Those signifiers of American renewal often seemed stagey and brittle, more bravado than strength. The 1980s and 1990s-the time of our youth-featured a strange subterranean battle between the slow steady ebb of national confidence and the resurgent rhetoric of “Morning in America,” victory in the Cold War, and the tech boom. Where young Baby Boomers saw American greatness embodied in the Apollo missions, we saw the fiery failure of the Challenger crash in 1986. After the end of the gold standard, the oil crisis, stagflation, the drug wars, and the crime waves, the 1970s ended with the Iran hostage crisis and Carter’s so-called national malaise speech.
For Generation X, political awareness began with Vietnam and Watergate.
#Started world war in imperial glory free#
With Wall Street so recently in free fall, the US media was divided between faltering belief in national power and swaggering insistence on American greatness.įor those of us who came of age in the 1970s, the two Olympic ceremonies simply rekindled what I suspect was a familiar sense of diminished expectations. The glamorous techno-futurism of Beijing and the zombie wax-museum antics of London threw America’s uncertain fate into relief. The rising superpower across the Pacific and the fading empire across the Atlantic seemed to sandwich an American Century on the wane. It highlighted the UK’s unfinished business of reckoning with an imperial past and a European future.īeijing 2008 and London 2012 struck a nerve for American viewers. Dancing health-care workers as a global sign of Britishness? The grandiloquent blend of past and present, with its hipster revisionism and blenderized ideologies, seemed to signify everything at once about the UK and therefore nothing at all. Flashes of imperial glory jangled against dashes of social-welfare pragmatism. His “Isles of Wonder” show seemed forced even on the spot. Boyle’s films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting as well as Slumdog Millionaire and Steve Jobs, tell stories of cold poverty in the UK, hot wealth in the colonies. Over in London, the Olympics kicked off again, this time with an opening ceremony masterminded by Danny Boyle. A month later, Lehman Brothers fell and tipped the world into financial crisis.īy the time 2012 rolled around, an economic recovery had been engineered in the US with the indispensable aid of Chinese capital. Commentaries popped up all over the US media, noting that the impeccable organization, the daring aesthetics, the avant-garde architecture, and the massive scale of project management in Beijing heralded the arrival of a new Asian superpower. In August 2008, Americans watched the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, marveling at Zhang Yimou’s spectacle of a newly confident, abundantly creative nation.
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