Olympic Fever.

The rock star Morrissey has rounded on the London Olympics, accusing the organisers and media in particular of generating a level of jingoistic fervour comparable to the nationalistic sentiments roused by Nazi Germany in 1939.

I think maybe he’s exaggerating a bit, but I recognise the nub of his objection. I, too, find excessive nationalism ugly, and from the bits of coverage I’ve seen, it does appear that the media is milking the event far beyond its inherent worth. That’s what the media always does, of course, and so many people are easily roused to something approaching mild mass hysteria if you only know which tune to whistle.

So is there any real harm done? Well, I suppose it could be argued that such events keep the people safely anaesthetised, blithely trusting the Establishment to continue delivering the best of all possible worlds and blind to some of the ills that need sorting out. Maybe they do, but I think the politics of Middle England invented by Mrs Thatcher have been doing that job well enough for the past thirty years anyway.