 Throughout history water has often been used as a metaphor for human consciousness and in particular the subconscious. I think it is more than a little ironic that recently the water in the Seine River had to be tested and at least once deemed too polluted for human safety. The irony being, of course, being concerned with the furor surrounding the controversy the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Paris Olympics most of which took place on or near the river Seine.
The furor was created when the organizers decided to parody the Last Supper by using transgender actors and actresses in place of Jesus and the Apostles. They immediately denied doing it and then very strangely publicly gaslit the very people who leaped to their defense by admitting that they had done exactly what they were being accused of and then offering up a less than genuine apology. The ceremony was broadcast to 28.6 million people world wide. The ceremony was obviously meant to shock and provoke. It took months, if not years, of planning. The man hired to create it had a track record and every deed and idea had to approved by some very powerful people. There is also a pattern beginning to emerge of these large scale events of ties to anti-clerical imagery. That's also kind of ironic because the French Revolution, some of which was also parodied, was largely anti-clerical in nature. It was also an event that impacted human consciousness far beyond the 18th century and the boundaries of France. And, despite the French attempts to glamorize and glorify as a major step forward in human freedom was a hell of a lot messier and convoluted than the typical history book tells us. In most respects, it was downright savage, bloody and demonic in nature. Many of the leaders were some of the most hideously, evil people who have ever existed. The French remind me a lot of San Franciscans in this regard. Those who lived through the Summer of Love have a nostalgic longing for the time and have remained in an ostrich like awareness of the fact that the counter culture of the Sixties, to a large degree, was a creation of the very government that they were protesting against. The origin of the French Revolution was largely created and funded by the Phillip II, the Duc d'Orleans, the king's brother and the people around him. If I remember right, there was only one prisoner in the Bastille on the day it was supposedly liberated, an old man who lived there because he could not acclimate himself to the outside world. The true fruit of the revolution was the gruesome and bloody nightmare of the Reign of Terror which led to Napoleonic Wars, World War I and eventually the Holocaust. The events were of such a nightmarish quality, that some historians blamed it all on an outbreak of hallucinations caused by a moldy wheat crop. In comparison, the LSD in San Francisco was first introduced via a CIA sponsored program at the behest of the so-called MK-ULTRA program at Stanford University. There was also a CIA program called Operation Midnight Climax operating where prostitutes were hired to drop LSD into the drinks of their clients while agents hid behind two-way mirrors and filmed what happened. Ken Kesey, the acclaimed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, claims he got a job at the university so that he could pilfer the drug. The Acid Tests, which introduced the Grateful Dead into the nation's consciousness, occurred when Kesey and his minions would spike huge vats of punch with the drug and hold all night concerts in old warehouses. In an article in Reason magazine, one author states unequivically that while Kesey often gets the credit for creating the counter culture, "It literally was the CIA.* The events were chronicled in a book by Thomas Wolfe. Jack Kerouac, the OG of the Beat movement which morphed into the Hippie Movement, was first published in the Parisian Review, a CIA sponsored literary magazine used to promote American ideas in Europe. some have said that his stream-of- conscious novel On the Road was propagated to spread a sense of dissatisfaction among the youth that the agency could manipulate for its own purposes. There was an effort that also included modern art and jazz music. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning were among those on the CIA payroll. The only major figure of the era to ever catch on what was happening was the Beat poet Alan Ginsburg who openly wondered whether he and his friends had been manipulated and played for fools. Not only the opening ceremony, but the actual events themselves promoted the idea that those people behind the Olympic production, interested in raking in the hundreds of millions of dollars that we just happen to have have laying around with nothing else to spend it on, are really only concerned with good healthy living and athletic competition. And while the rich and famous sat in the stands like Oriental potentates, those of us at home endured a virtual D-Day onslaught of advertising of everything from credit cards, insurance, and pharmaceuticals in order catch glimpses of the finely sculpted derrières of the female competitors in the skimpiest of outfits ever, whether they were track suits or ping-pong uniforms. (Seriously, ask yourself how many times did the female competitors in those nightly broadcasts look more like runway models than athletes, and how many times were they clothed in the skimpiest and tightest of outfits, and then how many times were the cameras placed directly behind the athletes as they stretched the fabric of those uniforms.) The 2024 Olympics with its controversial opening ceremony and its highly produced television was misdirection of the highest order. I was drawn to this opinion after reading Kazuo Ishiguro's classic novel The Remains of the Day. In the novel, the protagonist, a highly regarded butler placed in one of England's finest houses, witnesses a meeting his employer has convened in order to influence a French diplomat to agree to easing the restrictions placed on Germany by the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. While reading the brilliant scene, it made me realize that such meetings among notables still occur to plan the future of this planet and its inhabitants. Yet, we never see them, in fact, the great majority of us never realize that they even happen. Instead, we nightly slouch in easy chairs spread out across an an increasingly anxious nation and plug into our virtual pacifier with its endless demands for us to buy things in order to satisfy our need to gratify oral and other fixations and driven mad by the mad dog fights that passes for the news these days. And the Olympics and the controversial opening ceremony? They were just the distraction of the day, as is the weird circus masquerading as a political campaign we've witness nightly for two years, a circus where the clown show is featured front and center, yet the audience is prohibited from laughing until the ring master with his green hair, his white painted face and vacant eyes holds up a sign giving them permission to applaud or scream obscenities. The water is not only polluted, it is becoming increasingly so, and at an ever quickening rate. But they tells us that there is no need to worry because, for only $99 a month, you can have gallons of pure, crystal water labeled as being bottled in Alpine streams delivered weekly right to your front door. * As far as I know, no-one has ever questioned the counter culture myth that Ken Kesey took a job as a janitor in order to steal the LSD from the program. I think it a lot more likely, given the purpose of the program, that he was given the LSD. |
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