In the midst of the rain-soaked opening ceremony of the Olympics, President Macron tweeted: “This is France.” He was right, though perhaps not in the way he intended.
The president sent out his message in the hours-long display of France’s new secular religion: woke, which rejects and mocks the old while sacralising the new—transgenderism, multiculturalism.
The spectacle will always come first when organising an Olympic ceremony. Everything needs to be improved upon from its predecessors. Faster, higher, stronger is the motto of the games, after all. In 2012, the London Olympics had an opening ceremony which praised Britain’s National Health Service. That was as quirky an idea, though less insulting, as the French efforts to make a spectacle of sexual diversity (every variation of sex except a heterosexual married two-parent family).
It was always going to take something special to capture, in brief, the distinct history and culture of France, a relatively small country that has contributed significantly to the zeitgeist throughout the ages—Baudelaire, Voltaire, Monet, the rest. For centuries, painters, poets, and writers changed the world, leaving behind a cultural legacy for the next generation. Paris, at the vanguard of an artistic and cultural revolution, rose to prominence as the Enlightenment capital of Europe.
Though you would have to struggle to any of that in the Olympic opening.
Thomas Jolly, the organiser of the ceremony was very specific about what he wanted. The theatre director assured everyone that it would be a ’celebration of cultural, linguistic, religious and sexual diversity in France.’ Welcome to the ‘queering’ of the Olympic Games.
Representation entails prioritising one thing over another. From the outset of the sodden ceremony, Jolly shared with us his creative vision of all that France supposedly holds dear. Everywhere you looked during the event was a drag act. A group of body positive drag queens were served a naked man with blue body paint on a fruit platter in a scene that resembled a Bacchanalian Last Supper. Not to mention a man with a beard twerking for the camera. It was more Eurovision than Olympian.
The decision to host it on the Seine was a terrible decision. This was the first time in the history of the Olympic Games that the ceremony was held somewhere other than the traditional stadium. Major sporting events are held in stadiums for one reason: the weather. But I suppose that is what happens when you want to defy convention and be rebellious. While 300,000 spectators lined the quays in rain macs to cheer over 10,000 athletes representing more than two hundred sporting nations all piled onto boats in the pouring rain.
And then there was the length. This took four hours from beginning to end. If you were looking for culture, you could have attended a performance of Carmen at one of the opera houses in Paris, then returned to watch the last thirty or so boats drift up the Seine.
When we did at last get some culture, it was less authentically French and more a celebration of North American cultural imperialism. Lady Gaga and Canadian singer Celine Dion, two semi-forgotten pop stars from the noughties, performed and a headless Marie Antoinette sang a few lines to a heavy metal song. Forty years ago, this kind of faux radicalism would have been considered cliché in gay clubs.
The way that Christ is portrayed in the Last Supper performance has offended some people. The question I find myself asking is not how you could mock Christianity, as I respect freedom of speech and the ability to blaspheme, but rather why it is that you feel the need to constantly attack this specific religion. How would it go over if a man dressed like a busty woman wearing a purple wig spanked a drag version of Muhammad? These people consider it a safe target. Someone should have reminded Jolly that Madonna was doing this in the 1980s.
The fact that these identitarian enthusiasts would never mock or criticise Islam is evidence of their capitulation to conformity. Is it conceivable that they would stage a drag portrayal of Aisha atop a glitter-studded horse with rainbow-coloured wings, ridiculing the Muslim belief that Muhammad ascended to heaven atop this mythical creature? I don’t think so. The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, 12 of whom were killed in 2015 by two Muslim gunmen for publishing a cartoon depicting their prophet—then boldly published them a few years later—are the artists I admire.
Controversy has surrounded the games despite all of the fanfare and pageantry. An attack had sabotaged three of France’s main railway lines, leaving thousands of attendees stranded, just as athletes were lighting the torch. Then we learned that raw meat had been served to athletes in the Olympic village. But by far the most concerning has been the inclusion of a convicted rapist in the Dutch volleyball team. Meanwhile a six-time female Olympian had to drop out of the games for excessively whipping a horse. The entire situation strikes me as incredibly hypocritical for an event that purports to depict true ‘gender parity.’
There was one point during the tedious event that seemed to sum up France’s current predicament perfectly. To deliver the Olympic flag, a giant silver horse galloped down the Seine. We’re discussing religion and symbolism, so it seems like something out of the Book of Revelation. A pale horse is a symbol of death. We are mourning the loss of the nation’s cultural heritage rather than celebrating it.
Macron tells us this is France now, like a gay club in San Francisco in 1980 (brusselssignal.eu)