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 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 eventually 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.
world’s number one tourist destination, a position it has held for most of the quarter century since. Tens of millions of tourists would go on to 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 to 2024, when Paris is hosting the Olympics. The event began this past Friday night with what is 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 the face of culture in general and Christianity in particular.
And don’t be fooled by the Olympic Committee’s “apology” to anyone who might have been 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. Moreover, it was done to mock the faith of Christians, the one faith the left feels safe mocking.
Rush Limbaugh and Andrew Breitbart used to say, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Rush, especially, talked about it in the context of schools, Hollywood, and the media all acting as the bleeding edge of ideas that the left was trying to inculcate into America. Eventually, they knew, 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 a traditionally—by design—apolitical venue showcasing human achievement, human competition, and, most of all, the 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. Mocking 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, 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. Host countries pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the Olympic Committee and promise to spend billions more on the games, often knowing they will lose money in the process, but in the hope that they’ generate 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 21st century is anything resembling or worthy of that which built some of the greatest achievements of Western civilization. Does anyone who watched that spectacle imagine that the France of the 21st century could ever match the glories crafted by the France of history, nation that brought us the Rights of Man, Mont-Saint-Michel, or the Palace of Versailles? Of course not.
The opening ceremony 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 grand cataclysms. Rather, they 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 that I, fore one, would rather not have seen.
Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA, or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.
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