Crossposted from Reflections Journal.
We've made it through the entire Olympics, both opening and closing ceremonies, without a false flag incident or alien invasion. This leaves the woo woo world with nothing to do but pick through the Illuminati and Masonic symbolism and speculate about how the elites are mocking us with their openly practiced death rituals. They're not entirely wrong. There was some interesting symbolism in the closing ceremony and, as in the opening, it was fairly well obscured by bad theater. But, again, all I saw were beautiful, recognizable, symbols of ascension. And as with the opening ceremony, if the viewer wasn't looking specifically at that nearly subliminal through-line, there wasn't one. The close was considerably less cluttered and confusing than the opening but it was equally high on spectacle and low on making sense.
They continued on with the theme of "Great Britain has produced many great musicians and wouldn't you like to hear them all in rapid succession but in no recognizable order." As a theme, a "Symphony of British Music" creates a less than coherent narrative. "Disco at the end of the wedding," another description offered by organizers, is even less helpful... unless you're considering the possibility that we are looking at a stream of alchemical symbols. A wedding is a marriage of opposites, or polarities -- a representation of the transcendence of duality and return to oneness. One notable example, attributed to the Rosicrucians, is The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rozenkreutz. Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval give a thorough analysis of the symbolism in The Master Game, concluding:
So was the closing ceremony celebrating a completed initiation into the mysteries? I'm inclined to say yes. The only other explanation is that a lot of highly respected talent collaborated on a giant mess with a few random symbols poking out by happenstance.
The most apt and unintentionally funny line came from commentator Bob Costas, at the very beginning, as he described the opening sequence. Narrated by Michael Caine footage from The Italian Job c. 1969, a yellow car explodes and out pops a slightly chubby Batman with his sidekick Robin, as Costas put it, "for whatever reason." That sums up the closing ceremony quite well. "For whatever reason a bunch of stuff happens" would be a very fair tagline. The baffling choices start right there. Why the thoroughly American, DC Comics heroes Batman and Robin?
In point of fact, the sequence itself is a very British, very inside joke. This leaves out Costas and probably most non-Brits watching the spectacle. It's taken directly from a sitcom called Only Fools and Horses, in which the characters Costas correctly identified as Del Boy and Rodney run into some car trouble.
If we are looking at an ascension narrative, it rolls out right here, at the start, with some oblique references to gold. Whether this is alchemical gold, Olympic gold, or simply a fluke, I still can't say with absolute certainty. But bear with me for a moment as I follow the weird tangents. Only Fools and Horses still runs on a British oldies network called simply Gold. It's logo is a variation on the circumpunct which among other things is the symbol for gold.
The Caine movie The Italian Job, which seems so oddly juxtaposed with Batman and Robin, is about a gold heist involving the iconic town of Turin where the shroud believed by some to be the remnant of a resurrected Christ is kept. It also bears mentioning, perhaps, that Del Boy and Rodney's car is a sunny, golden yellow.
The loveliest and most uplifting message came from John Lennon. The sequence is a center of gravity in a largely disjointed and superficial seeming spectacle. In a project overseen by Yoko Ono, footage of Lennon singing "Imagine" was remastered and the resulting, very crisp print was played as part of an etherial musical number. A giant John Lennon edifice was puzzled together before our eyes. Then it was disassembled, dispersed, and finally white balloons ascended the heavens. Anyone who's ever done the Easter Sunday balloon ritual at church should recognize the symbolism of spirit rejoining God. John Lennon became one with everything before our very eyes while singing a message of peace and unity. I actually teared up a little and John Lennon isn't even my favorite Beatle.
That was a pretty hard act to follow and that such a sorry job fell to George Michael seemed a tad unfair. Sadly, he looked less animated than a dead John Lennon. But he poured himself into some leather pants and put on a game face. The message was clear: FREEDOM. And that's what the language of ascension is all about -- freedom from the illusory world in which we are all trapped in a cycle of unconscious deaths and rebirths. Not to put too fine a point on it, Michael wore a giant skull belt buckle and around his neck hung a slim silver cross -- death and ascension.
