A Civilizational Suicide Note on the Seine

 'It is likely that Thomas Jolly really does think that he mounted an “inclusive” spectacle in Paris. For these left-wing elites, people unlike themselves don’t exist, except as a dark and dangerous Other to be overcome.'

From The European Conservative

By Rod Dreher

The Paris Olympics overture was a floor show for the Antichrist.

The International Olympics Committee is in full-on damage control over its blasphemous Paris opening ceremony show. The IOC has apologized for the event, and deleted it from its YouTube channel. These elites would like everyone to forget what a global television audience saw last Friday: a filthy mockery of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, featuring drag queens as the disciples, and Barbara Butch, an obese lesbian DJ, as Our Lord. 

“Oh yes! Oh yes! The New Gay Testament!” Butch later messaged on Instagram. Underscoring the point, that tableau vivant was titled, in punning French, La Cène Sur Un Scène Sur La Seine – that is, The Last Supper Staged On The Seine.

The satanic parody feast featured as its blasphemous Eucharist a priapic Smurf meant to represent Dionysius—perhaps a sneering, obscene reference to St. Denis (a Gallicized version of “Dionysius”), the third-century martyr who is a patron saint of Paris. According to a tumescent Associated Press account of the event, the Greek god of wine pointed to his penis and sang, in French, “Where to hide a revolver when you’re completely naked?”

Thomas Jolly, the gay French theatrical director who conceived this vulgar abomination, said, “My wish isn’t to be subversive, nor to mock or to shock. Most of all, I wanted to send a message of love, a message of inclusion and not at all to divide.”

There are people stupid enough to believe that. But even the leader of France’s far left, the anti-clerical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is not one of them. In a blog post, Mélenchon condemned the revolting event as shaming the nation. 

“We were speaking to the world that evening,” Mélenchon wrote. “Among the billion Christians in the world, how many good and honest people are there for whom faith provides help in living and knowing how to participate in everyone’s life, without bothering anyone?” 

Jolly rogered the good faith of Christians the world over, and knew exactly what he was doing. So too did everyone at the IOC and in the French government who approved this thing. It is impossible to believe that this trashy LGBT mockery of Christianity didn’t get a sign-off at the highest level. This was Paris’s chance to present itself to the world, and they wouldn’t dare leave anything to chance. 

What the world saw was a transgressive homosexual romp and stomp across what Christians hold sacred. France’s elites signaled to the planet that it sacralizes homosexuality, transgenderism, sexual excess, and blasphemy. The Paris Olympics overture was a floor show for the Antichrist. 

As many commenters noted, these oh-so-courageous would never do this to Muslims. Nor should they, I hasten to say! It’s just that France is deep into a culture war between Islam and secularism that will determine the country’s future. For years now, many authorities have warned that the struggle could easily tip over into a civil war. And yet, these decadent French elites are determined to hasten the destruction of Western civilization. Decades ago, the lesbian cultural critic Camille Paglia warned her fellow homosexuals against reckless attacks on religion. Homosexuality only flourishes under conditions of advanced culture, she said—and like it or not, the church is a pillar of culture. Therefore, said Paglia, when gays “attack the institutions of culture (including religion), they are sabotaging their own future.”

In 2016, Paglia spoke at an ideas festival in Britain, saying that the West’s obsession with androgyny and transgenderism is a sign that “civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” 

“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” Paglia said. In truth, she goes on, they give evidence of a culture that no longer believes in itself. This, in turn, calls forth “people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity”—in other words, barbarians. 

Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle. Ordinary Frenchmen might fight for the Blessed Virgin Mary, or for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, or at least for Brigitte Bardot. But for Barbara Butch? Please. 

Symbolism matters. National symbols concentrate and proclaim what a nation thinks of itself, and how it wants other nations to think of it. Speaking on Saturday of the Olympics opening ceremony debacle the night before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán noted archly, “At the end of the day, every nation has the right to show its true colors; that’s what we saw.”

