30 Jul Olympic Boredom
The following are words I never thought I’d type: today, I’d like to discuss the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
You see, I dislike the Olympics. Call me a curmudgeon, but I just don’t find them even remotely interesting. Once upon a time, they were more interesting. I’d say the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980 and then the Los Angeles Games in 1984 were the Olympics’ high points, and it’s been mostly downhill since. The whole concept of the “amateur” competition collapsed in 1992, of course, when professional athletes were openly allowed to compete. Today…well…what’s the point?
Whatever the case, the opening ceremony of this year’s event was, apparently, quite controversial and has been the subject of much discussion. For my money, both the ceremony and the response say a great deal about the state of society, none of it good.
For starters, I assume that the controversial scene in the opening ceremony was, indeed, a parody of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” and not a recreation of the “Feast of the Gods.” I assume that because the scene was titled “La Cene Sur La Scene Sur La Seine,” i.e. “The Scene of the Last Supper on the Seine.” That seems pretty clear to me, but then, I don’t really care either way.
Many Christians in the United States and elsewhere are extremely upset about the alleged mockery of their faith. They shouldn’t be. For example, Daniel Darling, director of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Land Center for Cultural Engagement, criticized the event, insisting that “this was, as the organizers admitted, exactly what we thought it was: a blasphemous mockery of the Christian faith, which is the bulwark of Western Civilization.” That’s fair, I suppose. But he should know that parodies of religion – including “the Christian Faith” – also comprise a long and storied tradition in Western Civilization.
Aristophanes, the “Father of Comedy,” who lived and wrote in the fifth century B.C., at the dawn of the Hellenic influence on Western Civilization, mocked and satirized the gods as much as he did anyone (save, perhaps, Cleon). Chaucer’s most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, satirized the Church, as did Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. Voltaire’s Candide is, in part, a satire of the Catholic Church, while his play, Mahomet, was a complete and brutal mockery of Islam. Robert Burns, the “national poet of Scotland,” mocked the Scottish Calvinists in his “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” while Jonathan Swift satirized the entirety of Christianity in his A Tale of a Tub. The great Western canon is littered with brilliant and important parodies of religion and its practitioners.
In short, mockery of religion is neither anything new nor something about which to be terribly upset. It serves a purpose and always has. It is hardly something that should be banned or punished. Those who believe otherwise, of course, are ripe for mockery themselves. They are as much a part of the problem as anyone.
Now, that is not to say that the opening ceremony is above criticism or that it should be praised in any way. It most definitely should NOT be. It was horrendous, but its flaws are somewhat more complicated than its ridicule of Christianity.
The most obvious issue with the whole bit is that it’s wildly hypocritical. The entire drag queen/transgender issue has become a religious orientation in itself. It is clearly and inarguably an alternative religion, one based on sex and indulgence and especially deviance from traditional (Judeo-Christian) norms. Everyone knows this. It is obvious as the noses on our faces. Those who feign ignorance do so only because they have convinced themselves that the maintenance of secularism is the ultimate expression of intellectual discipline and are therefore embarrassed that they support this alternative religion. But they’re not fooling anyone.
The catch here is that these same people who mock Christianity demand that their faith be immune from the same type of mockery. Your faith can and should be criticized and satirized, but their faith is completely off-limits. If you dare to utter a word of disapproval, you are derided as hateful and bigoted and ugly and immature. “How dare you attack a 300-pound man pretending to be a woman pretending to be the Virgin Mary! You hateful rube!” These people are like the Islamists but even more cheerless and severe. To say they operate under a double standard is radically to understate their lack of self-awareness and their self-righteousness.
A second issue with drag/trans satire of Christianity is that it’s uninteresting and largely pointless. Erasmus satirized a Church much in need of satirization, a clergy and hierarchy that were uniquely powerful, oppressive, and corrupt. That’s not exactly the case today. The drag queens mock a Church that largely doesn’t care about them, and, even if it did, couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Even in allegedly “Catholic” France, the Church holds precious little sway. Robert Burns spoke truth to power. These people have no such mission. THEY are the power, and they are largely uncontested in that role. There was no bravery involved in this satire. It was all accepted and defended by “the establishment.”
All of this means that the whole thing was largely an exercise in self-indulgence and, as such, was incredibly boring. The late, great Christopher Hitchens once wrote that “the one unforgivable sin is to be boring.” And indeed, that was the sin committed by the Paris Olympic Committee. Their drag/trans bacchanalia wasn’t shocking or horrifying. It was tedious. It was tiresome. It was so unoriginal and “expected.”
In that sense, I suppose, it was also the perfect opening ceremony, in that the Olympics themselves are now unoriginal, “expected,” and utterly boring. The United States won the gold medal in men’s basketball, you say? Well…I should hope so. But tell me again why I should care?
