Tag Archives: Christmas

Holiday Hard!

24 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by in General

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I like our tree this year

One of the worst things about Christmas is watching people work too hard at Christmas. People do it in different ways, but they do it all the time.

Normally a moderate man, my father once Christmased up a big decoration for our rooftop. It was pretty cool, and as we lived just off Highway 18, people all around Victor-Valley, California certainly noticed it. So, of course he tried to top himself the next year, and again the year after that. I don’t recall when it got to be too much (though it might have been when we moved to a colder place). I do remember at least one year when the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth, …to him, I mean. The stress was apparent. Afterwards, we settled for a few strings of light.

And it was good!

Of course, Christmas lights can be a whole other kind of Hell. They could be a really special Hell back in the 70s. Hell, it was Hell just being my dad’s assistant in the annual battle of the Christmas lights. One bad bulb could ruin a whole string, and some of those could hide really well. I swear some would work only when you tested them, but when you moved on, they just conked right out. The struggle to find the one bad bulb was just the battle you fought after the one to untangle the strings in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen some amazing Christmas displays. Really wonderful stuff! I only hope the people who made them actually enjoyed working on the project.

…and I suspect there have been a few who didn’t.

Moni is a sweetie!

And then of course there is the competitive gifting. As they say, it’s the thought that counts. Yes, but money too expresses a thought of its own, a thought that doesn’t go away just because we sometimes talk like we don’t care about it. So, we dollar-up our Christmas love and double down on the price of our holiday thoughts whenever possible. It isn’t just the individual presents though; the spectacle around that tree can be a project in itself. That project got out of hand more than a few times when I was a kid. I noticed the beauty of the result, and I enjoyed playing with more than a few of those gifts. If I noticed the crankyness of the tall people around me, I didn’t always make the connection.

Some people just try way too hard to fill the space under the tree with as many gifts as they can. It really doesn’t have to be a mountain of packages that will take all day just to get through.

Well, for some people it does, which is precisely when Christmassing up the gift-giving gets to be a bit too much yule-tide cheer.

…and more than a few folks end up paying the cost of the holidays off well into the new year, the interest paid on credit cards being just one more holiday gift.

Hell, if a corporation can be a person, I suppose, it can receive a holiday gift just like the rest of us! It can even get that gift in the form of 21% interest paid well into late Spring.

And then there the tree itself! It can always be bigger, can’t it? At least it could if it weren’t for the ceiling, but then there are ways to flesh out the total tree display. You can Christmas up a tree a little more each year, making it bigger, brighter, full of more tinsel, decked out in brighter ornaments with each passing holiday happening.

A well decorated Christmas tree can be a beautiful thing.

Getting it there can be more trouble than it is worth.

Did I mention that special ornaments have a special way of falling from a tree branch? Seriously, the chance of breaking an ornament is directly proportional to its cost multiplied by its sentimental value.

…and the cost of the carpet.

And then of course there is the baking! A few Christmas cookies can be a lovely way to celebrate the holidays. But of course you don’t just need the sugar cookies (though you need lots of those). You also have to have the cinnamon stars, and those powdery white cookies too. Don’t forget the chocolate candies, and the hard candies! Maybe, some…

Give it a rest!

You’ll be too tired to eat them!

***

The stockings are grinchy this year

It’s funny, the way this holiday with all its themes of family and sharing can bring out the worst in people. Black Friday doesn’t seem to produce a body count anymore, at least I hope not, but the holidays can still deposit a whole butt-load of stress under the tree. Between the fake war on Christmas, obnoxious relatives at the dinner table, and the usual holiday loneliness some folks experience this time of year, the holiday season can sure produce a lot of strife and misery.

I suppose that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Make a point of any virtue and you create a special room for a little vice to grow. What makes Christmas especially troublesome is just how earnest people can be about it.

We really do work at this damned holiday!

At least some do.

Christmas can really be too much!

Among all the other hazards of Holiday Hell, the ones we all know, there is also the hazard of those trying too hard at this Holiday. We don’t talk about this holiday hazard too much, I don’t think, possibly because it doesn’t give us anything to fight about. The fake war on Christmas gives us that, at least. Holiday depression shapes up a good story to tell a therapist, a bartender, or at least a divorce lawyer, but being up till 6am putting the holiday cheer in proper order just seems too natural to some of us. Obnoxious relatives give us gripes to last the whole year. Those we will tell our friends, perhaps even the friends we will gripe about with our relatives over Christmas dinner. Hell, Holiday hell, gives us a lot to gripe about, and a good gripe is a gift well given. But working too hard at the cookies? There is nothing to complain about there.

Is there?

