On New Year’s Eve 1999 I was tending bar at Outback Steakhouse in DC. As midnight rolled through each time zone celebrations from each city were shown on TV. At 6:00 I looked up and what I saw would change my life. It was Paris and I was captivated. Everything seemed to be outlined in lights. The bridges, the Eiffel Tower, the walks along the river, the Louvre… seemingly everything. I was enchanted and turned to a friend and said “I have to go there…”
Five months later I was standing on one of those bridges I’d
seen on TV. It was my first visit to the
city and it was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. I remember standing on a bridge near the
Louvre, staring at the Eiffel Tower and saying to myself “I have to live here
someday.”
The next day I would meet my future bride in the form of my
guide in the gardens of Versailles. I
spent a week in the city and easily had the greatest week of my life. I would go
on to visit France a dozen times over the next 20 years and experience much of
what the city and the country had to offer… and I would eventually live there
too.
The celebration that I’d seen on that night in the bar had
been a carefully choreographed effort to show the world, on the biggest stage,
the beauty of Paris, the glory of France and invite the world to visit. It worked for me and tens of millions of
others. In 2002 France
would become the world’s number one tourist destination, a position it has
held for most of the quarter century since.
Tens of millions of tourists would visit Paris and France and their
billions of Euros make up 10% of France’s GDP.
That celebration might just have been the most effective advertisement
in human history.
Now, jump ahead a quarter century when Paris is hosting the
Olympics. The event began ten days ago
with what was essentially a three-hour commercial in front of one of the largest
worldwide television audiences possible, with upwards of 1.5 billion people
watching.
While there were tiny glimpses into some of that, the
reality is that the opening ceremonies were a celebration of everything but the
grandeur of France. From an early ménage à trois hookup in the public library
to the despicable mocking of the Last Supper by a cast of deviant trans
characters to what looked like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
sitting in front of the Eiffel Tower, almost the entire thing was a giant middle
finger to face of culture in general and Christianity in particular. And don’t be fooled by the Olympic
Committee’s “apology” if anyone was offended.
Nor by the designer Thomas Jolly’s disingenuous claims that the feast
was based on a Greek festival featuring Dionysus, the god of wine and the father
of Séquana, the goddess of the river Seine.
In the same piece TheWrap
quotes an Olympics producer stating: “Thomas Jolly took inspiration from
Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting…Clearly, there was
never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief …
[Jolly] is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous
work of art. From Andy Warhol to ‘The Simpsons,’ many have done it before him.”
Despite the denials, the opening ceremonies were clearly an
attempt to push LGBT deviancy into the mainstream of world consciousness – in a
way that it could never have reached viewers in most of the world otherwise –
and do so while mocking the faith of Christians, the one faith the left feels
safe in mocking.
Rush Limbaugh used to say “Politics is downstream from
culture”. He talked about it in the context of schools, Hollywood and the media
acting as the bleeding edge of ideas that the left was trying to inculcate into
America, and that eventually legislation would follow. There is no better example of this than gay
marriage a decade ago and today’s trans ideology and its attendant child
mutilation demands.
What we saw on Friday was an attempt to use this
traditionally – by
design – apolitical venue showcasing human achievement, human competition
and most of all human spirit, as the camel’s nose in the world’s tent for the homosexual
/ transsexual agenda.
And that right there is the crux of the problem. The mocking of Christianity is of course
vile, but a free society thrives on free speech, and that includes mockery and
derision. Similarly, the LGBTQXYZ123 agenda, while perhaps unseemly to many, is
welcome to take its place in the arena of ideas. That’s not the problem. No, what
makes this event so despicable, and frankly, disheartening, is the fact that
given the platform and three hours in front of a billion viewers, rather than France
showcasing her beauty and elegance and history and culture, someone decided to
hand that opportunity over to activists bent on showing France, not as one of
the great foundations of western civilization, but rather to be a nation of
depravity, sacrilege and deviance.
Make no mistake, while the Olympics are indeed about
athletes and competition and spirit, at the end of the day, money is what makes
them work. Broadcasters pay many billions of dollars for the right to be able
to broadcast the games. Companies pay billions of dollars to be associated with
the games for the specific purpose of advertising their offerings. Hosts pay
hundreds of millions of dollars to the Olympic Committee and promise to spend
billions more on the games, often knowing they are going to lose money in the
process, all in hopes of generating money in the long run from tourism.
This Olympic betrayal is not going to destroy tourism to
France. People are still going to come, by the tens of millions. The Louvre and
the Mona Lisa aren’t going anywhere. The Eiffel Tower isn’t going anywhere and
Paris’ spectacular bridges and boulevards aren’t going anywhere. But what might have been destroyed is the
illusion that French culture in the 21st century is anything
resembling or worthy of that which built some of the greatest achievements in
western civilization. Does anyone who watched that spectacle imagine that the
France of the 21st century could ever match the glories crafted by
the France of history that brought us the Rights of Man, Mont-Saint-Michel or
the palace of Versailles? Of course not.
It won’t do anything in the short run but make Paris and France the butt of
jokes. In the long run however, that’s a different story. Cultures rarely die in a grand cataclysms,
but rather wither on the vine from neglect, indifference, ingratitude and
contempt. That, I think is the message of the 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony in
Paris. For a nation I love, that’s a message, I for one would rather not have
seen.
Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA
No comments:
Post a Comment