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.