Perhaps not, but there ought to be a little cautionary tale in the matter.

For those who may be in the midst of trying to put together that bicycle before you go to bed tonight, still struggling with a troublesome string of lights or just working at another pan of cookies, don’t forget to save a little time to enjoy it all.

Fuck that!

Save a lot of time to enjoy it.

***

That said,

Someone I love is downstairs working a little too hard to clean up an already clean house so that we can enjoy it tomorrow. I better go see if I can help her.

***

Happy Holidays everyone!

For a Certain Value of ‘Win’

25 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by in Politics

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y0aRjr1DSo, the Trump campaign has launched a brand new website intended to help their supporters ‘win’ arguments over the Holiday dinner tables. (No, I’m not linking to the damned thing; you can find it yourself if you like.) I seem to recall the deplorable pundits encouraging their faithful to harass us at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Now they’ve decided to press the fight on into Christmas as well.

…and supposedly, it’s liberal secularists that are trying to ruin Christmas, but whatever!

How are they pitching this little bundle of disinformation? According to CBS News:

“We’ve all seen the news articles about liberal snowflakes being afraid to see their MAGA relatives at Christmas or holiday gatherings, so the Trump campaign wants people to be ready,” Kayleigh McEnany, Trump campaign national press secretary, said in a statement. “We’re not helping snowflakes avoid arguments – we’re helping Trump supporters win them! As 2019 draws to a close and 2020 approaches, President Trump and Americans are going to be winning, winning, and winning, and then winning some more!”

Which brings to mind a certain question. Why is it that we liberals are the ones ducking these Holiday discussions? Why is it that we are the ones consciously trying to avoid politics with friends and family over the Holiday season. I suppose there may be some counter-examples, obviously there are, but I do think the general pattern is those pushing this sight see it; liberals are the ones who would rather not engage even as deplorables are only too happy to spill their love of the Manchurian Cheeto all over the room, regardless of the season.

its-hard-to-win-an-argument-with-a-smart-person-44291783Frankly, I think this quote, commonly attributed to Bill Murray sums it up rather nicely. (Speaking of which, does anybody out there know when Murray said that? Or if it really was him?) It isn’t a fear of losing the argument so much as the knowledge that any argument worth making will be wasted on some folks. We’ve all been there, and the headache just isn’t worth it. Also, quite frankly, the fear of seeing the darker truths about people we know and love. It sucks when you realize that someone you really care about shows you that that they are only of egg-nogs away from telling a bunch of really racist jokes. It’s unpleasant to realize that a close friend or relative doesn’t check his facts before opening his mouth and can’t be corrected when called out on it. It’s genuinely horrifying to realize that someone you love is just fine with seeing certain people suffer needlessly (ahem! Children in cages on our borders or living under the bombs in any number of places around the world). It isn’t just the unpleasantness of disagreement that makes some of us wary of Holiday discussions, it’s those moments when you can’t help seeing a trace of cruelty or willful deceit underlies the politics of some people you’d like to love. Sure, sometimes people make a reasonable argument from the other side. Even a right wing clock is right twice a day, so to speak, but sometimes, all-too-often really, it isn’t the challenging case that makes us uncomfortable, much less the cold hard-to-explain fact, it’s the moment you see the genuine cruelty in a friend or family member. Politics brings that out in people, some people at any rate.

With Trump in the White House, politics is bringing it out of them a lot more often.

If Hell is the impossibility of reason, then Holiday Hell is the impossibility of reasoning with a half-drunk uncle. The White House wants to see more of that happening today and tomorrow. Apparently, this year it isn’t enough to fight an imaginary war on Christmas or to do as Trump has done in the past, which is to take credit for the fact that people are wishing each other Merry Christmas again, and hope that people won’t notice that most never stopped in the first place. Now they want us to argue more over Christmas.

This is just one more example of trump’s old promise that he will deliver countless wins to his followers. Like so many other ‘winning’ moments, this one is a manufactured moment of one-up-manship, a pointless battle designed to give someone lacking any semblance of character a chance to feel he got the better of someone else. It is neither patriotism nor conservatism. It certainly isn’t Christianity.

And it really isn’t much of a win when you think about it.

Which is to say that it is just like everything else Trump has brought to us over the last 3 years.

 

Alex Jones and the Weaponization of Christmas (An Irritation Meditation)

28 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in Irritation Meditation, Politics, Religion

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Surfing the net can be a lot like turning over rocks in the countryside. Every now and then you find something underneath a rock (or a link) so disgusting you just can’t pull your eyes off it. Case in point? This little bit of filth from Info Wars.

To begin with, let me apologize for bringing this shitgasm into the lives of you, my readers. I am sorry.

