21st Century Disneyfornicated Land...

What would it look like if Hollywood, particularly Walt Disney, got together with those leaders of the Chinese Communist Party who approved the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and the captains of an increasingly dying music industry all tinged with nostalgia? It would, I'm afraid, look a lot like the closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics.

We have, of course, seen these Disneyfornicated spectacles before at Disneyland, at Disney World, at American political conventions since the 1970s, and at the Super Bowl, so they are not novel. That is why I try not to watch the closing ceremonies. I dislike the celebratory gore of these banal and trivial Western spectacles. I ended up watching part of the closing ceremonies of the London Olympics, however, because, I suppose, such celebratory gore with all its banality and triviality is my version of the car wreck others can't take their eyes off for whatever reason. Another thing that I find so interesting about these Western Disneyfornicated spectacles is the fact that have gone global. How many differences, after all, were there really between the ceremonies in "Communist" Beijing last Olympics and "Neoliberal Cameron" London this Olympics time around?

What I loved most of all about the closing ceremonies of the London Olympics was the presence of the Spice Girls, a presence that had been hyped before the closing ceremonies as the most recent reunion of the simulated five, the simulated five who turned parodic and satirical punk names like Johnny Rotten and Jello Biagra into such stereotyped and caricatured female names as Posh Spice, Scary Spice, Baby Spice, Ginger Spice, and Sporty Spice. I loved it that the Spice Girls, Great Britain's version of Charlie's Angels if they were pop stars rather than detectives, were in the Olympics closing ceremony not because I love or even moderately like the Spice Girls. I neither love nor like the Spice Girls. But I do love irony. I loved the spectacle of the Spice Girls arriving in London taxis, a shout out presumably to British exceptionalism, gone all psychedelic because I think more than anything else the hollowness at the heart of the Spice Girls symbolises the hollowness of the Califonicated spectacles that have increasingly come to characterise uber sport contests like the Olympics all around the world not to mention Western life in general. The faux girl power I really want to be a Hollywood star feminism of the Spice Girls, after all, is as hollow as the hollow celebratory banality of the London Olympics and the hypocritical banality of the Olympics powers that be who have never met an Olympics that they have found unsuccessful.

Give me Pussy Riot.