A performance of "Pinball Wizard" from Tommy was certainly rife with circumpunct imagery. If you were watching the screen, you saw the concentric circles grow out of a single point of light and then morph into the octagonal structure of the Union Jack.
From there it was an homage to gold... I mean David Bowie. Well, Bowie was used as the jumping off point for a celebration of Britain's contribution to fashion. And all the models were dressed in, you guessed it, gold.
Next we were treated to the dragon (kundalini) imagery of Annie Lenox arriving on a flaming, Viking ship. She sang "Little Bird" about the self as a fallen bird with a dream of ascension.
And after Lenox's gorgeous portrayal of the fire serpent, a performance of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" ended with a recreation of it's iconic cover which depicts a man on fire. Subtle.
And in case you think Pink Floyd wasn't working with some serious alchemical imagery, here's a round-up of some album art.
From there things became increasingly psychedelic. Well, entheogens are one way to pierce the veil. Although, I think the primary lesson in this sequence was that Russell Brand should never, ever sing. If you can't warble out a tune as simple as "Pure Imagination" at least as well Gene Wilder, don't. As for the Britishness, follow the bouncing ball. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was written by British author -- and spy/playboy -- Roald Dahl. Yes. The famous children's author was a real life James Bond. He also wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice. I guess he'd know, having spent a good bit of his life On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Sooooo British.
Brand also belted out a sad rendition of "I Am the Walrus" from Magical Mystery Tour -- pure rainbow covered psychedelia and my childhood favorite.
Next, commentator Ryan Seacrest gave voice to our collective bafflement over the... um... giant octopus as it morphed out of Brand's psychedelic bus.
I don't know... Cthulhu? No. Lovecraft was American.
The suggestion from deep in the woo is that it represented the Rothschilds, but like the vampire squid that is Goldman Sachs, I don't really think that's how they self-identify. I suppose they could just be mocking us all... with their diabolical partner in crime DJ Fatboy Slim. I'm still more inclined to call it absurd, meaningless spectacle. I don't know. Is there some deep symbolism to the octopus? It has eight limbs like the Union Jack it's splayed out on, and octagonal symbolism seems to abound here. I'm quite sure I'm missing something... Probably something to do with the ordering of chaos in the deep, primordial waters -- much like the divine creatrix energy of spider. The whole show saw repeated images of spoked wheels -- the underlying structure of a web -- from the Union Jack itself to the London Eye (Ferris wheel), to umbrellas.
I have to give mad props to the exquisite Eric Idle who alone seemed to grasp that he was in something far more absurd than Monty Python and had a bit of fun with the Bollywood act that inexplicably hijacked his performance of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" -- a song which Idle sings suspended on a cross in the crucifixion scene of Life of Brian. There is some discussion in the deep woo about the python/serpent connection. Considering that the whole thing has been rife with kundalini imagery, there could be something to that. It could allude to the serpent (in this case python) on a pole. It could also point to the Pythia, the oracle of Gaia, at Delphi. For added fun, look at how much gold is in that sequence. Mont Piton, by the way is a volcanic mountain on the island nation of Mauritius, which was under British rule until 1968.
If the Brazilian sequence seemed out of place in the thoroughly British spectacle, it did at least tie in thematically. It was all volcanoes, mountains, goddesses, and, once again, dragons. But you had to look close. The vocalist was Maria Monte (mountain) and she actually appears emerging from a mountain of spinning umbrellas and singing like a siren on the rocks. Pelé, the famous Brazilian footballer who put in an appearance, shares the name with the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes and with active volcanoes in Martinique and on Jupiter. Also performing was Seu Jorge. St. George is the patron saint of England and he was most famous for slaying a dragon. So, I guess my point is that the fire serpent imagery kept coming even through that oddly out of place, not terribly British, interlude. And the capoeira was fun.
Missing from the US broadcast, perhaps over a rights dispute, was Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" complete with pyramid. Here's a description:
As I have suggested previously, the number 33 is not arbitrary. It's the number of vertebrae in the average spine and its use in Masonry points to the ascent of kundalini toward the pineal gland, aka, the "all seeing eye."