Alex Jones and his bunch are a special kind of putrid, but sadly, they are a special kind of putrid with a lot more influence than they deserve. So, I reckon it’s worth keeping track of their antics.

…regretful though that task may be.

There is a lot of crap in this video, but what got my attention here is the opening pitch.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated anyone hash-tagging ‘Merry Christmas’, ‘Christmas Eve’, ‘Christmas’, or ‘Jesus’ a far right wing extremist.”

Sounds pretty shocking doesn’t it? What could possibly lead the folks at Info Wars to such an impluasible conclusion? As they go on to explain in the video, the Southern Poverty Law (SPLC) has been tracking these hashtags in their hate tracker. What is the hate tracker? Well let’s take that information directly from the SPLC.

Screenshot 2017-12-28 13.22.50

So, there it is. The hate tracker tracks trends in right wing activity on twitter. It is not a statement about the meaning of any of these terms, nor is it a theoretical account of the trends it identifies. It isn’t even the result of a conscious effort to call attention to specific terms, or the specific use of them in right wing circles. If a hashtag trends in the activities of right wing extremists, it will come up on the tracker.

Simply put, the hate tracker picked up a lot of Christmas tweetage among the right wingers. What that means is an entirely different question. One thing it doesn’t mean is that anyone who uses these terms is a right wing extremist. No, the SPLC was not saying that, and the hackwits at Info Wars know this.

Both the Info Wars video and the Breitbart article on this subject do present a (more or less) accurate account of this in the meat of their stories. The trick here is the mismatch between that substance and the labeling. The folks at Info Wars know very well how the hate tracker works, and they account for it, but then they draw a conclusion totally unsupported by the facts they themselves provide. They are hoping you won’t remember the details, but that you will remember the pitch line they used to start the story. They are hoping you will come away from this thinking that a prominent liberal source has tried to label all talk of Jesus and Christmas as right wing extremism. This is simply not true.

It’s a bit after the bell, but this video is one more shot in the fake war on Christmas. More to the point, it is part of an ongoing effort to weaponize Christmas, to recast the celebration of Christmas as an explicitly political act, a defiance of liberal politics. IN effect, it is an attempt to make the celebration of Christmas into a partisan gesture, one which will divide Americans still further, and pointlessly so.

It may well be that the hashtag trends noted by the SPLC are also part of that effort to weaponize Christmas. Certainly, there have been a lot of people using ‘Merry Christmas’ to say something more like ‘fuck you liberals’, and at least a few of them have been doing this on the net. I expect right wing extremists also wish people Merry Christmas for conventional reasons, like actually wanting them to have a merry Christmas, but I reckon at least a few of those hits the SPLC caught in their tracker were conscious efforts to carry on the war on the eve of Christmas itself. Either way, the Info Wars piece is a conscious effort to spin that narrative up a notch, to pretend that liberals have declared Christmas itself a hateful expression.

The problem is of course that they are lying.

The real question is why? Why tell this particular lie? What does it get the people at Info Wars? I get that the SPLC has its own set of biases, but no, they are NOT trying to crush Christianity. Neither are they trying to steal the Christmas presents out from under your tree. This conscious demonization of the SPLC simply isn’t about correcting bias it’s about enshrining it. It’s about making sure that people do not make careful distinctions between actual hate groups and mere conservatives, or for that matter ordinary Americans of any political stripe. Info Wars wants the public to think the SPLC cannot tell the difference ordinary well-wishing and a racist political agenda. The problem of course is that the SPLC can and does make such distinctions all the time. Alex Jones and his merry band of festering bloodfarts, on the other hand, would love to be thought of as conservative, even patriotic. They would love to have their own brand of lunacy pass for good old fashioned conservative politics, and they would love to have the right wing fanatics who make up their customer base thought of as ordinary people. If they can muddle the distinction themselves, then they can pass all manner of lunatic ideas under the banner of basic American values. That’s their pay-off.

There is always a pay-off for this kind of political charade. For Trump, the War on Christmas was just another effort to brand something (Christmas) to which he contributes absolutely nothing. For the likes of Bill O’Reilly, it was grist for a combative mill that helped keep his ratings high. For Info Wars and Breitbart, it’s the hope for legitimacy. It is an effort by those on the lunatic fringe to pass themselves off as legitimate, to pretend that the ideologically committed racists who regularly consume their products are just ordinary Americans who love Christmas. In effect, they are telling the public that the SPLC and liberals in general cannot tell the difference between a conservative and a deplorable. But we can.

Yes, there is a difference.

Christmas is What Christmas Ain’t

25 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Childhood, General

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averylonghairedxmas

Yep, me with hair, decorating a tree.

