Their sense of superiority is frightening. Ours is just one of those funny quirks you just shrug off.
..........
Yes, but...
It's difficult, I imagine, to avoid a sense of superiority when your coherent history stretches back to the earliest moments of civilized life and when you know that while others were mucking about like proto-apes huddled around Clarke's anomaly, your ancestors were building, destroying and dreaming big. Compared to this long narrative, the Americans - with their unsustainable carrier battle groups, high fructose corn syrup enhanced waistlines and paradoxically homespun style of vainglory -- are only a bad dream.
They'll be gone, soon enough.
And speaking of dreaming...
To me, the most compelling moments of the opening ceremony orbited around the slowly unfurling digital scroll. What a perfectly, awesomely 21st century artifact; simultaneously new beyond description and yet terribly old, used, as it was, to tell a story of romantic nationalism.
Strangely, it reminded me of this:
When I was a boy -- perhaps 12 -- I dreamed that I was brought before the emperor of the world who was, appropriately enough, Chinese.
There he sat on his tensegrity throne. Behind him, a vast, flexible display undulated like a flag in a strong breeze. It showed scenes from the subjugated Earth and other worlds among the stars under the autarch's boot.
It was both terrible and beautiful, as I recall.
.d.
-- "Surrender Dorothy!"
W. Witch, Western Div ...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/