If there remains a question that the closing ceremony was an esoteric ritual, the conclusion should put it to rest. The extinguishing of the Olympic flame was quite simply exquisite. The flames -- one for each participating country -- fanned out to form a primordial mound from which emerged a flaming phoenix. The phoenix is a later iteration of the Bennu bird of Egyptian myth, born from the abyss with the Benben stone, which is described alternately as a mound, a tetrahedron, and a pyramid. According to Graham Hancock in Heaven's Mirror, the Benben stone "provided the model, and was in fact the name used by the ancient Egyptians, for the capstones (pyramidions) of all pyramids and for the tips (but not the shafts) of all obelisks." He continues:
Hmm... That's so evocative of the song by the dragoness Annie Lennox.
So the Olympics closes where it began, with the primordial mound of creation, now having completed a transformation and resurrection into full flight. Much of it wasn't even subtle. It was a celebration of the primal goddess in her fire serpent, kundalini, aspect, reconnecting us to the divine unity.
But if the Olympics ceremonies were a paean to the mother goddess, NBC's coverage kicked her in the teeth. Much about their monopoly on the games has been criticized. That they parceled out the big events during prime time, while trying and failing to maintain a media blackout on the results of the un-aired events, wasn't even the worst of their crimes. It was their endless trivializing of women athletes. They weren't alone in this but as the network with its hands on the coverage valve in the US, the responsibility for that tone rests primarily with them. And their contempt for women was on full display. Their grossest misstep had to be pulled from their website due to outrage. This was the appropriately titled "Bodies in Motion" video. I say appropriately because, ever so typically, women were completely reduced to their bodies.
The video is simply hideous. The camera lingers endlessly on women's body parts, panning slowly up to show faces last and almost incidentally. When faces are the focus, it's only because they're too close to their breasts or because there's something arguably provocative going on with their mouths. It's a celebration of all the T&A taking home its weight in gold medals.
All across the media spectrum, women were measured for everything but their athletic accomplishments. Runner Lolo Jones was savaged in a New York Times column for posing nude and for saying publicly that she is a 30 year old virgin. Her nude modeling was, in fact, part of an elegant spread in ESPN Magazine with both male and female athletes that even included paralympians. The photo is not particularly sexual. It is beautiful. And, anyway, who cares?! It's just so typical. Women are too sexual or not sexy enough. We're sluts. We're weirdly virginal. The one thing we never are is good enough.
Writes Sarah L. Jackson of the appalling coverage of female athletes like Jones:
Almost completely ignored by NBC was the first American gold medalist in judo. This drove my martial artist husband crazy because judo was one of the few events he cared to see. They never showed the match, only the winner's tearful victory hugs. The judoka in question was Kayla Harrison. But Harrison is more than an Olympic champion. She is a sex abuse survivor who took her power back, put her abusive judo coach in prison, came out publicly in response to the Penn State scandal right before the Olympics, and then went on to win the gold. She is a woman of tremendous courage and strength who ascended from as painful an abyss as one can find herself in.
Kayla Harrison's athletic brilliance was not interesting enough to be broadcast by NBC. That breasts jiggle when women run, however, was so endlessly fascinating that it needed to be shown in slow motion with a bow-chick-a-bow-bow soundtrack.
Such is our sorry state of affairs when it comes to the appreciation of female power. No wonder the symbols of the divine feminine have to be hidden. But the fire serpent -- so demonized in Western culture -- was on full, if terribly misunderstood, display at the Olympics this year. For all the paranoid fear around these symbols, it was exactly what William Henry and Chad Stuemke forecast -- a thinly veiled narrative on the path through the stargate. It even ended with a song about returning to the stars.
No doubt, the woo woo world heard Take That's performance of "Rule the World" as still more confirmation that the Illuminati is laughing at us poor peasants. But that would miss the point. Fans of the movie version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust will recognize it from the denouement, played as our hero marries his immortal beloved, achieves the (celestial) crown, and sheds his mortal identity to become a star. It all seems kind of obvious now doesn't it? Here's a little video montage. Have fun counting the symbols.