What makes a Christmas story?

Is it the threat? There always seems to be some threat to Christmas. Someone won’t make it home. Somebody else stole the presents, or maybe someone is going to stop Santa from spreading the presents. Perhaps someone is broke and thinking of taking the short route off a bridge just before the happy holiday. Whether it be a fantasy grinch, a real worldish villain, or simply a natural disaster of some kind, I’d be hard pressed to think of a Christmas story that didn’t feature some threat to Christmas.

Or is it the lesson? Christmas tales always have a lesson. Someone must learn something about the true meaning of Christmas. That true meaning always involves something about giving and/or grasping the value of our loved ones. Not uncommonly, someone in the story learns to shift their attention from material objects (i.e. Christmas gifts) to the other people in their lives (or perhaps the other whos in whoville). It’s a pretty heart-warming lesson.

Makes you want to go ‘awe’!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as likely to go ‘awe’ as anyone if the story is told well, but there is always something a little too pat about these stories. They can be damned formulaic, and damned trite. And when you consider their connection to one of the most overtly commercial rituals of the modern western calendar, it ought to raise all manner of red flags. Somehow, this holiday, which has been driven by commercial interests for the better part of at least a century keeps generating stories about how the stuff we are supposed to buy on account of it isn’t really what the holiday is all about.

Can you say ‘cognitive dissonance’?

I knew that you could.

(Of course I say it myself having just snuck a few presents under a tree.)

So, anyway, hoisting myself on my own petard here, I still can’t help thinking this particular profundity game is a bit more toxic than most of us care to admit. If it weren’t, then perhaps we could all enjoy a story where the main character suddenly realizes the true value of Christmas really is commerce. He could praise the virtues of conspicuous consumption and even acknowledge the often-competitive nature of gift-giving. He could see in the countless gifts nobody wants a kind of sacrifice to the Invisible Hand, telling us these white elephants are the price of keeping mom&pop stores going for another year. If the Market is well pleased with our pointless gifts, He allows the stores to stay in business, but if we fail to pay this tribute many tears will follow. Our fabulous Christmas protagonist could fairly acknowledge all of this in a toast before drinking his eggnog. Money is the reason for this damned season. Surely, there ought to be room for at least one Christmas story with this as its moral.

But no. That kind of theme is always at best an artifact of conflict, a viewpoint to be overcome by the end of the story. However important money may be to this holiday, it seems to be equally important that we find something else more important in the whole thing after all.

And with that, we get our Christmas tragedies. Scrooge loses his edge. The Grinch rejoins civilization. And how many sitcoms end their holiday episode in bad sweaters and milquetoast grins. It’s enough to make a grown man want to groan.

So be it!

Even so, the money story may be a bit more profound than simple materialism would have it. In the end what makes money so central to Christmas isn’t the gifts we hope to get. It isn’t even the ones we hope to give. It’s the lives that continue to function because a good chunk of the yearly profits actually did happen after all. So, business owners get paid, and because they get paid, so do their employees, and so on, and so on. We can sneer at the crass commercialism of it all, but if Christmas doesn’t happen, some people really do suffer (and not because they didn’t get what they wanted under the tree.) Money may be a lot more central to this ritual than our typical Christmas story would have it, but then again money is itself a lot more profound than most of us would care to admit. So, perhaps it’s not so bad to see through that crass commercialism of Christmas to something a bit more humane. It’s almost as if all this smarminess is an attempt to work out the actual significance of what we all do to put food on the table.

Of course that just lands us in a new mess. The celebration of love and togetherness that we are left with in just about every Christmas story is of course idealized in the extreme. The love celebrated in all these Christmas stories always comes across a bit too pure, at least in the final joyous scenes. But how often does this have anything to do with Christmas as we live it? If for no other reason than the threat of politics at the dinner table, we should all be a little wary of the promise these stories hold out. And if the celebration of togetherness and caring ever jumps out of these stories and into our real lives it often brings a bit of a mess with it.

If Hell is other people – and it is – then Christmas (with its themes of love and togetherness) can’t help but bring a little horror into our lives. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Christmas is so rich. It’s full of contradictions, and those give rise to countless real-life Christmas stories every year. Sometimes they end well and sometimes they end badly. Mostly, our Christmas lives are as mixed as our Christmas narratives aren’t.

Ah well, horror too has its place in the grand scheme of things.

How else to explain fruit cake!

***

I recall as a child, my mother always planned week’s worth of work. She would bake every cookie imaginable. She would buy enormous quantities of gifts which she would wrap in all manner of beautiful ways. We would decorate the whole house in the most elaborate way. We would sing carols. And so on.

