This Gaudy Fraud of Propaganda and Tastelessness

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

Alexander Boot shares Peter Mullen’s thoughts on the opening ceremony:

“… The latest emetic was that Olympic ‘ceremony’ in all its tawdry glamour, its misrepresentation of British history – agrarian England was not ‘a rural idyll’ and the industrial revolution brought tremendous benefits. (In any case, when Blake referred to ‘those dark satanic mills’ he was talking about the universities, the Deists and the Enlightenment intellectuals, not the Lancashire cotton towns). The whole socialist theme park of the ‘ceremony’: the sacred cow of the (failed) NHS; the glorious ‘liberation’ of the amoral 1960s followed by a tribute to punk rock.

“Naturally, this gets ecstatic reviews worldwide. It was universally described as ‘witty’. But it was the antidote to wit: that is cliché. It had the one thing modernity regards as a virtue in its technological slickness. Gimmicks. But no quotient of gimmicks can conceal a massive vulgarity – to which one must also add sentimentality and a general infantilisation. All under a relentless barrage of that ubiquitous modern Leitmotif – rock music. And drumming, drumming, drumming… I find it particularly objectionable to hear this trashy paganism described as ‘iconic.’

“It is intolerable to discover that this gaudy fraud of propaganda and tastelessness is thought by all my contemporaries to have been admirable. It is excruciating to find oneself the only one out of step. One feels as if one is the churl who has turned up to spoil the party, forever criticising, not a good word to say about anything – not even that schmaltzy desire for ‘togetherness’.”

Comments

  1. Anon says:

    I thought that perhaps the director was channeling Tolkien, who also loved the simple garden-loving agrarian Britain (hobbits) more than the industrial evolution (orcs).

    I also noted the disparity between the extreme diversity shown in the ‘cell phone romance’ sequence, in which a mixed race family’s daughter falls for a non-Caucasian boy in a dance scene that might well have taken place in Slumdog Millionaire, and the actual athletes from Great Britain, who were overwhelmingly white.

    I wonder if this was just the director’s view of modern London, or a deliberate attempt to induce people from around the world to believe that GB is a diverse and politically correct place to visit.

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