We've made it through the entire Olympics, both opening and closing ceremonies, without a false flag incident or alien invasion. This leaves the woo woo world with nothing to do but pick through the Illuminati and Masonic symbolism and speculate about how the elites are mocking us with their openly practiced death rituals. They're not entirely wrong. There was some interesting symbolism in the closing ceremony and, as in the opening, it was fairly well obscured by bad theater. But, again, all I saw were beautiful, recognizable, symbols of ascension. And as with the opening ceremony, if the viewer wasn't looking specifically at that nearly subliminal through-line, there wasn't one. The close was considerably less cluttered and confusing than the opening but it was equally high on spectacle and low on making sense.
They continued on with the theme of "Great Britain has produced many great musicians and wouldn't you like to hear them all in rapid succession but in no recognizable order." As a theme, a "Symphony of British Music" creates a less than coherent narrative. "Disco at the end of the wedding," another description offered by organizers, is even less helpful... unless you're considering the possibility that we are looking at a stream of alchemical symbols. A wedding is a marriage of opposites, or polarities -- a representation of the transcendence of duality and return to oneness. One notable example, attributed to the Rosicrucians, is The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rozenkreutz. Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval give a thorough analysis of the symbolism in The Master Game, concluding:
It seems to us beyond serious doubt that a great allegory of death, rebirth and spiritual transformation lies at the heart of the Chemical Wedding and that Adam McLean is right to compare the entire process to an ancient mystery initiation.
So was the closing ceremony celebrating a completed initiation into the mysteries? I'm inclined to say yes. The only other explanation is that a lot of highly respected talent collaborated on a giant mess with a few random symbols poking out by happenstance.
The most apt and unintentionally funny line came from commentator Bob Costas, at the very beginning, as he described the opening sequence. Narrated by Michael Caine footage from The Italian Job c. 1969, a yellow car explodes and out pops a slightly chubby Batman with his sidekick Robin, as Costas put it, "for whatever reason." That sums up the closing ceremony quite well. "For whatever reason a bunch of stuff happens" would be a very fair tagline. The baffling choices start right there. Why the thoroughly American, DC Comics heroes Batman and Robin?
In point of fact, the sequence itself is a very British, very inside joke. This leaves out Costas and probably most non-Brits watching the spectacle. It's taken directly from a sitcom called Only Fools and Horses, in which the characters Costas correctly identified as Del Boy and Rodney run into some car trouble.
If we are looking at an ascension narrative, it rolls out right here, at the start, with some oblique references to gold. Whether this is alchemical gold, Olympic gold, or simply a fluke, I still can't say with absolute certainty. But bear with me for a moment as I follow the weird tangents. Only Fools and Horses still runs on a British oldies network called simply Gold. It's logo is a variation on the circumpunct which among other things is the symbol for gold.
The Caine movie The Italian Job, which seems so oddly juxtaposed with Batman and Robin, is about a gold heist involving the iconic town of Turin where the shroud believed by some to be the remnant of a resurrected Christ is kept. It also bears mentioning, perhaps, that Del Boy and Rodney's car is a sunny, golden yellow.
The loveliest and most uplifting message came from John Lennon. The sequence is a center of gravity in a largely disjointed and superficial seeming spectacle. In a project overseen by Yoko Ono, footage of Lennon singing "Imagine" was remastered and the resulting, very crisp print was played as part of an etherial musical number. A giant John Lennon edifice was puzzled together before our eyes. Then it was disassembled, dispersed, and finally white balloons ascended the heavens. Anyone who's ever done the Easter Sunday balloon ritual at church should recognize the symbolism of spirit rejoining God. John Lennon became one with everything before our very eyes while singing a message of peace and unity. I actually teared up a little and John Lennon isn't even my favorite Beatle.