…She usually ended up scrambling to do as much as she could in the last day or three. It was never enough, especially not for her, and that meant Christmas Eve was an especially difficult evening. She was angry and depressed, and for me that meant at least a little phase where I would have wished the whole thing away. That moment always vanished by morning, but it was there.

Mom had one brother. He died on Christmas Eve while building the Burma Road during World War II. He had joined the military after getting kicked out of the house over drinking a single beer, so his death left a special kind of rift in her life, and presumably that of her parents. I can’t imagine how hard that holiday must have been to her. As a kid I really couldn’t.

For my mother at least, Christmas would always be a source of mixed feelings.

***

I once got to play Scrooge in my Jr. High Christmas Production. I rather liked that Christmas. Seriously though, the opening scenes were way more fun than the closing ones.

***

In recent years, talk of a war on Christmas has me both amused and irritated. If there is anyone out there who genuinely objects to being told ‘Merry Christmas’, he or she is fairly outnumbered by those clearly upset by the phrase ‘Happy Holidays’.

Much like a horse, I reckon one shouldn’t look a well-wisher in the mouth. Those who keep congratulating themselves on saying ‘Merry Christmas’ instead of ‘Happy Holidays’ do little but show the insincerity of either wish coming from their own mouths.

When thinking about this one, I am often reminded of the year I spent teaching at an orthodox Jewish private school. The folks at that school said ‘Happy Holidays’, and yes, that was a generous choice of wording on their part.

You never really know when you are the one to be tolerated.

***

I still remember the year my older sister made up a decoration that said “Pax et bonum” (Peace and Salvation)  This was to go at the top of our tree instead of our star. We had a really great star that projected all these cool colors all around the room. I really loved that star.

I was a bit of a shit about the whole thing.

More than a bit actually.

***

One of my favorite Christmases ever was the one we celebrated on Easter Sunday. My nephew was serving in Iraq that year, and no-one in the family was the least bit interested in celebrating the holidays until he came home. So, we literally gathered around a Christmas tree and unwrapped presents on Easter Sunday.

***

I’m even a bit more fond of the Christmas we all agreed to forgo presents entirely and went as a group to Molokai instead. I wish every Christmas could be like that. Oh there was plenty of drama that Christmas, but it was drama that played out in Molokai.

Molokai makes everything better.

***

When I worked at an animal shelter, I recall that we tried to discourage people from getting pets as Christmas presents, at least not without giving the recipient a chance to choose the pet. Too often, pets given sight-unseen on Christmas day ended up back at the shelter not long afterward.

No-one is surprised when a blind date goes badly. Think about that next time you hand someone a puppy and expect them to bond for life.

***

Speaking of my time at an animal shelter, I once had to dress up as Santa Clause at a Petsmart. The idea here was to pose with people’s pets for pictures. This is a pretty regular thing as I recall, but I always thought it a very bad idea. These animals are already in a strange environment. Now you want them to sit on the lap of a guy with a fake beard and fake hair, gloves, and a wild outfit?

Damned lucky I didn’t come away with scars!

***

Speaking of the war on Christmas, people sometimes wonder what atheists say instead of Merry Christmas? This one mostly says ‘Merry Christmas’. Some folks think it odd to say ‘Merry Christmas’ when you don’t literally believe in Christ. They oughtta love Thursdays.

***

My girlfriend tells me there is a benefit to dating a gringo. Her (Mexican) family celebrates Christmas on Christmas Eve. We typically celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day. This makes it possible to be with both her family and that of her boyfriend when the actual celebrations take place. This doesn’t work so well when her family is in Los Angeles and mine is in Freeport, Texas.

She is an extraordinarily patient woman.

Her boyfriend can be a bit of a shit though.

More than a bit, actually.

***

Ah well. That’s enough random Christmas stories. Someone recently asked me about my favorite Christmas songs, so I’ve attached a few videos. All that said…

Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry [War on the (War On)] Christmas!

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in atheism, Politics, Religion

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If I was to list the things I hate about Christmas, that list might well include Black Friday, bland food, and blander music. Jesus isn’t on that list. Oh, I know that I’m supposed to be working hard to get the Christ out of Christmas, at least according to certain talking heads, because that’s just what atheists do. But seriously, it would never occur to me to try and scratch Baby Jesus out of this holiday.

…mainly, because Jesus isn’t a big part of Christmas to begin with.

Yes, I understand American Atheists did a snarky Billboard. With that and a pickle, they’d still be one sandwich short of a lunch plate. Some of us will laugh (I know I did), but this is hardly a credible threat to the Prince of Peace. And seriously, atheist kids can’t be the only ones hoping to skip church for Christmas.

