Soft Targets

 

Yesterday saw the rather predictable surge in righteous indignation over certain aspects of the Opening Ceremony, with a subset of commentators scouring the footage for the remotest indications of satanic imagery.

Some even went back twelve years to the NHS bed sequence at London 2012 in order to propose a new exegesis involving demonic possession.

As Danny Boyle had some notoriety as a lapsed aspirant to the Catholic priesthood, Thomas Jolly is both Jewish and homosexual, and a man with an understanding of the term ‘republican’ which no longer travels so well across the pond.

Still, his artistic vision, if stoked by Hellfire, suggests that the latter may after all be a metaphor for the most extreme, everlasting form of ennui, for his ceremony was diabolically boring at times, when not fiendishly shambolic, aesthetically and organisationally.

I don’t have an issue with sending up religion per se, but there’s a time and a place for the full Charlie Hebdo, and with freedom comes responsibility — the responsibility to not just go after the soft targets. 

 

People who think The Last Supper is an article of faith rather than say, a painting by a gay man in the Renaissance are surely the softest of targets.