That was a pretty hard act to follow and that such a sorry job fell to George Michael seemed a tad unfair. Sadly, he looked less animated than a dead John Lennon. But he poured himself into some leather pants and put on a game face. The message was clear: FREEDOM. And that's what the language of ascension is all about -- freedom from the illusory world in which we are all trapped in a cycle of unconscious deaths and rebirths. Not to put too fine a point on it, Michael wore a giant skull belt buckle and around his neck hung a slim silver cross -- death and ascension.
A performance of "Pinball Wizard" from Tommy was certainly rife with circumpunct imagery. If you were watching the screen, you saw the concentric circles grow out of a single point of light and then morph into the octagonal structure of the Union Jack.
From there it was an homage to gold... I mean David Bowie. Well, Bowie was used as the jumping off point for a celebration of Britain's contribution to fashion. And all the models were dressed in, you guessed it, gold.
Next we were treated to the dragon (kundalini) imagery of Annie Lenox arriving on a flaming, Viking ship. She sang "Little Bird" about the self as a fallen bird with a dream of ascension.
I walk along the city streets
So dark with rage and fear
And I...
I wish that I could be that bird
And fly away from here
I wish I had the wings to fly away from here
. . .
They always said that you knew best
But this little bird's fallen out of that nest now
I've got a feeling that it might have been blessed
So I've just got to put these wings to test
And after Lenox's gorgeous portrayal of the fire serpent, a performance of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" ended with a recreation of it's iconic cover which depicts a man on fire. Subtle.
And in case you think Pink Floyd wasn't working with some serious alchemical imagery, here's a round-up of some album art.
From there things became increasingly psychedelic. Well, entheogens are one way to pierce the veil. Although, I think the primary lesson in this sequence was that Russell Brand should never, ever sing. If you can't warble out a tune as simple as "Pure Imagination" at least as well Gene Wilder, don't. As for the Britishness, follow the bouncing ball. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which was written by British author -- and spy/playboy -- Roald Dahl. Yes. The famous children's author was a real life James Bond. He also wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice. I guess he'd know, having spent a good bit of his life On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Sooooo British.
Brand also belted out a sad rendition of "I Am the Walrus" from Magical Mystery Tour -- pure rainbow covered psychedelia and my childhood favorite.
Next, commentator Ryan Seacrest gave voice to our collective bafflement over the... um... giant octopus as it morphed out of Brand's psychedelic bus.
As you watch this, try and make sense out of the octopus in the center. Your guess is as good as mine?
I don't know... Cthulhu? No. Lovecraft was American.
The suggestion from deep in the woo is that it represented the Rothschilds, but like the vampire squid that is Goldman Sachs, I don't really think that's how they self-identify. I suppose they could just be mocking us all... with their diabolical partner in crime DJ Fatboy Slim. I'm still more inclined to call it absurd, meaningless spectacle. I don't know. Is there some deep symbolism to the octopus? It has eight limbs like the Union Jack it's splayed out on, and octagonal symbolism seems to abound here. I'm quite sure I'm missing something... Probably something to do with the ordering of chaos in the deep, primordial waters -- much like the divine creatrix energy of spider. The whole show saw repeated images of spoked wheels -- the underlying structure of a web -- from the Union Jack itself to the London Eye (Ferris wheel), to umbrellas.
I have to give mad props to the exquisite Eric Idle who alone seemed to grasp that he was in something far more absurd than Monty Python and had a bit of fun with the Bollywood act that inexplicably hijacked his performance of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" -- a song which Idle sings suspended on a cross in the crucifixion scene of Life of Brian. There is some discussion in the deep woo about the python/serpent connection. Considering that the whole thing has been rife with kundalini imagery, there could be something to that. It could allude to the serpent (in this case python) on a pole. It could also point to the Pythia, the oracle of Gaia, at Delphi. For added fun, look at how much gold is in that sequence. Mont Piton, by the way is a volcanic mountain on the island nation of Mauritius, which was under British rule until 1968.