Schaedenfreude for All!

Schaedenfreude for All!

…if you think about it, they probably aren’t all that worried about it.

The annual fake war on Christmas is always entertaining. When folks find ‘Happy Holidays’ offensive or suspect an entire agenda behind use of the infamous X in ‘Xmas’, I can’t help but laugh. But I like to remind myself when the explicit reasoning people use makes no sense whatsoever, that’s usually because it isn’t the one guiding their actual thought process.

I figure the war on Christmas is primarily good marketing for right wing pundits, and apparently for Kirk Cameron. Near as I can tell, Cameron has never really outgrown his character on Growing Pains, but the culture wars certain do provide him with plenty of grist for the still-vapid mill. This year he’s working the Christmas angle. …meh! Anyway, the war on Christmas does two things near as I can tell; it helps Christian conservatives misrepresent the battle over civic religious pronouncements, and it helps those same Christians rally the faithful by wagging the dog, so to speak.

savingchristmas_smI know, I’m mixing my metaphors, yes, but what the Hell do you expect from a Godless bastard?

The battle over civil religion has been driven by concerns about the entanglement of religion in public institutions. This is not an effort to drive God entirely from the public sphere, nor is it an effort to enshrine atheism in that sphere. The question is simply whether or not government facilities ought to be making any kind of explicit religious expressions, whether it be a copy of the Ten Commandments or a Manger scene.

Now I’m not entirely sold on the value of opposing every cross, prayer, or hand-made sign with religious sentiments that makes an appearance on public property, but every time I’m tempted to support a compromise on these issues, some joker from the religious right (or ten of them) makes it a point to suggest those reflect the true Christian nature of this country. …and what seemed possibly harmless then becomes a great big power grab that needs answering immediately.

In any event, those defending use of public institutions for explicitly religious expressions have some real questions to answer about how this squares with the establishment clause, and near as I can tell most of the culture warriors are too busy generating narratives that bypass the whole problem. The War on Christmas is just such a narrative. As long as every challenge to a public display of Jesus in the manger counts as part of an effort to crush the joy of Christmas, the Christian right will never have to address the constitutionality of its public agenda. People will be too busy saving Christmas from godless grinches.

…just like in a television sitcom.

Vintage Christmas

Vintage Christmas

The larger and deeper misdirection here is also simpler. (It’s a multi-layered misdirection, really it is!) Jesus has been a rather minor theme in the actual celebration of Christmas for most of modern history. Sure, children sing the occasional Silent Night in a Christmas pageant, but they also sing Jingle Bells. Were I a believer, I wouldn’t want to take bets on which one gets a bigger round of applause from the audience. But that’s just the tip of the pagan pine bough. The fact is that Christ is always playing catch-up with His own holiday, and last I checked, he was well behind the marketing professionals on this one.

These days I hear a lot of people talking about putting the Christ back in Christmas, as if simply saying the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’ would provide them with a real victory. The fact of the matter is, though, that people have been saying ‘Merry Christmas’ for generations without meaning much more than ‘Yippee, presents!’ or ‘Hope you get a good bonus.’ Hell, even the more profound messages of giving and family togetherness are as easily embraced in secular circles as those of the truest of the True Christians™. The right wing culture warriors know this and they want to change it, or at least they want to be seen trying to change it.

Whatever else the war on the ‘war on Christmas’ is, it’s also a means of investing the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’ with a new and more politically aggressive meaning. It effects that investment by conjuring an enemy, so when you say ‘Merry Christmas’ now, you aren’t just wishing people a nice glass of egg-nog. Hell, you aren’t even just telling them to celebrate the birth of Jesus or wishing them all the blessings the Prince of Peace could possibly bring. When you say it now, you’re pissing off an atheist (or even a liberal Christianl), and nothing says you love Jesus more than pissing off an atheist (or a liberal)!

Good fun for all!

Only, most of us aren’t all that bothered by the phrase. Hell I say ‘Merry Christmas’ as often as I say ‘Happy Holidays.’ When I did a brief stint at a Jewish private school, I said ‘Happy Holidays’ more often, but that certainly wasn’t about pissing off any Christians. When my Jewish colleagues said ‘Happy Holidays’ to me, they were showing far more compassion and tolerance than the right wingers pushing this fake war can possibly imagine. None of this strikes me as expressing animosity toward those saying “Merry Christmas.” Anyway, I don’t think I’m unusual in this regard. The phrase “Merry Christmas” just isn’t a problem for most unbelievers, and certainly not liberals in general, at least not when Bill O’Reilly isn’t writing the script.

vintagecoke

Coke, another “reason for the season.”

