Anyone watch the fantastic opening ceremony last night? I thought the Chinese would be hard to top, but I'm glad Danny Boyle was going for an all-out celebration of "Britishness"...to celebrating its past as the first industrialized nation (awesome sequence, that), and even managing to get into the digital age and social networking without the corniness one might have assumed from it. It wouldn't be fully British if there were elements that indicated we weren't taking it
too seriously, such as Rowan Atkinson playing Mr Bean as the keyboardist for Chariots of Fire and, of course, the Queen and Daniel Craig as James Bond jumping out of a helicopter.
The icing on the cake for me, was the Olympic cauldron. When each of the 200+ nations came out during the parade, they had a teenager/kid carrying a copper petal of some kind. I thought it was some Olympic tradition and had no idea what it was. Turned out, each copper petal topped its own stem (one for each nation of the world), each furled out like a dandelion or some such. Then, the Olympic torches lit one segment, and all the petals subsequently lit up. They then rose and coalesced into one entity as the cauldron itself, representing the various nations coming together for the Olympics. That really was moving for me, personally, that despite the harsh faultlines in the world right now, there's still something to be patriotic about, as a single species; the fact we can still come together despite actively hating and killing each other is really a testament to all of us.
Some of the elements, as
this BBC article points out, may have gone over the heads of non-Brits. But as LA Times points out, repeating viewings by folks will reveal some connections as they learn about British history/culture. We're not generally a patriotic people, and it seems all your typical British moaning has subsided into a collective sense of pride. Here's to all athletes earning prestige for their nations, if they're successful!
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Topic: The Olympic opening ceremony! (Read 2957 times)