Five Rings for Foolish Progressives in their Posh Salons…

The Opening Ceremonies are intended to be a window onto the history and culture of the sponsor nation. Indeed, the Vancouver Opening Ceremony was a celebration of the Inuit culture, the Scotch/Irish and British and French colonists, culminating in modern Canada and what it has to offer. The 2002 Salt Lake Games also was a pageant of the peoples indigenous to the American Southwest and the strength and resilience of the American Spirit in post 9/11. Atlanta featured the American and Georgian history, especially through the prism of song. The Barcelona Games featured the founding of the city by Heracles, and showcased Spanish and Catalonian culture.

That brings us to London. The story began with the transformation of the agrarian British culture by the industrial revolution, including a spectacular visual with the forging of glowing iron rings. Unfortunately, not far behind the industrial revolution, the specter of Marxism was to rear its ugly head.

Ironicallly, conservative J.K. Rowling stood and read from classic British Literature, at which point a legion of glowing hospital beds rolled in in a tribute to the National Health Service.

Now the NHS has among its ranks some of the best doctors and nurses in the world. They have probably the best physical diagnostic skills in the world, a necessity borne out of finite material resources to work with. The doctors and nurses have never been the issue with NHS and socialized medicine, but rather it is with top down control of those resources rather than rational utilization of resources at the level of the patient and provider. Denial of care and long delays are the order of the day in a monopoly top down delivery system.

Fortunately, Mary Poppins was able to save the day.

Dr. J. thought we were safe, from more socialist pap but then along came Frankie and June, a couple raising their family, along with the rest of their clan, in Council Housing. There was something about a lost cell phone and a lot of self worship of the younger generation. Even the Democratic Underground posters had some negative things to say about this chapter. While it was an interesting stroll through pop music including a nice dash of OMD, Dr. J. was shocked that the tribute to the unsustainable welfare state was on display. Thank goodness that we didn’t get the games in 2014 or 2016 and be forced to endure an Obamahamian Onanistic Tribute.

Dr. J. was not alone in his criticisms. NRO regular, and Catholic ethicist George Weigel also chimed in, and like Kim Strassel, far more articulately than Dr. J.

For that’s what these multi-hour theatrical extravaganzas have become: a kind of ersatz liturgy of the in vitro World Community, in which film directors (such as Britain’s Danny Boyle) take the role once played by the monks and canons who designed public worship centuries ago. And as such things go, London’s secularized Olympic liturgy on the night of July 27 was perhaps slightly less offensive than others in the same genre. Boyle unabashedly anchored the show/liturgy in history, meaning British history, rather than in the Gnostic and pagan fantasies that have become the Olympic norm. But it does tell you something about what Evelyn Waugh would have called “decline and fall” when the British National Health Service is proposed for global worship as a kind of sacrament, when Paul McCartney (sorry, Sir Paul McCartney) replaces Ralph Vaughan Williams as liturgical hymnwriter, and when H.M. the Queen, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, is reduced to a bit player in a knock-off of the Bond movies.

We are not amused…such things should not be left to commoners.

Dr. J.