The real threats to the religious perspectives on Christmas have never been secularists; they have been the myriad pleasures of worldly ways. The threats have been train-sets and iphones, bicycles, and Barbie-dolls, well-spiked punch-bowls at office parties, gaudy lights, and near riots at the local Walmart. It’s these things that compete with Jesus for our attention on December 25th, and quite frankly, it isn’t atheists that are pushing them on people. It’s good old-fashioned American capitalism, and let’s be honest, Christian conservatives are hardly interested in fighting a battle against corporate capitalism. So, they’ve conjured up a scape-goat. This way they get to have their stale gingerbread and eat it too. Through the ‘war on Christmas’ Christian conservatives can pretend to fight for the spiritual significance of their holiday all the while going right along with the very practices that keep turning the conveniently imagined birthday of Christ into a hollow and impious event.

Don’t laugh; it works folks!

I can’t be the first or even the thousand and first scaped goat to complain about this little gambit, but well, it’s a white Christmas up here in the arctic, and I’d rather gripe than go outside. Plus, I’m an atheist. I’m supposed to be grumpy and grinchy. Some days I am happy to oblige.

Oh yeah, there’s one more thing.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Satirical Santa Only Visits Talking Heads Who Remember to Bring the Irony

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Politics, Religion

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131210_HOL_SantaMakeover.jpg.CROP.original-original

This illustration by Mark Stamaty appeared in Aisha Harris’ original article for Slate.

What so many in the right wing echo chamber do not seem to get is that Satire does not begin the moment you are called out for making an ass of yourself. You cannot simply toss bigoted statements about the airwaves and play the irony card whenever someone says no to your bigotry. Jokes are meant to be funny the first time around, not simply when the whole world finds your position too stupid to take seriously. Even when the humor is intended one always has to content with the with-me or at-me question. And if the point of your joke is to make fun of someone’s race, gender or sexual orientation, all the laughter in the world will not let you off the hook. Humor is NOT a get-out-of-trouble-free card, especially for those who simply weren’t joking to begin with.

Granted, satire can be a tricky game to play (just ask Sarah Silverman), but an ironic intention doesn’t usually materialize out of thin air. We can generally spot some sign of it in the original moment, so to speak, or at least we should recognize that irony when it is pointed out later.

This is what makes Megyn Kelly’s I-was-joking defense of her comments on Santa’s race so ridiculous. In case you’ve been comatose for the last day or three I’ll let Kelly tell you the story, but let me just say one thing first, watch closely for the light-hearted tone of her original comments. In this clip, she tells us that her comments about Santa were meant as a joke, then plays the original clip. When the original clip comes up, let’s watch closely and maybe we can find the signals of humorous intent:

Did you see the humor? Did you hear that light-hearted tone in her treatment of the subject?

Okay neither did I.

There was nothing funny about the original segment, and that is not changed by Kelly’s forced humor in subsequent statements. She wants us to believe she was joking, but dammit, a joke doesn’t look like that, and it doesn’t sound like that. What is hilarious about this pathetic defense of Kelly’s own racism is that the very video clip she plays ought to be a positive refutaion that her own attempt to recast the moment as humor. Everything from her tone of voice in that original clip to her body posture and the complete lack of humor in all of those present should suggest that she (as the others) were taking the issue VERY seriously. …even too seriously. There is nothing in Kelly’s words that suggests any intent to undercut the seriousness of her claims; she does nothing to show us that she didn’t mean exactly what she said. Everything about he original clip suggests that she meant to be taken seriously.

It’s all just a little funnier when you realize that the original article written by Aisha Harris for slate magazine was in fact offered in a satirical tone, as Kelly herself (now) concedes. So, the bottom line is that Kelly and company read a satirical piece about a real issue (racial identification with a major holiday figure), took it as a serious threat to their own racial politics, and proceeded to pronounce, ex cathedra, that one ought not to mess with Santa’s racial identity, because he is white.

He just is.

Just like Jesus.

John Stewart and his guest (Jessica Williams)are spot-on as usual. To watch that, click here.

So irony is playing quite a shell game with us here. It is present in the piece Kelly was talking about altogether absent in her initial comments on the subject, and present only as an effort to save face in her attempt to address the controversy. …which is unintentionally ironic in the extreme. Is this irony fail or irony jackpot? I really can’t say.

Maybe it’s both.

