I’m really fed up with being gaslit. Our whole culture, in the West at least, is rotten through with lying-as-norm.
Pick an example, any example. I’m going with butch Jesus and blue smurf Dionysus because when I posted about this on social media today, a New York Times reading acquaintance tried to correct me with a very sophisticated lie, and it annoyed me enough for me to go fishing on the internet to get to the bottom of things.
As everyone with internet access knows by now, on Friday night the Paris Olympic Games opened with a drag cabaret fashion show interpretation of Da Vinci’s famous Last Supper tableau (la Cène in French). The scene featured LGBTQ+ icon Barbara Butch as Jesus, accompanied by apostles in drag, and with a musical performance by blue smurf Dionysus.
Christians were offended, upset and shocked, tweeting angry things and condemning the scene in statements. American tech company C Spire announced it was pulling its sponsorship of the Olympics. Notably, none of the Christians declared a holy war or shot up the Creative Director’s offices over it.
This was all entirely predictable, unless you’re so embedded in a grievance minority cult that you have lost all contact with the world ‘out there’.
Facing backlash from 2.4 billion Christians (not to mention other conservative cultures, such as in China, whose broadcast commentators were reportedly stunned into silence during the spectacle) and the prospect of further sponsorship withdrawals, Creative Director of the ceremony Thomas Jolly swiftly denied the Last Supper reference.
“It was not my inspiration,” he said in an interview the next day. “I think it was pretty clear, there is Dionysus who arrives at the table… The idea was rather to make a big pagan festival linked to the gods of Olympus,” explained the queer-identified Jolly.
A pagan festival, that should make the Christians and Muslims feel better.
There was “never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group”, games spokesperson Anne Descamps told reporters.
“On the contrary, I think Thomas Jolly did try to intend to celebrate community tolerance. We believe this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offence, we of course are really sorry,” said Decamps.
Exactly what one would expect the people responsible for a PR and sponsorship crisis to say in a PR and sponsorship crisis. This is PR spin, folks.
But no one actually believes this story, do they?
Yes, Dionysus arrived on the scene after the tableau was set. But come on.
And if the Last Supper reference was genuinely not intended, then how this scene got past the sensitivity readers without anyone, anyone, saying “hey, you know what, this looks an awful lot like that world famous historically significant religious tableau” is a story for the ages.
But actually, the New York Times wants you to know that “art historians are divided” on which feast was being represented at the ceremony. As though pastiche can only be derived from a single source of inspiration. As though art historians must first reach consensus before Christians can divine whether to be offended or not.
The art historian sophistry prompted educated-sounding people on social media to inform the world that the opening ceremony scene definitely wasn’t inspired by the Last Supper, because can’t you uneducated brutes tell a Dionysian feast when you see one?
The subtext is that anyone who angry-tweeted or pulled sponsorship over the Last Supper imagery is a buffoon who doesn’t know their art history.
I didn’t even angry tweet over this before today but now I’m mad about it, because once again everyone is being told not to believe their lying eyes. ‘Experts’ are being wheeled out to prop up PR messaging. And people who want to appear erudite are furthering the BS by politely correcting their friends on social media.
Perhaps the reason it pisses me off more than others is that I can do it too, but I choose not to. I worked in marketing. I am an English and Cultural Studies major. I fully understand how easy it is to twist a fact, find an expert and apply a reframe to hit the message you want and pull the rug out from under the one you don’t want.
But I refuse to do it because it’s lying. I think the best thing we can do is keep saying what is obvious and put up with the withering looks from our erudite friends who assume we just don’t understand NYT op-eds well enough.
Anyhow, before the great re-write continues on this particular lie, I’m just going to highlight that three days ago, everyone thought this was a Last Supper scene, not just the Christians.
Drag Queens:
Gays:
Leftists:
France TV in a since-deleted post, calling the scene “A LEGENDARY Supper” (again, la Cène is the French name for the Last Supper).
French culture website Sortir à Paris, noting the clever pun in staging the tableau on the Seine – Scène de la Cène à Paris sur la Seine:
Literally every single French media outlet that covered the event (English translated from French)
(Above includes Sud Ouest, Le Soir, L’Equipe, Notre Temps)
So, okay fine. We need art historians and the Creative Director of the show to tell us everyone understood it wrong. In any other setting this would be called an artistic fail.
But in our sick AF culture, everyone had better adjust to the expert queer professional opinion or you’re a dumb bigot.
Biden’s dementia cheap fakes, Covid vaccines saved a bajillion lives, ‘democracy’ wars, Ukraine, Palestine, Kamala the Border Czar, men can get pregnant – the New York Times and friends patiently explain with the utmost sophistry why you ought not believe your lying eyes or read any historical literature unsupervised.
