Outrage, like all emotions, has its time and place. One should, for example, be outraged at a genocide.
Outrage is a powerful emotion and engaging people’s emotions can provide wealth, fame, clicks and even power. Which brings us to the “last supper” Olympics outrage bullshit.
This is not the Last Supper, and only a cultural illiterate and dribbling moron would think so:
The second I saw this I thought “Dionysius.” If you don’t know, that was the Greek God of wine, revelry, dance and, in effect, partying hard. Dionysius was also the particular patron on Athenian theater.
The Olympics are a form of theater, though the God most associated with the original Olympics was Zeus and his son Heracles (Herculues) supposedly started the Olympics.
One of the most amusing things about right wing culture warriors is their embrace of the Bronze and Classical Age. Though there was an ascetic impulse, epitomized prominently by the the Romans Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, the Dionysian tradition of revelry: meaning feasting, drinking, wild sex and, yes, partying damn hard, was also a part of the classical heritage, and often far more popular.
Oh and that wild sex definitely included same sex partners. The greatest poet of the classical era was Sappho, who gloried in lesbian love and male homosexuality and what we would consider pederasty was common.
The Christian impulse to despise the Dionysian makes too many blind to the real nature of the Classical world: for every dour Stoic or rigid philosopher there was a reveler who loved Dionysius for creating the pleasures of human life.
Since the West, and especially the conservative West considers its wellspring; it’s first great impulse, to have been in Ancient Greece, anyone denying the Dionysian impulse, or unable to recognize it, is a Philistine.
As for outrage, there’s nothing to see here but the French being French. People who were upset with this are either stupid and uneducated or deliberately goading others into outrage over a deliberate misunderstanding.
Long may Dionysius’s influence reign: feasting, theatre, dance, and partying are part of the human experience. Simply be aware that Dionysius often goes to excess and that you aren’t a God, capable of partying hard twenty-four-seven.
Soredemos
Was she the greatest poet? My understanding isthat the noteworthy thing with Sappho was that her contemporaries were forced to admit she was very good, not necessarily that she was of surpassing greatness, eclipscing everyone else
Oakchair
The episode tells us a lot about how emotionally hysterical, and intellectually dysfunctional modern society has become.
What would even be an adequate parody?
A house gets bombed, the firemen instead of spraying it with water are spraying lead based pesticides everywhere. The family stumbles out with 3rd degree burns, and begin raging at a naked guy painted blue two blocks down.
Jan Wiklund
Oh no, they are not Philistines, they are Fariseans. The Fariseans, as we remember, thought that living according to a million rules would make one holy. To which Jesus retorted: whoever will be happier because you do so?
It’s really funny. Fariseans were the people Jesus revolted against, so revolt against the Fariseans is the core of the Christian creed. Some people seem to forget.
DMC
Pharisees you mean? The scribal class as opposed to the Sadducees or priestly class? Those Jesus condemned as as being too concerned with the cleanliness of the outside of the cup?
Dan
This sort of culture war shit is what passes for politics in Western countries anymore. Neither liberals nor the right has anything to offer economically, except maybe what degree of cruelty you want with the same neoliberalism that’s been on offer for 40+ years. So the best they can do is slop out outrage, counter-outrage, etc.
Purple Library Guy
There’s an odd little Shakespeare quote puritanical types always remind me of. Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there will be no more cakes and ale?”
Willy
I think their stupidity goes well beyond a basic ignorance of history. Maybe some conservative Christians did become outraged upon seeing that, to imagine a mockery of the Last Supper. Maybe they were oblivious to Dionysus, having forgotten that they’d ever even heard of him. But I think it more likely that most saw others in their tribal community being ‘outraged’, asked what was going on, then blindly joined in on all the ‘outrage’ fun because the emotions they get from tribal mobthink is so very important to them.
Try telling one of them, one-on-one, it was just a fanciful Frenchie take on Dionysus (and this is important) do so in a compassionate “I’m one of you” way. Watch them settle right down. But once back inside the comfort of their tribal mob, watch as they become ‘outraged’ all over again. They’ll blame the gays, the French, Brandon, Bernie, Marx, liberal elites… and any other “the other” who’s not inside their feel-good mob.
Seems the exact opposite of what their Christ taught, BTW (he’s the guy in the center).
As a lifelong “not-a-joiner”, I’ve always seen that behavior as idiocy. But then I was probably made that way. I think mobs should only become outraged after individuals recognize the same outrage, individually.
But try telling that to the conservative evangelical family I know who’s been season ticket holders to a perennially losing pro sports franchise for decades. They even go to every spring training with all that travel and lodging expense. It doesn’t matter how many different coaches and players come and go over the years. Or that uniforms, logos, and venues change. Or that the ownership has been proving its incompetence year after stinking year.
