Bizarre Opening Ceremony: Mary Poppins, Peter Pan & NHS?

Friday night’s opening ceremony for the Olympic Games left me agape and wondering what in the world I was witnessing. The only thing I could picture was someone watching the proceedings while tripping on acid. Maybe then the whole production would have made sense. The New York Times described last night in London as “a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful; the conventional and the eccentric; and the frankly off-the-wall.” The Times went further: “Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is.”