Paris 2000 & Paris 2024: A Tale of Two Cities...

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. 

And what did France do with this once in a lifetime opportunity?  Showcase French culture? Showcase the most beautiful city in the world? Showcase the bridges or the buildings or the sculptures or the parks? The Sun King - Louis XIV, Victor Hugo, or Baron Haussmann, the father of the city we know today?  Umm… not exactly.

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 21^st 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 21^st 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

The NFL has become the No Freedom League - How Wokeness Helped Bring America to the Brink of Revolution

I grew up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before they had satellite TV. As such, on the Monday after the Super Bowl everyone on the entire base would try and get through the day without knowing who won the game. That night, after a tape of the game had been flown down from the US, we'd watch the game and be riveted to our TVs. The military TV stations weren’t allowed to show private commercials so we would all greet a Pepsi or McDonalds commercial that might slip by the censors with wondrous applause. The NFL was my passion, along with my sainted Dolphins, with Gods Bob Griese and Dan Marino at the helm. Today however, I doubt I’ll watch another NFL game and most certainly won’t spend a penny on NFL merchandise.

Why? It’s simple. The NFL, helmed by men who are ostensibly some of the smartest businessmen in America, literally helped bring America to the brink of revolution, maybe even led the way. Of course we’re talking about Kaepernick and Black Lives Matter.

The NFL, and to a lesser degree, MLB and the NBA used to be oases from which all Americans could seek refuge from the slings and arrows of daily life. Monday at the office used to be “Did you see that catch?” or “The zebras blew another one!” Since Kaepernick started his grandstanding however the conversations became more about who was kneeling, what star was lecturing America about this grievance or that and ceased to be about the excitement or pain or joy of the actual games.

In a sad irony, Charlie Daniels once wrote an anthem called “In America” where he used an NFL team to demonstrate American's unity. 

And we may have done a little bit of fighting among ourselves, 

but you outside people best leave us alone...

Cause we'll all stick together, and you can take that to the bank,

that's the cowboys and the hippies and the rebels and the yanks...

You just go and lay your hand on a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and I think you're gonna finally understand”

It’s almost apropos that Daniels died in the very year when it’s not outsiders who have started a revolution, but other Americans, and they were set on that course by the NFL.

Had the “geniuses” who run the NFL understood anything about America and put a stop to Kaepernick’s on field preening four years ago, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Freedom of speech had nothing to do with anything. Kaepernick had and has every right to say what’s on his mind. The NFL however did not have to allow him to hijack their platform to trumpet it. Had they not helped him become a media darling, he probably wouldn’t have walked away from is multimillion dollar contract and become the least worthy “martyr” in the history of martyrs.

And just to be clear, it's not because they couldn't have done anything.  The NFL controls virtually every single thing about its games and programs. It choreographs everything!!! Uniform colors… check. Shirts tucked in… check. Fines for faux cellphone celebrations after a touchdown? Check. Yet somehow they weren’t able to tell players that they could not disrespect the American flag and National Anthem. They could have required standing, or required those not wanting to participate to stay in the locker room, or they could have kept all the players in the locker rooms and let the fans sing the song… But they didn’t. Instead, they allowed what would have been a flash in the pan to become a raging inferno that has the potential to turn the United States and its Constitution into ashes.  The fires and riots and attacks on police and federal buildings and America are simply the progeny of the boiling tempers fueled in part by the victim mentality emboldened by the NFL's wokeness.

Today in the United States the idea of free speech is vanishing and the NFL, by showcasing a struggling, marginal, spoiled quarterback with a chip on his shoulder helped make it so. Today in America, everything is political… science, education, healthcare and now, sadly, even sports. Sure politics in sports has been around for a while, go back to the 1968 Black Power Olympic protests or Muhammad Ali, but those were news, not everyday life.

Now politics has infested every corner of American life and you can’t help but see it everywhere from shopping to going to the movies to wedding cakes to science. Not to mention workplaces.  Up until about 2016 Americans had at least one refuge from the cancer of political rage… that was sports. Americans of different colors, of different religions of different national origins could get together and cheer for (or against) the Cowboys, the Raiders, the Patriots or the Steelers and feel like they were part of something bigger than themselves, members of the same team.  "How'd we do this weekend?" or "Where are we at this Sunday?" wasn't reserved for players or coaches... Fans were part of the team, the 12th man, they weren't just observers, they were family.  Sports made fans' differences inconsequential, even if only for as long as they were cheering together or drinking beer together or wearing the their matching Giants jerseys.

In putting politics front and center of their offerings, in letting their platforms become a cultural litmus test, in actively turning their sport into a vehicle for wokeness, the NFL has destroyed their brand as an American icon. Never again will many Americans look to it for a welcome respite from the chaos of everyday life. Never again will it have the capacity to change American life the way the Heidi Bowl did.

The NFL may continue to be a viable business for some time, but its place in history will be sealed by its engagement in wokeness. The thing about wokeness is that there are always new victims to be supported, new causes to be championed and new targets for expropriation and destruction. The geniuses who run the league shouldn’t be surprised that eventually they will be on the wrong side of some victims rights group and their businesses will be targeted, their directors will be hounded and eventually their assets will be taken, one way or another. When that happens they shouldn't be surprised that more than a few people might be whispering feelings of Schadenfreude.