From Gibbon to Lincoln, Oswald Spengler to James Burnham, it has been repeatedly noted that Western civilization in its various iterations of decline and fall has, like the structure of an infested house, been hollowed out internally before succumbing to catastrophic external invasion.  The grotesque bread-and-circus bloodlust of the Coliseum and widely chronicled perversions of the Roman elite — like the Emperor Elagabalus, who reputedly offered half the empire’s treasure to any surgeon who could turn him into a woman — had sufficiently weakened Rome’s moral and spiritual fiber over the centuries that Alaric and the Visigoths in A.D. 410 put the miserable carcass that was once the glory of Rome out of its self-immolating misery.

Back in those days, when the chariot and horse were the most rapid means of transporting goods, armies, and information, it took some 200 years to go from Elagabalus to Alaric, from decadence to collapse.  With the coruscating speed of today’s internet and worldwide web, I fear — unless a prompt and encompassing change of course is made at the eleventh hour — that a warp-speed descent awaits us in the West as we go from slippery slope to a rush off the cliff.

This grim calculus was firmly in mind as I watched the opening ceremonies of the 33rd Summer Olympic Games in Paris.  In the conservative press, much has been made of the signature sacrilege of this scabrous spectacle: an obscene parody of one of the West’s signature religious icons, Leonardo’s Last Supper, with drag queens impersonating the apostles and a female Jabba the Hut-like mountain of blubber ensconced in the center as Christ, the Redeemer.  Could the calculating, Satanic intent to hoist a space shuttle-sized middle finger at the foundational center of the West’s spiritual core be any more apparent?

No doubt the secular Left and New World Order globalists are quietly smiling at this latest manifestation of Voltaire’s infamous exhortation to “écrasez l’infame” — crush the infamous Catholic Church and clergy.  Have at it, you good little Jacobins, and the elite betters who keep these cultural arsonists well fed and protected from consequential justice.  Enjoy your laughter and pyrrhic victories while you can.  But beware the vagaries of unintended consequences.  For a revolution once unleashed has a tendency to eat not merely its young, but its elders as well.

To wit: Did Monsieur Macron and Frau Von Der Leyen — champions of the Enlightenment secularism that freed Western culture from religious superstition and allowed its civilization to flourish as never before — not notice that a hallmark and centerpiece of that enlightened culture — Leonardo’s Mona Lisa — was treated to an equivalent desecration to what The Last Supper got?  For in one of the broadcasts, including many hallucinatory sequences attempting to chronicle the historic treasures of French culture, a masked and hooded spectral figure was coursing through the Louvre in search of Leonardo’s great masterpiece, only to find it purloined from its protective casing.  Minutes later — after an obscure interlude, where the painting became a prop in an animated burlesque with the Minions cartoon characters — the audience witnessed another jarring sacrilege: a forlorn and discarded Mona Lisa floating face up and forgotten in the Seine, bobbing like so much fecal matter that is contributing to the high E. coli levels coursing through the heart of the “City of Light.”  How cosmically perfect that it continuously rained on this macabre parade.

In sum, at it reaches its cultural climax, the godless Left destroys the capacity for not just religious transcendence, but also secular transcendence.  In its regressive primacy — the apotheosis of Rousseau’s not so noble savage — the Left is the destroyer of all aiming upward, of all transcendence, sublimation, civilization, refinement, and holiness.  Donald Trump said it plainly in his inimitable Queens patois: “Everything woke turns to s---.”

After witnessing this depressing, infuriating, incoherent spectacle, I saw the sand in our Western cultural hourglass go from 25 to 75 percent spent.  Something is going to have to be done to stanch the bleeding and reverse the damage.

Perhaps we could take courage from the riveting performance by a true icon of the ancient regime, Celine Dion, that closed these anti-festivities.  Fighting a withering neurologic illness, she emerged from seclusion like some avatar of our eternal soul and from the elevated heights of the Eiffel Tower electrified the throng with her glorious voice and heroic emotive ferocity.  Here was somebody, in France’s and the West’s dark hour, who sang as if she knew what was at stake and gave us all that she had of her surpassing talent and passion for the cause — the cause of excellence, of the transcendent, of an artistry that lifts and inspires rather than sullies and degrades us.

May God bless her soul, and may the West rise again, as it has in the past, from its existential crisis.

Image via Pxhere.