Which is worse: Babylon, or our global liberal culture?

Trying to be a good citizen of the global culture, Mark Richardson watched far more of the Olympics than I did. He kept trying to enjoy it, despite his distaste with “the mannish physiques of the female competitors,” and despite his disgust at the notion “that we were supposed to celebrate these body types as the new female sexy.”

But then:

the female boxing started. I just turned off the TV and pretended it didn’t exist, but I noticed that a future queen of England had been sent to cheer on the competitors—obviously we are supposed to think the new sport worthy of support.

But last night I switched on and the first thing I saw was two women kicking each other’s heads (I think it was Taekwondo).

Enough. If that’s the Olympics I don’t care for it any longer.

All of which is a preface for what I’m about to say.

Last evening I finished reading aloud with a friend The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, the altogether amazing and worthy (if sometimes grotesque and hard-to-take) conclusion of the Bible. At the climax of the book, Babylon, symbolizing the Roman empire, is utterly destroyed:

And [the angel] cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. (Rev. 18:2-3.)

(Note: I think that the incredible phrase “the wine of the wrath of her fornication” means much more than illicit sexual intercourse; it is an image of rampant selfish desire and rancor, of a disordered, toxic state of being. But let’s stay with the sexual meaning for the moment.)

Now when I read Mark Richardson’s description of the Olympics this evening, the following occurred to me. Babylon is destroyed because “all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” But in our Babylon, in our global, Western-led anti-culture, we don’t just have lots and lots of fornication, indeed, international fornication; and we don’t just have officially facilitated international fornication, with 150,000 rubbers distributed to the 10,000 athletes (15 for each athlete) from 204 countries. No. We have female boxers, we have females kicking each other in the head. And we celebrate this and think that it is wonderful and that it proves the greatness of our culture.

All of which leads up to the question: if Babylon deserved total destruction for its sins and perversions, what do we deserve for ours?

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JC in Houston writes:

I agree that this sports carnival has gotten out of hand. I think that a lot of the problem is that in the last 20 years, in addition to what were considered traditional Olympic sports like track and field, they have added just about every oddball sport like beach volleyball, badminton, soccer, and other weirdo sports I can’t remember. Avery Brundage was hated for his insistence that Olympic athletes be amateurs, and it probably disadvantaged teams in the era when the Soviet bloc subsidized their athletes. In my opinion, the Olympics went kaput when they decided to allow professional athletes to compete, like the USA basketball team. Who wants to watch these thugs defeat some genuine national team? I will stand up for a couple of female competitors at the games. Kim Rhodem who won the women’s Gold in skeet shooting, yup, with a GUN!

She and her male teammates on the U.S. shooting team wear modest clothes so maybe that’s why they don’t get the MSM coverage. We’ll never see NBC covering their matches, but at the first modern Olympic games in Athens in 1896, the American brothers John and Sumner Paine, dominated the shooting events. Yes, shooting was a part of the Olympics long before beach volleyball.

Roger G. writes:

What with all that you people have been batting around the Olympics, after shul I’m rewatching National Velvet—a sordid tale of cross-dressing.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 10, 2012 10:23 PM | Send