"I've been watching the Olympics sporadically. Who even knew there was such a thing as synchronized diving? I'd already read articles and watched a couple of documentaries on the Bird's Nest and Water Cube--though as much as I enjoy the design, I can't help noting that from the air the Water Cube resembles nothing so much as a quilted mattress. I caught the beginning and end of the opening ceremony. The 2008 drummers were a not altogether flattering look into the soul of the Chinese regime, which I guess we're supposed to call authoritarian rather than totalitarian these days, and the spookiness of the spectacle was only heightened by the rictuses the drummers were instructed to display after they seemed too intimidating in the dress rehearsal. But the moment that most got to me was the Red Army soldiers raising the PRC flag. They'd been made up with some goo that made them positively glisten. It was the perfect counterpart to the '36 Olympics' Aryan ubermenschen.
Did you notice how during the start of their opening ceremony coverage, NBC peppered the script with phrases like "great leap" and "long march" that have enormous resonance in recent Chinese history, but used the phrases utterly out of their historical context, an inappositeness that was especially jarring considering the human suffering caused by the Great Leap Forward? So now we know (1) the Olympics are not just a small step for China, they're a great leap, (2) it's been a long march for China to these Olympics, and (3) NBC's writers are brainless hacks. Only the last of these is an insight that's likely to stay with us."
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