Generally, I tune out the Olympics. For the past 206 weeks I haven't thought about competitive swimming. Why start now?
But I do like pageantry. So my wife and I watched the opening ceremonies Friday, a rolling street party with boatloads of athletes floating down the Seine, waving happily.
The ceremonies were lauded. "A daring feat," The Washington Post gushed. "Paris transformed into a spectacular stage."
We found the opening dull.
"It must be dramatic if you're there," my wife kept saying, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. To me, it seemed like standard, Cirque du Soleil street theatrics with a few celebrity cameos thrown in, though I'm willing to assume the fault is with me. Like "The Bear," the opening ceremony is something everybody loves, but I just don't get. (Have you ever been to an Italian beef joint? Did you see a dozen people in the back, "yes chef"-ing each other? I just didn't buy the premise.)
Internalization of dislike — my negative reaction is my problem, not yours — is an important, though rare, survival skill. A more popular route is to become offended, get ruffled, register displeasure and try to rearrange life to suit your whims. A path I just don't understand. You go over someone's house and don't like the wallpaper, you don't then take your fingernails and try to claw it down.
Who does that?
A lot of folks. People are constantly getting offended and registering that offense. The opening ceremonies, which I shrugged off, drew howls of condemnation from the religious right.
“Last night’s mockery of the Last Supper was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, announced on X. I could give another dozen examples.
As you may have heard, they were wrong — even though the scene involved people at a table, the opening ceremony's artistic director has said it was supposed to be a Greek bacchanalia — Greece being the place where the Olympics originated. (The local Olympic committee, nonetheless, felt compelled to apologize.)
France is a truly secular society, as opposed to the lip service we settle for here. The French don't need to mock Christianity. They've done one better — they've exiled it from its position astride the body politic. It's against the law to wear a cross to public school in France — or a yarmulke, or a burqa, I hasten to add; don't want to get anybody into a quivering funk thinking they are being singled out.
Being offended is a symptom of the egoism pandemic in American society. Of course the tableau is mocking you — who else in the world is there?
Writing a newspaper column as I do, I continually hear from the offended. Many simply present the simple fact of their offendedness, as if nothing more need be said. Your column offended me, sir. Period. The "So do something about it" is unvoiced. Though I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. Apologize, I suppose. Recant. Because they're offended.
I don't do that. What I want to say is: "Why are you telling me this? I wrote the damn thing. Yesterday. I believed it then, and believe it even more now, and so should you."
Sometimes I write back, "I'm not responsible for what you choose to be offended by." Just to rattle 'em. If they're a scornful Trumpy — are there any other kind? — I might type out an email along the lines of, "You know, the opinion of someone in thrall to a liar, bully, fraud and traitor does not carry the weight you seem to imagine it does." Then I delete the email before sending — usually, anyway, because any reply from me is something they can wave over their heads as further reason to be offended.
A better reply is, "But I didn't write it for you." Robert Crumb, the great underground cartoonist, has a wonderful line: "Not everything is for children. Not everything is for everybody." I wish we could splice the "This isn't for me," gene into the public brain. It would save a lot of wasted time.
I suspect many people secretly enjoy being offended. They do it enough. There must be a kind of high. They put the thing that supposedly offends them in a bag and huff it. I have a number of readers who despise what I do, supposedly, yet are here every single blessed day, reading it and writing me three emails a day telling me exactly how awful I am. Or at least I suppose that's what they're saying. It isn't as if I open their emails gathering dust in my spam filter. Ignoring stuff you don't like is an important life skill. Give it a try.
