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Sunday’s main competition at the Paris Olympics: Apologies. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was competing against itself.
First, a fake apology for the sacrilege at the opening ceremonies, and second, a real apology for getting the North Koreans and South Koreans mixed up.
I stopped watching the Olympics opening ceremonies years ago, due to their increasing weirdness and the enthronement of John Lennon’s Imagine as the obligatory anthem. Imagine is an atheistic “hymn” that imagines no countries. While IOC members have no trouble holding mutually contradictory positions, less craven observers object to singing of “no countries” as the athletes march in, country by country, to compete on that basis.
The ceremonies did have a thrilling conclusion, with Celine Dion’s return on the grandest possible stage, the Eiffel Tower itself. In 1989, for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Jessye Norman, resplendent in a billowing tricolour, sang La Marseillaise at the Place de la Concorde. This was in that category.
Not even Dion has the operatic power of Norman, but her struggle with stiff-person syndrome made her moment both potent and poignant. Her return brought back memories of Luciano Pavarotti, who came to the Olympics to say goodbye. He bid farewell at the 2006 Turin opening ceremonies, his last public performance of Nessun Dorma. He would die the following year.
From the sublime onto the sacrilegious. The program included drag queens on a fashion catwalk, who assembled themselves after the pattern of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Meanwhile, Dionysius, the Greek god of drunkenness and debauchery appeared. Who knows to what end, other than to make the organizers feel transgressively clever? Jesus gives the chalice to the apostles; Dionysius the god of wine. Get it?
The Christian world erupted, as detailed at the Post by Michael Higgins, who set the fiasco in Paris into the wider context of anti-Christian wokery and bigotry.
Like others, Higgins noted that no such thing would have been done regarding Islam in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, given the excitability of the local Muslim population.
More relevant are the real gods worshipped by the IOC. Would any such mockery be tolerated of Visa, or Toyota or any of the other worldwide sponsors? To the contrary, various IOC gnomes undoubtedly review the script to ensure nothing untoward might offend their paymasters.
Given that the Louvre was part of the ceremonies, why not have the blue-body-painted Dionysius seduce the Mona Lisa? That da Vinci is actually in Paris. Sacrebleu! That would have been unthinkable.
Sunday’s faux-apology was thus false on its face. Spokeswoman Anne Descamps told reporters that “there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.”
Did they ask any pious Christians what they might think of the drag queens doing da Vinci?
What if the artistic director had proposed Dionysius writhing sexually around the Greek letter, omega? Is it possible that it would have been run by luxury watchmaker and Olympic sponsor, Omega? Or would they have gone ahead and, when the Omega executives objected, told them, “if people have taken any offence, we of course are really sorry.”
Everything in the opening ceremonies is carefully reviewed and approved. With the global variety of cultures and creeds present, care is taken not to degrade or disgrace. Yet a bit of grotesque anti-Christian sacrilege was approved. It was not an accident, but a deliberate provocation, approved at the highest levels. It reveals that at those levels of French society, and the IOC, anti-Christian sacrilege is acceptable.
Despite decades of demonstration that it is plagued by corruption, the IOC does know how to properly apologize. It gave an actual apology to South Korea, which was introduced as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is the official name of North Korea. Given the cozy relations between the IOC and tyrants, it may have been intended as a compliment.
In any case, they apologized: “It was clearly deeply regrettable and we apologize wholeheartedly.”
They can do it if they wish to. They evidently did not wish to in regard to sacrilege. The IOC does not find grave offense to Christians regrettable.
Christians were right to take offence because it was offensive. But the offence is mitigated when inflicted by banal nihilists who confuse the teenage sentimentality of Lennon’s Imagine with serious philosophy.
Imagine an Olympics without a decadent and demonic opening ceremony? It’s easy if you try.
They didn’t try in Paris.
National Post
English