When viewers all over the world watched the 2024 Paris Olympics open, they were shocked to see a blasphemous tableau in which Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles were painted as drag queens and transsexuals. Caught in this monument to impropriety, the “Powers That Be” issued the statement that the performers were reimagining a bacchanal, not Da Vinci’s famous painting.
Nobody’s that gullible.
Millions of viewers turned off their televisions and took to the internet, to cancel their relationships with the companies that sponsored such dreck, terminating their viewing of this year’s Olympics before the events even began.
But what of the excuse? Does it hold water?
Well, let’s think about it.
Were there really bacchanalia in ancient Greece?
Of course there were.
And didn’t the Olympics begin in ancient Greece?
Of course they did.
So, could the opening ceremony pose that looked like da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper possibly have been a representation of a bacchanalia instead?
Of course not.
There are at least two points to make here, both important, both instructive:
First, of course the pose was a repulsive parody of da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper. This is clear to any observer, and is confirmed by the fact that it was billed as such before the blowback started.
Can famous works of art be parodied? Sure. Almost anything should be available for parody in the world of comedy.
But comedy must be considerate of the audience. There is one range that’s appropriate for a movie or comedy club, a very different range for a public speaking engagement or a sporting event.
Did this audience come to see a comedy show, or did the audience come to see sports?
There are two famous examples in the entertainment world of parodies of da Vinci‘s famous painting of The Last Supper. One is a classic Monty Python sketch featuring John Cleese and Eric Idle, and the other is a scene from Mel Brooks’ movie, “The History of the World, Part One.” Both examples are reasonably tasteful, inoffensive to most Christians who have a sense of humor, and were designed specifically for audiences that came to see comedy and were prepared to chuckle at something silly.
By contrast, there’s no clever wordplay, no puns, no jokes of any kind, in the Olympic opening tableaux that attacked da Vinci’s portrait this week. There was nothing funny about it at all. It was not so much a parody as an attack, as the characters in it were specifically chosen as characterizations that would offend Christians.
That doesn’t mean that good comedy can’t be offensive; it often can. But it still needs to be comedy, and it still needs to be presented to the right audience. There was nothing funny about this presentation, and it was therefore completely inappropriate for a sporting event.
Even at a stand-up comedy club, this act would have bombed, because there was nothing of substance to it. No jokes, no gags, just an intentional provocation to offend the religious in their audience.
It is instructive to ask ourselves whether they would have chosen to attack Islamic imagery, Buddhist imagery, or Hindu imagery in the same way that they attacked Christian imagery here. We all know the answer – because this wasn’t entertainment at all; it was just an insulting, gratuitous attack on Christians, on the world stage, taking advantage of a captive audience that bought their tickets for something very different.
But there is another point of equal importance worth discussing. What do we learn from their failed attempt at a cover story?
As the blowback began, its defenders immediately claimed that this was a representation of an ancient Greek bacchanalia, a claim that collapses upon application of either research or logic.
But it is worth discussing anyway. What if it really were?
What if their purpose was indeed to commemorate the famous festivities of antiquity that celebrated the worship of Dionysus (in Greece) and its equivalent, Bacchus (in Rome), on the theory that both the Olympic Games and the Bacchanalia were time-honored events in antiquity?
To be perfectly honest, even if that were their intent, it wouldn’t make them look better at all.
Ancient Greece and Rome are rightly recognized as having been among the primary cradles of western civilization for many reasons. Science, politics, philosophy, writing, theater, architecture, and more – all these contribute to the respect we have for the ancient Greeks and Romans.
But the worship of Dionysius/Bacchus is not on that list of accomplishments.
Back in the days when American schools taught history, we all knew that the Romans and Greeks were famous for their diligent work to climb out of pre-history and to be as civilized as possible.
Sure, they were pagans, worshipping a pantheon of imaginary gods and goddesses – but their societies aimed to honor and celebrate the most respectable members of that pantheon. Zeus/Jupiter, Apollo, and Athena/Minerva were the ones the civic leaders emulated, the ones they hoped their people would respect. They hoped against hope that their constituents would emulate the gods of wisdom and justice and leadership.
Dionysius/Bacchus was the god of partying, the god of drunkenness and libertine behavior. His festivals were often primitive orgies of sexual excess and drugged libations.
The bacchanalia were always hated by the leadership of both Greece and Rome; efforts to thwart the practice lasted hundreds of years in both regions. These efforts are most memorably captured in Livy’s history of the Rome of 186 BC, and in Euripedes’ dramas about the Athens of 405 BC.
In the ancient world, the Olympic Games were sober, organized, respectable contests. Dating back to 776 BC, they constituted an effort to display the best of human ability – to themselves and to outsiders.
Even though there were also primitive festivals celebrating the worst of human depravity in those days, there was no similarity, no shared participants and likely no shared audience either.
Just as the drunks and deviants of the bacchanalia would have been too inebriated or hung over to participate in the Olympics, so too would competitors in the Olympics be too well-behaved to compromise their own health or judgment by participating in a bacchanalia.
Among the lessons of this current stunt is therefore the fact that these current practitioners of media spin are so clueless about their subject matter that they don’t even realize that their cover story is utterly unbelievable.
The global Left’s anachronistic reprobates have shown that they don’t really understand the pagan world dated in years counted backward Before Christ, any better than they understand the modern world that we date in years counted forward Anno Domini.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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