered extras recreating the Industrial Revolution in
hip-hop will miss a stomp. And you're so grateful to have dodged these
calamities that it never occurs to you to wonder whether taking 40 minutes to
do the Industrial Revolution in interpretive dance was a good idea in the first
place. Britons seem unusually touchy on the subject, touchier than they've been
since the week of the Princess of Wales' death, when the prudent pedestrian on
the streets of Kensington avoided catching the eye of the natives, lest they
club one to a pulp for being insufficiently maudlin and lachrymose. A
Conservative Member of Parliament who made the mistake of tweeting his thoughts
without running them by the party's focus groups was disowned by his colleagues
and forced into groveling public recantation. It seems his now-disowned tweet
that the whole thing was a load of codswallop was an unfortunate typing error and
that what he'd actually meant to say was that the highlight of the evening,
"Government Health Care: The Musical," was far too riveting to be
confined to a mere two-and-a-half hours
I would be intrigued to know what the Queen made of it, once safely back at the Palace with a stiff drink. The last time Her Majesty opened an Olympics, in Montreal in 1976, she did a quick bienvenue and left it at that. This time round she was inveigled into participating in a kind of upmarket variety-show sketch in which James Bond (Daniel Craig) called at Buckingham Palace to escort her to the stadium. Very droll – although one felt a little queasy watching it, as if this was one of those late-night ideas kicked around by producers and directors ("Wouldn't it be great if we could get the Queen to do a bit with Daniel?") that might have been better left on the fantasy wish-list.
Turning the Queen into her own Queen
impersonator (as Commentary's John Podhoretz put it) underlined that vague
unsettling feeling you get walking around Central London that these days it's
the theme park of a great capital rather than an actual one. The iconic red
telephone boxes, for example, are currently the home of eccentric "artwork"
– in Covent Garden, a statue of a giraffe busts through the roof of one and
nibbles the leaves overhead. Meanwhile, the red boxes without giraffes have
nonworking phones, stink of urine and are plastered with prostitutes' business
cards – though even these have a quaintly dated, semi-parodic quality about
them: In the one round the corner from the Houses of Parliament, a Russian lady
promises clients "the ultimate Soviet Union." Like the Queen's, it's
a 007 gag, but from the Roger Moore era.
Yes, yes, London is doing a better job
than most Olympic hosts of subverting the Games' totalitarian aesthetic –
deflating the synthesized bombast of the "Chariots of Fire" theme
through the presence of Mr. Bean suggested a rare sense of proportion about the
whole circus. "Do you like the way we're not deliberately winning all the
medals?" my old friend Boris Johnson, now and somewhat improbably the
Mayor of London (and even more incredibly Britain's Prime Minister-in-waiting),
said to a reporter from The Irish Times the other day. But where was that
much-vaunted British sense of irony on opening night? The overhead camera
settled on robotic formations of grateful apple-cheeked urchins in a giant
children's ward spelling out the letters N-H-S like a Busby Berkeley chorus in
"Gold Diggers Of 1935" – and, horrifyingly, they seemed to mean it.
Had the pageant been truer to life, the patients would have left their hospital
beds riddled with C difficile, MRSA, septicemia and the other parting gifts
that attend a stay in an NHS hospital. But no; when the state religion of
government medicine comes up, the dark irony of Danny Boyle, the epitome of
Blair-era Cool Britannia, withers and dies like a geriatric waiting for her hip
replacement. And all this in the week that the nation's doctors are going on
strike.
The lack of basic awareness is remarkable.
To that ever-dwindling band of Americans who believe in truly private health
care, the NHS is a byword for disease and degradation. On the other hand, to
Continentals who believe in clean, efficient universal health care, the NHS is
a byword for disease and degradation. Yet the British delusion that the NHS is
"the envy of the world" is indestructible. Years ago, in London's
Daily Telegraph, I carelessly remarked that, while one might be able to find a
Bhutanese yak farmer somewhere upcountry who envied Britons the NHS, nobody
else on the planet did. A couple of days later, the paper printed a letter from
Mr. Sonam Chhoki, a Bhutanese gentleman who, while not a yak farmer himself,
came from generations of sturdy yak-farming stock. He reported that his British
in-laws were still waiting for their operations after two years and that, based
on his experience, Bhutan's health service was superior. Whether or not Danny
Boyle's NHS musical will run longer than "Cats," the waiting list
already does. Yet there they were, dozens of Mary Poppins figures descending
into the Olympic Stadium on unfurled umbrellas, like British paratroopers
behind German lines on D-Day. When everywhere's a nanny state, inventing the
great iconic nanny is a source of national pride.
Britain may not be able to match the
Continentals at music and art, but it gave us the language of global business,
of global culture, of law and democracy, the language of liberty, of the modern
world. And yet, aside from a perfunctory bit of the Bard, words were oddly
avoided, save from the finale, when the audience joined Sir Paul McCartney in a
mass singalong of the universal message:
"Na na na, na-na, na na, na-na na na
..."
Hmm. What can Americans learn from the
Olympics spectacle? According to the IMF, China will succeed America as the
dominant economic power in the course of the next presidential term, so Howard
Fineman, editorial director of the Huffington Post and MSNBC mainstay, was
anxious to pick up tips. "Brits long ago lost their empire," he
tweeted, "but overall show us how to lose global power gracefully."
So there's that.
Na-na na na.
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