Sacre Bleu!

Let me paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald in stating categorically, the French are different from you and me. In point of fact, they are a weird people. Or maybe I should say, outre'.

I was doing radio news all afternoon on Friday, and had the local NBC affiliate on the monitor in the news booth as the Olympics began. I'm only a casual observer of the Olympics since the great battles between Russia and the US during the Cold War. John Thomas and Valery Brumel in the high jump? That was great sports TV.

Since Steven Spielberg was doing the promos for the Paris Olympic opening ceremony, I assumed he directed it. With visions of great openers like Saving Private Ryan, Raiders or Jaws in my head, I watched the baroque and labyrinthine chaos that ensued and presumed Steve must have been on acid. Turns out it wasn't his doing at all, and my admiration can go on unabated.

It was some guy named Thomas Jolly, a French actor and theater director who came up with some sort of chiffon-wearing mystery parkour expert clambering across the rooftops of Paris, a mechanical horse being towed down the Seine, a Ménage à trois, a decapitated Marie Antoinette singing, Lady Gaga with feathers dancing along the river, oh, and a controversial tableau that some critics say was a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper ”with a cast of drag queens.

Jolly says, though, that was not the intention. He says the blue smurf looking guy there is "...Dionysus who arrives on this table. He is there because he is the God of celebration in Greek mythology,” Jolly told BFMTV, according to an interpretation from NBC News. “The idea was to have a pagan celebration connected to the gods of Olympus. You will never find in me a desire to mock and denigrate anyone.”

Well, obviously, except the Greeks.

The usual cast of characters, led by Don Jr., have amplified the outcry, and I don't know whether to believe Monsieur Jolly or not. For example, here is a statue of Dionysus...

The Reverend Benjamin Cremer, based in the US, shared a post on social media which he felt dispelled the allegation that the controversial scene featuring drag queens was mocking Leonardo da Vinci's classic painting and therefore Christianity. 

The post reads: 'It was a representation of the event called the Feast of Dionysus. Greek God of festivity and feasting and ritual and theater.'

'The Olympics are from Greek culture and tradition. French culture is deeply rooted in feasting and festivity and performing arts.'

I'll be honest and say that other than being an absolute mess, it does look more like the above painting than The Last Supper. Well, to the extent that is looks like anything put together by sentient mammals. If I may offer an artistic critique here. I don't know if this Jolly guy is telling the truth or not about the drag queens, Papa Smurf or any of it. But either way, it was simply, stupefyingly awful. I mean, how can Monsieur Jolly look at this...

...and think to himself, "Yeah, baby! Nailed it!"

Now, I've admitted before that I am no doubt the most imperfect vessel to champion the faith. At my Mother-in-Law's funeral in Mississippi a couple of weeks ago, we sat around after the service and had snacks and talked about family.

I sat across from their church's former pastor and when in the conversation, I revealed that I was Episcopalian, the gasp was almost audible. I now know how to bring a Baptist conversation to a complete halt. Now the minister was a very friendly fellow whom I liked, but couldn't resist letting me know they used to call us "Whiskeypalians!" After the hearty laugh faded I allowed that that was unfair as we hadn't used whisky for communion in years. As I sit here writing this, I'm still not sure they realized that was a joke.

So, as a semi-proud Whiskeypalian, let me observe that taking offense, from the left and the right, is superseding baseball as the national pastime. Religion is perhaps the most common one from the right. May I offer another comment from The Rev. Ben Cremer...

I just don’t think we Christians realize how fragile we make our faith look when we act as though something like artistic expression represents an existential threat to us. We have allowed fear and suspicion to overtake our public witness rather than love and understanding.

Just look back to either the Old or New Testament and realize that people proclaiming our monotheistic faith were condemned, made fun of, laughed at and generally shunned. So let's take a cue from Sgt. Hulka...

And of course folks on the left have many times, earned the sobriquet "snowflakes" when things like this happen. The singer Katy Perry has a comeback single called "Woman's World." Ideally, it is some sort of jumbled pop anthem to the power of women or something, and that's just fine. But apparently, showing in the video that Ms Perry is very attractive was a bridge too far.

Well my friends, I for one, stand proudly for not fewer but more attractive women in music videos and will take on all comers who want to argue the point.

But the most goofy complaint came from a trans activist who proclaimed that her inclusion of some sort of glittery uterus in the video was...

 ..."painfully cissexist' and exclusionary of trans women." 

Now, if you are not following the latest cultural patois, about 1.6% of the American population identify as transgender. The rest of us, you know, 98.4% of us, are now referred to as cisgender, meaning, well, you are what you were when you were born. That means that if you are a woman, you have, uh, you know, that bejeweled thing there, though probably less jeweled unless there is some fantastic surgeon out there making a fortune in Beverly Hills.

So, at the risk of going all Bill Maher on you, if every small aggrieved group can determine the content of pop music, every song on the radio will be as long as "MacArthur Park," and no one wants that.

And this is my point, in so far as I have one. We have taken every slight grievance like a dagger to the heart, and it becomes the hill we are willing to die on. In this case, it's a pop song, and after watching it, I can say a pretty dumb one. Frankly, who cares? Well, I can assure you that somewhere, someone does and is willing to raise a ruckus about it.

So, whether it's Katy Perry and her uterus, and I can't believe I just typed that, or some drunk French guy's idea of entertainment, it's just not that big a deal. Olympic opening ceremonies are generally overblown shambles, well, unless you count James Bond and the Queen parachuting into a stadium where Paul McCartney is playing piano. Come on now, that was entertainment, folks.