If the Brazilian sequence seemed out of place in the thoroughly British spectacle, it did at least tie in thematically. It was all volcanoes, mountains, goddesses, and, once again, dragons. But you had to look close. The vocalist was Maria Monte (mountain) and she actually appears emerging from a mountain of spinning umbrellas and singing like a siren on the rocks. Pelé, the famous Brazilian footballer who put in an appearance, shares the name with the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes and with active volcanoes in Martinique and on Jupiter. Also performing was Seu Jorge. St. George is the patron saint of England and he was most famous for slaying a dragon. So, I guess my point is that the fire serpent imagery kept coming even through that oddly out of place, not terribly British, interlude. And the capoeira was fun.
Missing from the US broadcast, perhaps over a rights dispute, was Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" complete with pyramid. Here's a description:
One of the highights featured a stepped pyramid created out of 303 white boxes to Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill, and when the song got to, "If I could make a deal with God" all the dancers were in full prostration on the floor.In numerology, the O counts for zero, so in other words, the white boxes making up the pyramid represented the number 33, the most significant number for any Freemasonic ritual and the highest order that can be achieved.
As I have suggested previously, the number 33 is not arbitrary. It's the number of vertebrae in the average spine and its use in Masonry points to the ascent of kundalini toward the pineal gland, aka, the "all seeing eye."
If there remains a question that the closing ceremony was an esoteric ritual, the conclusion should put it to rest. The extinguishing of the Olympic flame was quite simply exquisite. The flames -- one for each participating country -- fanned out to form a primordial mound from which emerged a flaming phoenix. The phoenix is a later iteration of the Bennu bird of Egyptian myth, born from the abyss with the Benben stone, which is described alternately as a mound, a tetrahedron, and a pyramid. According to Graham Hancock in Heaven's Mirror, the Benben stone "provided the model, and was in fact the name used by the ancient Egyptians, for the capstones (pyramidions) of all pyramids and for the tips (but not the shafts) of all obelisks." He continues:
The model for the phoenix of the later Greeks, the Bennu was another manifestation of Atum, this time in the form of a grey heron that was said to have appeared at the moment of creation, perched atop a pillar on the Primeval Mound. It is important to note, as Egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark has pointed out, that the rising of the mound and the appearance of the phoenix were not viewed as consecutive events but rather as 'parallel statements, two aspects of the supreme creative moment'.
In the texts that moment is epitomized as the victory of light and the spirit over darkness and death and specifically as 'that breath of life which emerged from the throat of the Bennu bird, in whom Atum appeared in the primeval nought.' In Rundle Clark's eloquent evocation of this scene:One has to imagine a perch extending out of the waters of the Abyss. On it rests a grey heron, the herald of all things to come. It opens its beak and breaks the silence of the primeval night with the call of life and destiny.
Hmm... That's so evocative of the song by the dragoness Annie Lennox.
So the Olympics closes where it began, with the primordial mound of creation, now having completed a transformation and resurrection into full flight. Much of it wasn't even subtle. It was a celebration of the primal goddess in her fire serpent, kundalini, aspect, reconnecting us to the divine unity.
But if the Olympics ceremonies were a paean to the mother goddess, NBC's coverage kicked her in the teeth. Much about their monopoly on the games has been criticized. That they parceled out the big events during prime time, while trying and failing to maintain a media blackout on the results of the un-aired events, wasn't even the worst of their crimes. It was their endless trivializing of women athletes. They weren't alone in this but as the network with its hands on the coverage valve in the US, the responsibility for that tone rests primarily with them. And their contempt for women was on full display. Their grossest misstep had to be pulled from their website due to outrage. This was the appropriately titled "Bodies in Motion" video. I say appropriately because, ever so typically, women were completely reduced to their bodies.
The video, titled "Bodies In Motion," depicts select female Olympic athletes in slow motion. The first two shots are of one woman taking off her shorts and another licking her lips. The women selected are overwhelmingly white, thin and wearing uniforms that are varying degrees of revealing, and the footage is set to what Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan describes as "soft core porn music." The mashup, which was originally posted on NBCOlympics.com, NBC's official Olympics website, elicited a swift wave of criticism from media outlets such as Jezebel and ThinkProgress. The video has since been taken down (the full clip can still be viewed on Jezebel), but the criticism raises larger questions about NBC's coverage of female athletes.
