Opening Ceremony Observations

Like so many others, I spent a few hours Friday night watching the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics.  I imagine that I was not the only one that found the ceremonies, well, interesting.  Thanks to the extreme narration skills of Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, there was very little room for the television audience to watch the ceremonies and form their own impressions of what was happening.  

Facebook post during the Opening Ceremonies:  Watching the Opening Ceremonies being narrated by Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira is far too similar to watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with its extreme overnarration. "The Voldemort puppet is over 100 feet tall and his wand shoots real sparks!". Thanks very much, Matt. I had difficulty interpreting the fact that I just watched a huge Voldemort puppet shooting sparks from his wand.

I doubt that an artist such as Danny Boyle would want someone telling his audience what to think, but perhaps I am wrong about that, since he probably had a hand in the script that Matt and Meredith used.

The narration team told us that the bizarre hospital scene was a tribute to Great Britain's National Health Service.  The children in the hospital beds were then tormented in their nightmares by a handful of iconic British literary villains until the Mary Poppins army came to the rescue.  Had I not been told how to interpret the scene by Matt and Meredith, I would have assumed that the NHS was part of the nightmare.  

My personal nightmare regarding socialized medicine, however, is already becoming reality.  The passage of the Affordable Care Act and the fact that it was upheld by the Supreme Court is a giant leap toward socialized medicine in the U.S.  Where is an army of Poppins's when you need it?