Back to the Future II: The Olympics

I haven't paid much attention to the Olympics for years.  It.   has been a long time since the Games were a genuine amateur sport.  All my life they have been big business that guaranteed endorsements and jobs to the winners.  When they allowed professional basketball players in, it was a public declaration that they were giving up any  pretense that the Olympic Games were a competition for amateur sportsman modeled on the ancient Olympics.

It has not taken long for every major sport to turn to Vegas for inspiration, and the 2024 Games have reached a new depth of vulgarity.  Every other news report includes tales of free condoms and sex orgies among the athletes, and the even before the first race was run, fans were treated to Celine Dionne.  That would have been enough for me.  Most of the performances recall  the claims of Democratic presidents that they are giving us a cabinet that looks like America:  Pete Buttigieg, Karine Jean-Pierre, Rachel Levine, and of course Sam Brinton, the transvestite thief of women's dresses in charge of nuclear waste security.

Not to be outdone, the Olympic Committee gave us what many are calling  a LGBetc parody of the Last Supper.  It is interesting that these freaks are so unimaginative that they can not even invent their own religious mythology, but like other Satanists, they can only hang crosses upside down and recite the Mass backwards,  But even if it was really about Dionysus and not intended as anti-Christian blasphemy, it should still be condemned as a mean-spirited attack on the ancient Greeks.  And if had nothing to do with Dionysus, then TeamGB should protest that it is an insult to the ancient Britons who painted themselves blue.  And if all else fails, Smurfs world-wide should rise up in protest.

With my hold on 2024 becoming ever more tenuous, I slipped unconsciously into 14th century Florence, where I looked up Petrarch, who  had slipped unnoticed into the city that had exiled his father along with Dante.  I told him, in terms I hoped he would understand, the woeful tale of the 24 Olympics, and I asked him what he thought.  He first reminded me of Dante's portrayal of Sodomites in his account of Hell.  When I probed him for an explanation of how so many people could bear to watch such dismal filth or listen to Celine Dione or admire athletes who lived like zoo animals, he reminded me of what he had written in De Vita Solitaria:

It is nothing more or less than imitation, reckless and persistent  and not content with any limits that may be imposed on it, that has brought in these distasteful and disagreeable caprices and having brought them in continues to nourish and foster them .  How indeed can men be expected to maintain a consistent course of life when they do not submit to be ruled by virtue, or reason, or the advice of friends, but allow themselves to he whirled about by the madness of strangers and the wild caprice of fools?  

I protested that silly fads and fashions in dress and manners were one thing, and American pop music and blasphemy quite another.  He replied that they are all the caprice of fools  imitating other fools.  I suppose he must be right.  There have always been human failures who could never be sure who or what they were, and, unless they were born to wealth, they slipped between the cracks into a subterranean subexistence.  But, at least since the beginning of the 20th century (and we could trace it much farther back), artists and intellectuals have celebrated the incompetent, the ugly, the perverse, the self-destructive.  What else explains the manufactured status of Picasso and Schoenberg to say nothing the inanities produced by Jackson Pollock and John Cage?  If the arts that once made sense of the world have been turned into noise and nonsense, what chance have the cud-chewing herds of  dedicated followers of fashion? (Apologies to Ray Davies and the Kinks!)

When I was a boy, my father pointed out that, starting in the late 1950s, no handsome virile man could be a movie star.  In place of William Powell, John Wayne, and Robert Taylor, we were asked to admire Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and later,  in the Hesiodic progression from gold to lead, .Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon.  To every rule there are a few exceptions, and Sean Connery is an obvious one.  My father enjoyed "Danger Man" (retitled in the USA "Secret Agent") and pointed out that Patrick McGoohan, with his strong features and decisive character, would have a tough time in Hollywood playing anything but villains--though he was twice offered James Bond, which he wisely turned down on moral grounds.  Fortunately, his last big role was the heroically evil Edward I, for which in any just universe he would have received every award the film "industry" can provide.

Both Hollywood and the Olympics give us vivid images of the transformation of the American character, from Myrna Loy and Irene Dunn to Sharon Stone and Angelina Jolie, from Robert Mitchum to Robert de Niro (both in Cape Fear), from Bruce Jenner (1974 Olympics) to Caitlyn Jenner.

The prosecution rests.

Back in the 1950s Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth wrote Space Merchants, a prophetic Sci Fi  novel of a world future dominated by admen.  Kornbluth also wrote two short stories that were a source for Mike Judge's Idiocracy.   The film, the short stories, the novel describe a dystopian future that falls short of today's reality.

When a people, whose noses are being pulled by advertising and the studios, comes to identify with lower-class losers, they become themselves., ineluctably losers.  Poor Lot, he thought he could find a few good men in Sodom, when his neighbors were looking to rape the angels who visited him.  Today, they are all watching the Olympics.