While I see an incredibly stupid return on the considerable investment of their time, money, and emotion, they apparently see something else. I think their true stupidity lies in not knowing what that something else even is.
Failed Scholar
Trannyism/LGBTQ+-#%etc and other culture wars BS is the favourite of neoshitlibs, and whenever you see it ‘celebrated’ AKA rammed down the populations throats whether they approve or not, it’s inevitably done by PMC adjacent neolib ‘politicians’ who use it to destroy the real left, AKA the ‘concrete material benefits’ wing of social activism. They’ll give you all the equality, inclusivity and wokeism you can stomach, as long as you ignore their shilling for the real policy of ‘billionaires uber alles’.
Also, the opening ceremonies sucked over all even without this rather small and dumb part.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dan Kelly
Thank you Ian. One of my personal favorites of yours was when you wrote about the necessity of a ‘welfare state’ or strong social safety net because this is where the artists et al flourish. I’m paraphrasing and completely butchering what you wrote, and I can’t find the article now. You’ve probably written a number of similar pieces over the years, but this one was recent – last year or two.
There is less and less space for not only ‘wild scenes’ as Ian notes, but also for eccentricity in general, or just for, god forbid, a more relaxed existence. The entire society is more like a tightly-wound control freak father (or mother, for that matter). Let’s say an authority figure in your life. But one you can less and less get away from, for either a temporary reprieve or even a permanent relocation and ‘new beginning.’ You can’t really run away from this particular home.
It’s like that horror movie where the couple is away on vacation somewhere and bad things start happening at the motel, so they leave…but all possible roads they take eventually lead back to the same motel of horrors.
Civilization needs to provide, within itself, ‘escape crevices’ from itself. Not everyone fits in. You can’t institutionalize everyone, you can’t psychologize and therapize everyone. These are, generally speaking, straight rational approaches, but the symbology of image and narrative are much more powerful than reason. Thus why trillions upon trillions are spent on marketing, advertising, spectacle, and illusion.
Debord was writing in 1967, and the premise goes back even further in industrial times and , for all I know, pre-industrial.
This goes hand-in-hand with bigness. All the buildings are bigger and bigger, the ag equipment is bigger and bigger, the trucks and machines…my god I just went by a crane earlier today and it’s almost as high as the heavens – with an American flag flying at the very top, of course.
What happened to Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered? Or Ivan Illich’s “Tools for Conviviality” where he anticipates the problems and offers practical, small-scale, ‘sociable’ solutions.
Are these concepts even applicable any more?
Add to that the ‘high tech’ everywhere, and AI. And soon human-sounding robots walking around interacting with us…
————————————-
Ian, will Tony doing the Sunday write-up going forward?
Mark Level
Pagans had a healthy attitude toward the human body & toward sexuality generally, including, as you point out, same sex love. The helots fought harder when their lovers were fighting alongside them . . .
The French remain among the more sexually healthy of Europeans (admittedly, I’ve only spent time in Spain, but have known many French over the years, also a big fan of their writers & cineastes), along with the Spanish, the Italians (okay, some machismo & mama fixation there, but still) since they threw off the yoke of the Catholic church starting in the middle of the 20th century. The Scandinavians for the most part don’t engage in this kind of right wing moral shaming & tut-tuting either.
Conservatives are miserable people (the sincere ones), look at a little twit like Ben Shapiro bragging about following HIS Bronze age morality & staying a Virgin until marriage. People like this have guilt about “naughty” sexual thoughts or acts, but they (the Zionists in particular) experience no guilt about exterminating “Untermenschen” or “Savages” as Netanyahu was denouncing in Congress to thunderous applause.
As Mencken noted long ago, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Mary Bennet
I thought it was Pan in the photo. I confess I don’t understand what this has to do with sports.
What I am outraged about, besides Gaza, is not enough firefighters or support staff and equipment out west. This is what tax cuts for the rich gets us.
mago
Bacchanalia, bon temps, let the good times roll.
Jokers gotta joke ; hedonists gotta play
Roll over rover and let Jesus take over.
Christ, I don’t what I’m a gonna do/there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
Ian Welsh
Dan,
yes, he just needed to take last weekend off. Weekend wrapup will probably be back this coming Sunday.
bruce wilder
The tableau we saw so much of was what it was: a provocation.
I am not sure which I am more tired of in the symbiosis of outrage factories.
I have definitely run of patience with feigned innocence from a position of cultural superiority. Silly philistines know nothing of the real Ancient Greek culture; that’s why they make these silly mistakes! Deplorable ignoramuses!
