As Team GB entered the Olympic stadium during the opening ceremony on Friday night, it was to David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. The central line from the song struck me as summing up the country’s hopes for its sportswomen and men amid a double-dip recession and seemingly terminal economic inertia - ‘We can be heroes, just for one day’. A concession in the choice of song perhaps that the Olympics represent a temporary, if somewhat spectacular, distraction from an increasingly dire reality that can only intensify over the forthcoming years.
Something of a debate has broken out about the meaning of this extraordinary ceremony, not least here on OurKingdom with Anthony Barnett and Sunder Katwala. The New York Times called it “...neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future”. This struck me as an accurate summation of an event that presented in microcosm the present historical moment in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the social and economic malaise that has followed. I was reminded of the quote by Antonio Gramsci on crisis in its consisting“...precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born”. It is similar sentiments that informed the mixed nature of London's opening ceremony, which looked neither wholly forward nor back.
