Confession: I’m not much of an Olympic games fan at the very best of times, for the primary reason that it serves mainly as a platform for sports that most of us wouldn’t spend much time watching at any other time. Sure, you might tune into the rowing if it’s free to air on the television and there’s an Irish medal at stake, but let’s not pretend that many people are going to pick “Rowing Today” on the television were it competing with, say, Match of the Day or The Sunday Game. There’s a reason the summer Olympics are held in August, after all – it’s when the football offseason is at its height, and the only other major sport in full swing (outside of Ireland) is Test Match Cricket.
It’s also relatively unsurprising, I would think, that the opening ceremony for Paris would have ended up being – in the phrase of a disgruntled acquaintance – “a woke shitshow”. That such a thing would happen is a predictable consequence of the kind of people who get drafted in to produce such things. Outside of academia, there is no more reliably left-wing institution in the western world than “the orts”, and certainly none more preachy.
In truth, having watched the thing in full, it was the grotesque depiction of the murdered French Queen that annoyed me the most. The French, having never had the humility to confront the ugly side of their revolution, have always instead tried to justify it retrospectively, including with various slanders against the Queen up to and including the lie that she told the peasantry to eat cake. The reality is that the French executed a young woman and a mother for no other reason than to satisfy the blood-lust of the parisien mob: She posed no threat to the “liberty” of France, and her trial, it is widely agreed, featured outrageous slanders and lies against her person. The manner of her death, in a brutal public spectacle, should rightly be a source of shame, not pride, for the French.
The greatest amount of ire, however, has been directed not at the mockery of the former queen, but at the alleged parody of “The Last Supper” involving a tableau of drag queens. UK TV host Piers Morgan was amongst those to accrue millions of views in the expression of his outrage:
Btw, what the f*ck was all this about? A drag queen mockery of the Last Supper at the Olympics? Would they have mocked any other religion like this? Appalling decision. pic.twitter.com/50uREKJEJd
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 27, 2024
There are a few things to say here, aside from the obvious and self-evident point that this was a lazy, predictable, needlessly offensive, and deeply weird moment.
First, unpopular as this will be to note, the scene above is a parody of, or homage to, a painting, not a religion. “The last supper” is a piece of artwork, and not a religious icon. There is not a christian alive who venerates the painting. It is not a sacred object.
Second, I do not intend to fall into the infuriating habit of some in lecturing people about their own faith, but it has always seemed to me that “turn the other cheek” is one of those examples of fundamentally good advice given by Jesus in the gospels to his disciples. One of the reasons that the west is in a cultural cycle of outrage and counter-outrage is that provocations like that one tend to work. Call it the inverse version of “own the libs-itis”, which is a disease that afflicts a great many on the right, wherein the success or failure of a particular initiative is judged purely and entirely on the volume of liberal tears it produces. The nature of the culture wars is that anger in the other tribe is a very valuable currency, and that the more you react to stuff like this, the more of it you will get.
Third, there’s the ever-unflattering comparison with Muslims. It’s trite and true to say “they’d never mock Islam like this” with the unspoken implication that the reason for this is that the reaction to such a provocation might well be an outbreak of head-chopping. One might argue that this is a feature of Christianity, rather than a bug: A history over the last few hundred years of permitting free speech, even when it is offensive, is one of the reasons our civilisation is as enlightened as it is. There’s an unfortunate habit that some commentators on the right have developed of almost sounding wistfully admiring of the worst features of Islamic society, imagining that “they” would never dare mock us if we were more like “them”.
Fourth, there’s the inherent error of conflating the opening ceremony with the Olympic Games themselves. The games, while not necessarily my cup of tea, feature thousands of athletes from all around the world most of whom, it can safely be assumed, have been much too busy training for the most important fortnight of their careers to worry too much about the culture war politics of the opening ceremony. I’m not telling you you have to watch them – I probably won’t – but pretending to strike a blow for the culture wars by refusing to watch the beach volleyball isn’t a political statement. It’s just social media performance art.
Fifth and finally, it is the athletes really who should be protesting this, for it has detracted unnecessarily from their accomplishments and talents, which are what the focus of the games should be. The greatest crime of the opening ceremony organisers was – and this is sadly not unusual for the left in the modern era – to contract main character syndrome, in which it was very clearly the intention to stoke discussion and controversy and political debate entirely separate and distinct from the discussion of the sports. The Olympic games are supposed to be a celebration of athletic and sporting prowess, not a celebration of drag queens. The political left’s main character syndrome where everything, absolutely everything, must be about them, is the best argument for not responding in kind. There’s a lot to be said for just letting people watch the archery in peace.