Enough with punching down and claiming innocence. These “artists” knew what they were doing. The reaction was the art.
someofparts
Reminds me of a wonderful episode of the Simpsons. Homer dreams that Marge has died and she and the rest of the family are in heaven. In their protestant heaven they are singing hymns, wearing uncomfortable clothes and being somber. Homer and Bart slip away and notice other heavens on nearby clouds. At all of the other heavens, Mexican, Irish and Italian, everyone is feasting, drinking and making music and dancing. Naturally Homer and Bart scoot over to one of the other heavens and start having fun.
So that’s my intellectual contribution to the conversation.
StewartM
I would add to your excellent commentary, Ian, that ancient religions and beliefs described as much if not more so than prescribed. Recognizing Dionysius is not unqualified praise for him (caveat–the character of all Greek deities changed with time and place, in some places, gods could be seen as friends and allies while in other places they could be bitter enemies). The Greeks also described his destructive side. The Greeks saw gods and goddesses as unpredictable and dangerous beings that mortals should approach with caution. Take poor Action, he’s out hunting deer and stumbles into the goddess Artemis bathing. As punishment for him seeing her naked, she turns him into a stag and he’s torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. But the poor guy didn’t intend to trespass or show disrespect; he just stumbled into it.
Likewise, the Old Testament saying that “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children” is not an acclamation, but simply a description of how things work in the world. Act with malice and stupidity and your children will pay the price.
Anonymous
Why is so much sexualized content on display for a sporting event in the first place? The planners absolutely knew such displays would be frowned upon by the 90 percent of the global population and welcomed it.
Such displays are intentionally put on to provoke outrage around the world and distract from the actual outage of including of genocidal Israel in the “garden”. No other Olympics ceremony had such crude sexualized content, amongst many displays of crass bad taste (a riderless skeletal pale horse? Is that from the Greeks too?).
And now the Western male grayhead “sophisticates” here are mocking the stoopids rather than talking about the coup attempt underway in Venezuela or the Israeli mobs opening demanding the right to rape imprisoned Palestinians to death. So it’s working as intended.
Anon
I did not identify a ‘Last Supper’ reference… I did observe a child amidst an orgy of adult themes. This was Foucault liberalism on full display, and the fact that no one has been beheaded speaks volumes, either to the West’s superiority in its capacity for tolerance, or its marked degradation. Yes, have sex, party, but leave the kids out of it. Leave the ‘pederasty’ in the Bronze Age where it belongs. There is no ‘conversation’ to be had there, and the blatant, shameful use of an international forum to propel such an ideas was offensive. If we are clinging to historical accuracy Ian, they should have paraded some Haitians in chains, or Hottentots in cages, and spared us the farce of homoerotic liberté. Like so many pride flags hanging from Israeli tanks.
Jan Wiklund
I see that most of the readers condemn the conservative attitude, but is the liberal so much better? It’s the same I am holier than you attitude, the same priggism – according to wikipedia “a prig (/ˈprɪɡ/) is a person who shows an inordinately zealous approach to matters of form and propriety”
It’s just that their standards differ. But why make a case of that?
Willy
It’s just that their standards differ. But why make a case of that?
Two reasons:
1. They don’t usually practice what they preach.
2. They’ve well-proven that they’ll impose their own minority views onto the majority.
I’m old enough to remember Phyllis Schlafly preaching the values of stay-at-home motherhood, while traveling the nation as an activist attorney. I didn’t mind her encouraging others to not follow her example, but really did despise her for using whatever power she could find to get her ways imposed onto others. I”m unaware of her views on neoliberalism, but see the unleashing of neoliberalism to be a prime reason why mothers couldn’t stay at home anymore. Where was the fight against that?
StewartM
Anon (and Jan)
There is a false tolerance in the West. Yes, we’re all for ‘multicutluralism’, however, it’s just a veneer. Members of other cultures can have their exotic dress, and theirs cuisines, and (within limits) their religions but if you’re REALLY different from us we’ll call you barbarians and censure you. Just like Anon did. And maybe we’ll do worse.
Meanwhile, our culture is doing harm across the globe, to many people around the globe, and to the climate itself, all in the name of personal profit for the richest people in the world, but hey, at least we don’t practice pederasty or polyandry or polygamy–things that, insofar as I can see, cause no tangible harm (and no, this isn’t all Bronze Age stuff in just one culture, these practices were/are worldwide and span continents). See how “morally superior” we modern Western peoples are?
As for the ‘party hardy’ stuff, we do plenty of that too, save we’ve made that kind of harm to others a profit stream for the rich, and made getting addicted to substances easier. No doubt another sign of our moral superiority.
Swamp Yankee
StewartM — I am going to have to profoundly disagree with your assertion that “pederasty … cause[s] no tangible harm.”