It’s interesting to consider a tale of two cities—Budapest and Paris—and of two rivers, the Danube and the Seine. Every August 20th, the national feast day of St. Stephen the King, the Orban government ends its light show over the Danube by having drones form a giant cross of light. Contrast that with the corpulent lesbian Christ figure surrounded by writhing drag queens, re-enacting a blasphemous Last Supper on a bridge over the Seine.

True, Hungary is not as religious as the floating Cross of Light would have you believe. Nor, for that matter, is France a nation filled with trans-loving blasphemers. The point is, what does the leadership of these nations consider to be their nations’ highest values? The goals to which they aspire?

In France, as in so much of the West, the general answer is: inversion, which is what critical-theory academics mean when they speak of “queering” something. It means to turn the meaning of something inside-out, as our governing and cultural elites have done to our civilization’s values. We are told that we must be diverse, which means punishing those who hold non-progressive views. We are told we must be equitable, which means majorities must accept as just their permanent second-class status, and all the humiliations that go with it. We are told that we must be inclusive, which means excluding Christians, whites, and males. 

What’s more, the Inversionists seek to compel everyone else to accept the radically abnormal as normal. What do you think the new Democratic Party campaign to brand Trump running mate J.D. Vance as “weird” is all about? He’s an ordinary white male, a military veteran from a working-class family in the American heartland. Naturally, the party of race riots, men in women’s bathrooms, military drag queens, and sex changes for children are mounting a media offensive to smear Vance as bizarre. 

It is likely that Thomas Jolly really does think that he mounted an “inclusive” spectacle in Paris. For these left-wing elites, people unlike themselves don’t exist, except as a dark and dangerous Other to be overcome. Their moral self-righteousness often blinds them to the world as it truly is. Since the Obama years, the United States has made advancing LGBT rights a cornerstone of its foreign policy. The U.S. has used its soft power to browbeat many non-compliant nations to accept things that violate their deep moral convictions. 

Those days are rapidly coming to an end. As Viktor Orbán observed over the weekend in his annual Tusványos speech, opposing LGBT extremism at home, as Russia has done, is a form of soft power that is effective in parts of the world where nations would like to progress materially without accepting the decadence that has overtaken the West. 

Nearly 30% of American women aged 18 to 26 identify as LGBT—three times the number of men in their cohort. A recent Gallup poll showed a clear majority (56%) of Americans aged 18 to 29 affirming the fluidity of gender identity. This is no surprise, given that their generation has been propagandized by gender ideologues in schools and in popular culture—in fact, by events like the Paris Olympics opener. 

These are women in their peak childbearing years, coming of age in a culture and a civilization entering a fertility-rate death spiral. No country that wants a future for itself can allow that kind of mind virus to infect its young. It might be too late. In his 1947 classic Family And Civilization, Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman examined the way changing family forms affected the fates of the Roman and Greek empires. His historically informed sociological analysis concluded that civilizational collapse is presaged by a dissolution of families, as well as by a loosening of sexual mores, and a rise in both androgyny and homosexuality. 

Zimmerman was writing at the start of what many in the West today consider a golden age. France had entered the Trente Glorieuses, its thirty years of rapid postwar economic growth, and the United States was rocketing forward into the American Century. Yet, the sociologist could not unsee the patterns in the tea leaves. He wrote, “The only thing that seems certain is that we are again in one of those periods of family decay in which civilization is suffering internally from the lack of a basic belief in the forces which make it work.”

Watching the degrading Paris ceremony on Friday, with its exaltation of sexual transgression and regicide, brought to mind Hannah Arendt’s line about how uncontrolled transgression laid the groundwork for 20th century totalitarianism: “The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.”

What happened on Friday night in Paris was a globally televised dismantling and mockery of one of the core symbols of Western civilization, as a manifestation of France’s national character. The etymological opposite of “symbolic” is “diabolic.” Draw your own conclusions. But do not miss the symbolism here, when, hours after the opening ceremony, the 18th arrondissement of Paris lost electrical power. The only thing left illuminated was the Basilica of the Sacre-Coeur, built in the 19th century in reparation for the crimes of the Revolution. The light shines in the darkness, and even in Paris, the darkness did not overcome it.