Is this what it looks like when your civilisation is in decline? Asking for a friend.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnettt’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Gibt man jemand den kleinen Finger, dann will er die ganze Hand.
German proverb, If you give a finger to someone he’ll want your hand next. The old non-white men at the UN want Net Zero to be pulled forward by ten years because all their past predictions were wrong. Should the government commit to that, they’ll want 2030 next and then, 2025. And that’s all just code language for We want more money!, a demand which can inherently never be met.
I think, as awareness grows that there isn’t an emergency, clinging to that line makes them more and more ridiculous. We know it, they know it. All they can do is to try and move faster and faster to complete the plan before we cross the line of critical mass of cognisance in the citizens. Its a race to the line, but we’re winning…
I have a question.
Who is this toff? Why is he a peer? What exactly has this guy accomplished in his life, what makes him so special, that he should have a lifetime position making laws that affect me?
I have just lost all respect for our system.
It was.ok when we were left.alone and could lead our lives as we wished. It didn’t really matter who these people were. The problem is that these people now think they have a right to lord it over us.
Here’s an idea, Zac, whoever the hell you are. Piss off, live your life how you want and let us do the same.
“I have just lost all respect for our system.’
What took you so long?
Just = simply, not just now.
The day they locked us down I realised how wrong I was about many things and our system was not what I had assumed.
You didn’t get suspicious when immigration quintupled after cottager Blair?
I think, for me, there was always a very Western presumption that there was a limit to how corrupt and stupid our politicians could be. Lockdowns smashed that presumption and made us realise that they are no better than any other banana republic dictatorship.
Isn’t he the man that lost the London Mayoral election to Sadiq Khan a few years ago? Thank goodness he did. He might well have been worse than Khan.
“worse than Khan” – impossible.
I moved back to London at the tail end of Livingstone’s regime (lots of stabbings going on) was there for all of Al ‘Boris’ Johnson’s era and the beginning of Khan’s regime. It goes to show that most of Johnson’s era was a pretty good one in terms of the ‘feel’ of London. Johnson was a perfect Mayor of London, playing a buffoonish cartoonish character to promote the city around the world while appointing other people to administer the place.
When Khan arrived, it was all diktats, banning images of attractive women on advertising hoardings and playing up to activist organisations. By the time I left in 2019, I’d come to despise the place. I suspect Goldsmith would have been more activist too, probably in a different way, but I bet he would have sanctioned the ULEZ nonsense too.
Yes, he claimed to be ‘pan-sexual’ or some nonsense to pander to the hedonist left wing Islingtonite crowd.
Do I take it that he will still want to remain as a peer and continue to be paid (by us taxpayers) for just turning up to the House of Lords? What good is this guy doing?? What is he contributing to help a better society??? I suppose I could easily ask the same question for many of our ‘politicians’. I hope and pray that society continues to wake up to the fact that this is all about control and not the climate/Covid/Ukraine/Weapons of mass destruction/hate speech etc.
Utopians like Goldsmith cannot tolerate anything other than the utopia they seek. There is no compromise, understanding nor reason in their position.
He’s surely a dystopian who expects to benefit from the dystopia he wants to inflict on the white gentiles
I don’t understand how he can call himself a Conservative when he appears to be completely the opposite?
Goldsmith is an oxygen thief.
He’s also a CO2 emitter!
We are getting rid of petrol and diesel. We are getting rid of coal and want rid of gas. We want to take the best central heating system we ever had (gas) that keeps us warm in a very cold winter and we want to replace it with basically anything that isn’t gas, whether it is any good or not. Grant Schapps was asked 3 weeks ago if heat pumps are as good as gas central heating and he relplied “I don’t know”. —————-WHAT? Is he f…ing insane? How can he not know? Him and his silly eco socialist government masquerading as conservatives want to get rid of the best ever heating system and fob you off with a heat pump that might not be any good? And the people just sit back and take it. ——-We are building thousands of wind turbines, and solar panels right left and centre. We are spending 30 billion on smart meters etc etc etc. ——Yet the blithering idiot Goldsmith says we are not doing enough. We have entered into NET ZERO with not a single question of cost/benefit asked and government have no idea if it can be achieved or even if the technologies required can ever be invented and we are prepared to impoverish people and force millions into energy poverty but that “Isn’t Enough” ??????????????????????. Maybe he would prefer if we sat with sack cloth on our heads and ate turnips cooked by candle light.
They won’t be happy until either we’re dead or back in the Middle Ages with us camping outside their castle walls freezing to death in our sack clothes whilst they Lord it up throwing chicken bones over their shoulders belching and farting as they go.
There is no climate crisis. Global warming is a contested theory. The climate change people are a political movement led by elites seeking power a control.