Is that a position you really wish to take? I think the assertion above is prima facie wrong, both in the sense of being incorrect and in the sense of being immoral. I don’t think I’m alone in those views, either.
capelin
@ Ian “This is not the Last Supper, and only a cultural illiterate and dribbling moron would think so:”
“Hugo Bardin, whose drag queen character Paloma took part in the tableau, was disappointed Paris 2024 had felt compelled to apologise. “An apology means recognising a mistake, recognising that you deliberately did something to harm, which was not the case,” Bardin said.
“What bothers people isn’t that we’re reproducing this painting,” Bardin continued, “what bothers people is that queer people are reproducing it.”
Supporters of the tableau praised its message of inclusivity and tolerance.”
https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/paris-2024-apologises-any-offence-caused-by-last-supper-sketch-2024-07-28/
“As for outrage, there’s nothing to see here but the French being French. People who were upset with this are either stupid and uneducated or deliberately goading others into outrage over a deliberate misunderstanding.”
Oh, those rascally french, nudgenudge winkwink. It’s just a testicle swinging in the wind next to kids.
No, there is lots to be seen here, and _is being seen by those so gleefully othered in this post and thread.
They see this for what it is – an assault on societal norms, by the elites. (I guarun-f-tee you that this spectacle has about 1 degree of separtion from the WEF). They see this in context of skirted men in public washrooms with their daughters; of the bud light bullshit, of the hard push to transition youth; in the DEI secret service head that “allowed” their president to be nearly murdered. They see:
“The beating up of Angela Carini, an Italian woman, by Imane Khelif, an Algerian man, live streamed from the Paris Olympics as “Women’s Boxing” is a testament to the infiltration of The Temple of Satan in our society disguised as Wokeism. Let’s stop this abomination.”
Robin Monotti @robinmonotti
They see: “pederasty … cause[s] no tangible harm.”
https://www.ianwelsh.net/culture-rage-outrage-bs-at-the-olympics/#comment-152586
@Mary Bennet “I thought it was Pan in the photo. I confess I don’t understand what this has to do with sports.”
To paraphrase a comment I read ” the narcissistic trans woke bullshit people won’t be satisfied till they make everything entirely about them”.
@ Willy “Try telling one of them, one-on-one, it was just a fanciful Frenchie take on Dionysus (and this is important) do so in a compassionate “I’m one of you” way. Watch them settle right down. But once back inside the comfort of their tribal mob, watch as they become ‘outraged’ all over again.”
Said from the raptured comfort of the “Lesser Genocide” tribal mob.
Anonymous
The Western brand is now synonymous with debauchery, rape, genocide, thievery, and lying. They will even kill their own (“Hannibal Doctrine”) to keep their gang rape sticks on the global South for a little longer. Cheerleading for the “not Trump” “enlightenment” position isn’t going to distinguish “woke” Western liberals (in my experience some of the most myopic and provincial people out there, no matter how many flyaway vacations they rack up) from the most gleeful MAGAite, for 85 percent of the world’s population.
Yemen and Russia already amply demonstrated that the conventional military prowess of the West is just a paper tiger. All that the West has left militarily is threatening the Samson Option writ large. Sanctions and manipulating SWIFT and other remaining international levers has gone so far that robust alternatives has been stood up, so it basically amounts to threatening slaves on the Western plantation with eviction. Once the dollar goes, there’s going to be very little left.
Willy
Said from the raptured comfort of the “Lesser Genocide” tribal mob.
Easy to say. Harder to come up with a replacement. Got someone or something better, who can pass through the gauntlet of reality?
I’ll wait.
capelin
@ Willy “Easy to say. Harder to come up with a replacement. Got someone or something better, who can pass through the gauntlet of reality?
I’ll wait.”
No reason to support either entity. It messes with your brain – and legitimizes them.
Time, after time, after time.
The political theatre is very important, but there are many avenues to bring forces to bear apon it. Focus on / promote the issues, put it in their faces; or chug away in the background. There is lots of people at it.
Boosting and “investing” in team blueshit or team redshit is bullshit, except in specific and locally strategic situations – and then while holding one’s nose.
capelin
Aaand, just to square the circle of the woke trans fetish and a certain u.s. federal political party,
“Kamala Harris campaign considering J.B. Pritzker for vice presidential candidate”
Pritzker and especially his brother-who-trans’ed (both rich) are a significant force behind the trans industry (invested in the pharma$ of it – 1million per/transition over a lifetime) and have been for decades.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2024-democratic-national-convention/2024/07/24/kamala-harris-presidential-campaign-jb-pritzker-running-mate-consideration?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow-cst