The Surprise We Expected - New York Times
BG: What a great way to describe the artistry of the psyop.
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July 8, 2005
The Surprise We Expected
By IAN MCEWAN
London
THE mood of a city has never swung so sharply. On Wednesday there was no better place on earth. After the victory of the Olympic decision in Singapore, Londoners were celebrating the prospect of an explosion of new energy and creativity; those computer-generated images of futuristic wonderlands rising out of derelict quarters and poisoned industrial wastelands were actually going to be built.
The echoes of rock and roll in Hyde Park and its wave of warm and fundamentally decent emotions were only just fading. In Gleneagles, Scotland, the Group of 8 summit meeting was about to address at least - and at last - the core of the world's concerns, and we could take some satisfaction that our government had pushed the agenda. London was flying and we moved confidently about the city - the paranoia after Sept. 11 and Madrid was mostly forgotten and no one had second thoughts about taking the tube. The "war on terror," that much examined trope, was an exhausted rallying cry, with all the appearance of a moth-eaten regimental banner in a village church.
But terror's war on us opened another front on Thursday morning. It announced itself with a howl of sirens from every quarter, and the oppressive drone of police helicopters. Along the Euston Road, by the new University College Hospital - a green building rising above us like a giant surgeon in scrubs - thousands of people stood around watching ambulances filing nose to tail through the stalled traffic into the casualty department.
The police were fanning out through Bloomsbury, closing streets at both en
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