Opening Ceremony: A requiem for a dead nation.

An Olympian opening ceremony that cannot be watched by children is nothing but a requiem for a dead nation. France earned itself another millenium of purgatory.

I usually cry when watching Olympic Games openings. There will always be a moment when it gets me, all the smiling people marching behind their flags, all the beautiful and goofy acts by which each host city tries to dazzle and to amuse. Who does not smile thinking-aback of Her Late Majesty landing from a helicopter, or of Mr Bean’s finger playing Chariots of Fire? But there was something eerie about the opening of the thirty-third Olympiad of the modern era. Was it that in lieu of composed and slightly awkward athletes walking around in a stadium, we witnessed the unbridled joy of more than 200 delegations shouting for joy and waving from their péniches like any group of tourists ending their perfect day in Paris by a cruise along the Seine ? No, to be fair, I think I liked that. Maybe it was the contrast - the very large city and the small humans making things happen in it. Lady Gaga’s cover of « Mon Truc en Plumes » or the cancan to Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enters were expected skits, the usual tease of Paris’ slightly goofy sense of glamour. But they looked puny, seemed out of proportion. Ants trying to put a military parade down the Champs-Élysées would have had the same effect. I was glad I was watching the ceremony from the comfort of a cosy sofa, with all the close-ups and no rain at all.

Paris alone, that day, was covered by thick clouds pouring rain; or maybe the angels were weeping.

Things were at times too small, at times too big. In other instances, it seemed the tended towards a climax that, for being endlessly deferred, never really happened. The video of the torch being carried through the Louvre, the stolen Mona Lisa, the allusions to the Phantom of the Opera, were all pulling different strings without going anywhere. The Mona Lisa had been subtilized by naughty minions who drowned in an explosion of silly bad taste all the beauty that preceded.

When things did not seem out of place because of their size, they did because of their tone.

When I saw « Ca ira » appear on the television screen, I shuddered. That was the song to which, during the Terror, in 1792, thousands of aristocrats, of priests, of nuns, were beheaded. Would the joy of the Olympiad go trampling in the soggy red mud of the Revolution? They won’t dare, I thought.

Yet here It was. Just like, in 1789, the intoxicating joy of unbridled licenciousness lead to the bloodthirsty carnages of 1791 and 1792, the joy was turning into something menacing. We were not having fun anymore. There were gushes of blood in the air as the tableau vivant of Gavroche shooting in the sky and of La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, to the sound of Les Misérables, evolved into something terrifying; The Thysia to the distorted riffs of Gojira. The effusion of the blood of the sacrifice, dear to the ancient greeks, and dear to the Revolutionaries. I said a prayer for Louis XVI as blood flowed down the windows. Lastly, like a slap on the face, Marie-Antoinette herself, through her cut head, was made to sing: « Ah, ça ira, les aristocrates on les pendra. »

I remembered how intense my feelings for France can get. At La Marseillaise, I wanted to curse and I wanted to sing. I stood up, stupidly, in front of the television, at the last moment of the singing, because I love France, even defaced, even if it has lost the resemblance of He who gave guardian angels to countries and discarded all that made her truly beautiful.

At that moment, France added another millenium of darkness to its never)ending purgatory.

As long as it will glorify revolution, and revolution at all costs, France will never find peace. And it will go on, riding endlessly, like that ghost horse on the Seine, until it collapses and asks for forgiveness.

Later, I heard that not even Christ was left sacred on that woeful evening. France murdered the very idea of family when it beheaded its father and mother, turned an infant prince into a cursing drunkard, and threw itself to suck on the bitter, barren breast of its red-capped idol, Marianne, harlot of a freedom that never existed.

Paris, we have been told, is the city of love. It is rather the temple of self-loathing, where all past greatness is barfed on by the happy few enlightened, while the mob, on all fours, with delectation, licks the vomit and blood off the pavés parisiens.

No other religion, no other kingship, than Catholicism and the reign of the Capetian dynasty could ever be dragged in the mud publicly and go unpunished. Remember Charlie Hebdo. But there will be no Charlie Hebdo. I do not think any athlete commented on the awfulness of it all, or condemned the attack on Christianity.

Some will smile and pretend they are too enlightened to be offended. Others would slightly squirm. A few, maybe, will cry, with a bleeding heart, while France beheads itself.

France is slowly dying, and Paris, who sails but never drowns, was drowned that day. The opening ceremony was a ceremony to the death of the future. A ceremony that cannot be watched by children is nothing but a requiem for a dead nation. France, you will die in your corruption and, because you killed your King and spat on your saviour, no one will save you. If you had known the glory of peace prepared for you - but as you preferred the taste of your own blood, so be it, let it flow.

There will be more fire in France, more blood, and more useless deaths, because the country threw itself in a desperate quest for its head - the missing face of the flame carrier and of the horse rider. Brainless and faceless, with no identity and no reason, France will see its sons tearing her guts apart, ripping her open and spitting on her body. After having desecrated, once more, the memory of the victims of the Revolution, France went to rejoice, and where ? In front of the Louvre and along the Tuileries, because nothing after the Revolution could rival with the quiet splendour of the old abode of the Kings.

Yet while Aya Nakamura’s barely understandable, scantily dressed performance was fine as an entertainment, when the olympic flame was lifted, when the athletes had walked through the Louvre where France’s grandeur defies time, France had to go back to beauty, to the simple, genuine beauty of Edith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’Amour”. And Céline Dion, herself an emaciated soul clad in shining stars, defying pain,  in spite of all the trashy ugliness that preceded, in spite of the fake intellectualism and in spite of the debauchery, in spite of the stupid ‘Imagine’ and in spite of the disturbing expressionist dance and the ugly fashion show and the lack of soul of it all and the blaspheme, in spite of the blaspheme, and perhaps to redeem it through the tears we shed hearing her, closed the ceremony by a prayer, the prayer of loving, gentle douce France and of Paris who sings the eternal love it craves, even as the world collapses -

Dieu réunit ceux qui s’aiment.