The games opened with some things that are quintessentially British; a weird homage to the National Health Service (and why not? After all, what have Oxford or Cambridge ever did for the world?) was just one of the jumbled, confusing things "Trainspotting" creative director Danny Boyle gave us. What to make of it? Journalists were desperate to provide some new, deeper context. The show was symbolic of "a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is" wrote Sarah Lyall in the New York Times. And if they don't know, how would we? Well, maybe America will have time to think about it.
As we were reminded numerous times, Britain last hosted in 1948, the first games after World War II, and they did it in the muck of rebuilding their nation. But Britain also reminded us during the opening evening that apparently the fires of Mordor are somewhere there (probably Wales) and there were 5 rings, not 20 as the Brit J.R.R. Tolkein claimed. Kenneth Branagh was seemingly Sauron - he can play anyone and make it seem authentic.
Yet to criticize any of it was bad form. And it is even worse form now. The Brits feel good about what they have done, perhaps for the first time in a while. Americans inherited one important trait from our big brothers over the pond - only Brits can criticize Britain, a lesson Mitt Romney learned when he said the exact same thing everyone in London said, and managed to galvanize the public there just by opening his mouth.
Britain instead suddenly seems to care what other people think, which is not a very British thing to do. As Parliament member Kwasi Kwarteng recounts in "Ghosts of Empire", in 1931 the British ambassador to Iraq had an Arab hamlet removed so he could expand the gardens of the British embassy. In 1939 the British Consul, George Monck-Mason, would take a pickaxe to the back of the head, despite the fact that Britain had by and large done wonderful things in its holdings and the Brits there all really wanted to be there and embraced the cultures where they lived. It didn't stop the Brits from continuing to be Brits, as they had done for a hundred years prior to that. They continued on being benevolent, patronizing colonizers who truly believed they would make the world better by making it more British. Yet during these games, the quirky opening aside, they have been positively un-British, at least in the modern sense. Instead, they have been stoic about the weather, the traffic and whatever else; more like the Jan Morris Victorian Brits in her "Pax Britannica" trilogy than the shades we see in Kwarteng's "Ghosts of Empire", unsure of their legacy or the value they brought to the world.
But even British historians reflect the skewed scope of modern Britain. Contrast Morris, born James, who writes wonderful British histories but is a fierce Welsh nationalist, with Kwarteng, whose parents were born in Ghana and who rose to understand England as the ultimate insider while putting a context to its history that older, self-loathing Brits can't quite seem to grasp. The old people are the ones that think their culture stinks. Young people look at the world left behind after Pax Britannica and may agree they could have done things differently but it isn't all their fault; Britain could not have managed things differently and stopped Islamic fundamentalism, for example.
Mesopotamia - Iraq - is the reason that pundits invoke British imperialism regarding America, but it's a flawed lesson. Germany, Japan and South Korea were also examples of American imperialism that show British post-empire wisdom. Many of the same people in America critical of American imperialism in Iraq have been annoyed that America has not assisted 'freedom fighters' in Libya, Egypt and now Syria. Well, that is a lesson America learned from Britain too; you can't fix all countries.
International diplomacy remains a rough affair and the only experts on what should be done are historians. Yet sports remain deceptively simple - you can't buy a Gold medal, nor is it simply a matter of throwing more people in a sport. Economists used a model they created to match results of previous Olympics and declared that socialism works best for sports; they were also wrong about the numbers and the cultural world view. Socialism (or even quasi-Communism, in China with its Soviet-era training farms) had no special place. The world has not passed America by in sports. If anything, the parts of America that have been less socialist - sports - are the parts doing well. The parts most heavily regulated and criticized are the ones still keeping America solvent.
Watching these Olympics, I searched for recurring themes that relate 20th century Britain to the 21st century U.S. that Kwarteng sees. If the Brits did not recognize in 1912 that a new giant was on the world stage (as Morris recounts in "Heavens Command", the first book of "Pax Britannica", various members of British government did, shown authoritatively by dispatching a faded empire in 1898) by 1917 they did. Who is that giant now? China? Maybe, but at its apex the Sun never set on the British Empire despite the fact that they only had 50,000 troops overseas. Likewise, the actual fighting force in a small American military is a minute percentage. China weathered the economic downturn of 2008 because of cheap exports and cheap labor and autocracy that keeps it from changing, not a superior business model.
America retains an anti-imperial spirit, despite what critics think regarding nation building. And for that, we have Britain to thank. So thanks Brits - and well done. I look forward to watching whatever you do in the closing ceremonies to show us all that Britain is still British. But be warned, not everyone gets it. Partisans in America have even somehow reframed the entire event as being the Brits thumbing their noses at Mitt Romney, as if the Olympics would not have been successful otherwise, which shows that kooky progressives are a more dangerous flavor of nationalists than neo-cons ever were.
I've had "Ghosts of Empire" for a few months and it's a terrifically thorough book - in every chapter I learned some new fact or context that I bookmarked in hopes that I might use it some day. And I got to watch the Olympics with a copy on my couch. When anything interesting came up that involved a former British 'colony' (like the American and Iran lightweight wrestling match a few days ago) I would flip open the book to the relevant chapter and give it a look. It made this Olympics a different sort of fun. If you're a western European (or American) and enjoy historical context that isn't trying to simply make an opposing argument to common knowledge (a plight of the humanities in general and historians in particular), you'll get a kick out of the book too.
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