Jenny Diski woke up depressed on Saturday morning. This may be, she starts by saying, just because she's not keen on collective joy or on spectacle. Fair enough. As always when a lot of people are oohing and aahing about something that isn't to your taste, one response available to you is to get on with what you do enjoy or attach importance to, and ignore the fuss. Diski, however, goes beyond merely stating a personal disinclination; she offers a general line of argument which - assuming that it's good - might be thought to provide reasons why other people should have been less taken with the Olympic opening ceremony than they were.
Her line of argument, in summary, is that despite several good features of Danny Boyle's production it failed in a decisive respect. The good features? Such things as: giving the left a 'morale boost'; revealing the animosity of the right towards the NHS; the absence of Tony Blair and Stephen Fry. The decisive failure, on the other hand, was that proceedings were 'a wishful tale of things long gone... a nostalgic cry for what has been lost'; it looked, she writes, 'like a last shout'. On the morning after, the political realities remained very much what they were the day before, in terms of corporate power, restrictions on protest, austerity cuts. The bottom line:
Those opposed to all this are feeling good. They've had their moment, publicly laughed in the face of Cameron, and have a sense of collective acknowledgment. As to making any difference, I'm not sure a boost to our morale is quite enough.
It's an extraordinary conclusion, and for at least three reasons.
First, the implicit benchmark against which this failure is measured is quite fanciful. It is hard to imagine how an opening ceremony for the London Olympics could, just in itself, have transformed the politics of this country, so that the morning after, all the objectives that Jenny Diski favours would have been hugely assisted or brought forward. This wasn't, mainly, a political event - a campaign, a set of reforms, a new party programme or movement. Second, given the inflated character of Diski's comparative expectation, one may reasonably ask what's wrong with a boost to morale? Third, there's a subtext here according to which for people simply to enjoy themselves is somehow not enough if there's no political payoff. Shall we watch 'Singin' in the Rain' tonight? Ooh, I'm not sure - what would it do for the struggle? Hey, why are you singing a love song? There's surely still stuff we need to protest about, and songs can do that too, you know. And so on.
People who enjoyed Friday evening's extravaganza could, and did, do so for many different reasons. They didn't have to be troubled just then about lack of progress in opposing the cuts.