The London Olympics opening ceremonies were, in a word, preposterous. I understand the Beijing envy, but the enormity of that spectacle was a product of China's defining character, being its billion-plus population. Kenneth Branagh played a cheerful tycoon in the middle of a ruined countryside that was the price of the Industrial Revolution---a major British contribution, to be fair, but did no one notice this was essentially the role of Sarumon, if he got to write the ending himself? Sure, the nod to the NHS was good cheeky fun, but children staying up to read scary stories and later teenagers texting each other at night seemed of an unfortunate type. It's as though Danny Boyle solicited hundreds of themes for the evening but picked the winner at random, and that winner was "A Tribute to Children Resisting Their Bedtime."
And social media? Wtf, Britain? To the extent you can take credit for it at all---Al Gore's watching, and his revenge with be wrathful, and swift---surely that credit should be for one of the socially useful applications of the Web. You know, the research applications that are possible with the instantaneous exchange of information, or the ecological benefits of paperless offices. NOT teenagers updating their social profiles! Why take your country's shining moment in the sun---and again, solely to the extent that a discrete Brit and not, you know, the mammoth project undertaken decades earlier by United States military and government agencies---if you're only going to highlight the most corrosive, trivializing application of it?
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