The video is simply hideous. The camera lingers endlessly on women's body parts, panning slowly up to show faces last and almost incidentally. When faces are the focus, it's only because they're too close to their breasts or because there's something arguably provocative going on with their mouths. It's a celebration of all the T&A taking home its weight in gold medals.
All across the media spectrum, women were measured for everything but their athletic accomplishments. Runner Lolo Jones was savaged in a New York Times column for posing nude and for saying publicly that she is a 30 year old virgin. Her nude modeling was, in fact, part of an elegant spread in ESPN Magazine with both male and female athletes that even included paralympians. The photo is not particularly sexual. It is beautiful. And, anyway, who cares?! It's just so typical. Women are too sexual or not sexy enough. We're sluts. We're weirdly virginal. The one thing we never are is good enough.
Writes Sarah L. Jackson of the appalling coverage of female athletes like Jones:
During the women’s road race on Sunday, commentators continually referred to the competitors as “girls” despite the fact that the top finishers for the U.S. were Shelley Olds, 32, Evelyn Stevens, 28, and a former Lehaman Brothers associate, and Kristin Armstrong, 39, and competing in her third Olympics. That adult women, at the top of their craft, with full lives and countless accomplishments continue to be referred to as “girls” in sports coverage is minimizing to say the least.
. . .
In perhaps the creepiest Olympic sexism, London Mayor Boris Johnson wrote in an editorial earlier in the week that the popularity of women’s beach volleyball at the Olympics could be attributed to the “semi-naked women” who were “glistening like wet otters.” Wet otters?
. . .
Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon has also noted NBC’s “obsession” with motherhood in this year’s Olympic coverage. It seems no commentator can talk about female Olympians who have given birth without reserving most of their praise and discussion for that fact. To top it off, Proctor & Gamble’s “Thank You, Mom” Olympic campaign wants us to spend a lot of time thinking about and being moved by the fact that Olympic athletes have supportive mothers. As Williams puts it, hey, “Suck it dads!” This media obsession with motherhood has some serious implications besides narrowing world-class athletes down to the value of their uteruses (or the one’s they came out of). It also demonstrates the way women athletes are constantly framed by judgments of their sexuality and femininity; something male athletes are simply not subjected to.
Almost completely ignored by NBC was the first American gold medalist in judo. This drove my martial artist husband crazy because judo was one of the few events he cared to see. They never showed the match, only the winner's tearful victory hugs. The judoka in question was Kayla Harrison. But Harrison is more than an Olympic champion. She is a sex abuse survivor who took her power back, put her abusive judo coach in prison, came out publicly in response to the Penn State scandal right before the Olympics, and then went on to win the gold. She is a woman of tremendous courage and strength who ascended from as painful an abyss as one can find herself in.
Kayla Harrison's athletic brilliance was not interesting enough to be broadcast by NBC. That breasts jiggle when women run, however, was so endlessly fascinating that it needed to be shown in slow motion with a bow-chick-a-bow-bow soundtrack.
Such is our sorry state of affairs when it comes to the appreciation of female power. No wonder the symbols of the divine feminine have to be hidden. But the fire serpent -- so demonized in Western culture -- was on full, if terribly misunderstood, display at the Olympics this year. For all the paranoid fear around these symbols, it was exactly what William Henry and Chad Stuemke forecast -- a thinly veiled narrative on the path through the stargate. It even ended with a song about returning to the stars.
No doubt, the woo woo world heard Take That's performance of "Rule the World" as still more confirmation that the Illuminati is laughing at us poor peasants. But that would miss the point. Fans of the movie version of Neil Gaiman's Stardust will recognize it from the denouement, played as our hero marries his immortal beloved, achieves the (celestial) crown, and sheds his mortal identity to become a star. It all seems kind of obvious now doesn't it? Here's a little video montage. Have fun counting the symbols.
Chocolate Jesus also pushed the limits because he was depicted in the nude, naughty bits and all. I think I've said about enough on the 
... on so many levels. I also don't want to see the District of Columbia turned into the "District of Christ." I'm rather too fond of the principles of our founding fathers.
