And why more pompous ceremonies and jingoistic anthems when we really need to focus on the emergent pride in our modern country?
A pompous groundbreaking ceremony was held last week to inaugurate the construction of a third bridge over the Bosporus in Istanbul, even though the environmental impact was not sufficiently debated.
To the list of things that J.D. Salinger found hard to bear, we can now add these: pompous graduation ceremonies and shlepping overseas to see tulips.
Chinese bloggers derided him then as "a master of directing totalitarian group calisthenics," whose "blockbusters create standards for pompous state ceremonies," and similar criticisms are now surfacing.
In a pompous declaration-signing ceremony, Tidal made these stars co-owners in exchange for them giving it first crack at releasing their music.
Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, whose blog I read regularly and admiringly, faulted me for my quick dismissal of Elizabeth Alexander's work, and for making too much of what will be far from the dullest or most pompous moment of the ceremony.
I fought my way to Wembley, wielding a press card as pompous as a passport, and was seated well before the ceremonies began to unroll.
It did not put off Havel's fans that the pompous state funeral, whose bits were partly modeled on the memorial ceremonies for Czechoslovakia's first president Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, was orchestrated by his arch enemy and successor in office, Václav Klaus.
The consequences for their own country are mostly thought of as so much pompous bric-a-brac and nostalgic trivia: honours and baubles with imperial names, archaic ceremonies, statues of forgotten heroes, a smattering of exotic vocabulary, curry and distressingly proficient rival cricket teams.