Don’t read the comments of her twitter defenders by the way. …I mean it don’t! You’ll lose faith in humanity, or at least I did, which is odd considering that I didn’t think I really had any faith in humanity before this, but anyway…

Kelly does have one defender worth considering, though his defense is flawed as Hell. Reza Aslan a Professor of Creative Writing and historian of religion at the University of California, Riverside, tells us that Kelly was actually right about something, sort of. He tells us that she was right about Christ, but not Jesus. Jesus, Aslan tells us was the historical person in question. Jesus would most certainly not count as a white person, as Aslan tells us, but Christ, the cultural construction of Jesus as a God is most certainly white. So, Aslan is trying to tell us that the vision of Christ near and dear to Kelly is certainly white whereas the historical reality of any person whose life might have served as the inspiration for that vision is not.

Okay that’s interesting. It just isn’t all that helpful.

See the problem is that Kelly was not just telling us that Jesus is white as he is imagined in western religious traditions; she was telling us that he really was white. Hell she still hasn’t quite wrapped her mind around the fact that he most certainly wasn’t but apparently she has learned enough to concede that the matter is open to question.

It isn’t.

The bottom line is that Aslan is introducing a distinction that his subject matter does not make which is ironic. More ironic still, Aslan is using this highly flexible manner of speaking about Jesus to defend someone who was most emphatically denying any flexibility to the notion of Jesus whatsoever. She wasn’t telling us that Jesus was white to her and a number of others; she was telling us that it was wrong to think of Jesus as anything but white.

This is the sort of thing that has always bothered me about the study of comparative religion. Too often it seems to amount to a claim that religious faith in general is a good thing even if any particular faith is problematic. I can accept that religious institutions may produce a wide range of wonderfully positive values but I expect those fall in an undefined array of social benefits whereas those who study comparative religion often seem to want to locate them in religiosity itself. It’s an ironic form of apologetics that always seems to stop just short of a literal defense. But that’s just my general beef with the academic field of religious studies; it bears a strong resemblance to Aslan’s effort to rescue some value in Kelly’s views even as he acknowledges their inaccuracy as applied to actual history. The trouble is that Kelly herself isn’t really cooperating with his analysis. She was talking about the history even as she was also talking about the religious imaginary.

And that brings us back to Kelly’s disingenuous attempt to hide her bigotry under the guise of humor. She wants to remind us that both she and Harris acknowledged the same thing, that Santa and Jesus has historically been thought of as white but of course this would h=be a half truth if it were even a little truth. Kelly misses the alternative visions that are in fact out there. More to the point, she is opposed to those alternatives.

Make no mistake Kelly was telling us to say no to anything but a white Jesus and Santa, and she was not joking.

I think I prefer to say no to racism.

Great Movie Villains, Volume VIII: Your Mother!!!!

13 Sunday May 2012

Posted by in Movie Villainy, Movies

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Okay, maybe not your mother, but damned close! Today’s movie villain is that lovable every-Mom from A Christmas Story.

What?

I should wait for Christmas?

This villain isn’t Santa Clause! It’s Mother. And today is exactly the day to celebrate the most excellent movie villainy of Mom.

The Mom from A Christmas Story is the perfect Mom to be our movie villain of the day. From the very first scene you cannot help but fall in love with her. …which would only be your first mistake.

Don’t even try to tell me that you don’t see it, because we all know that you are right there with Ralphie on that Red Rider BB Gun thing. You want it for him. You want it for yourself. Even if you are a girl, you want the Red Rider BB Gun, or at least you’ve wanted something as badly as Ralphie wanted that Red Rider BB Gun. Your own Red Rider BB Gun might have been a Cabbage Patch Kid, a new bike or even a bullwhip, …mine was a bullwhip. Anyway, the point is that we’ve all had our Red Rider BB Gun. So, when Ralphie says he wants one for Christmas, he speaks for all of us. Hell, he is us!

And that makes his Mom, OUR Mom!

…at least for the balance of the movie.

And when Ralpie’s Mom says ‘no’ to that Red Rider, you all know damn well how it feels, because you heard it from your Mom too. If there was ever any doubt that his Mom was your Mom and my Mom, it vanished in that very moment. Right there and then Mother squashes your one true purpose in life. What on earth would possibly be better than a Red Rider BB Gun? Nothing! And she says ‘no’! It’s soul-crushing.

You know what I am talking about. You are right there in the scene with Ralphie and I right now, aren’t you? You are there.

And sure enough, there Mom is, telling you ‘no’. “You’ll shoot your eye out,” she says. It is the first of many times you will hear this terrible proclamation. And seriously, is Mother not acting as the true villain here? Is she not the central obstacle to fulfillment of our major ambition. How could Mother possibly be anything else but a villain while doing such a terrible thing?

Dad would understand. At least he would if it weren’t for Mom. She’ll talk to him and that will ruin everything.

Don’t try to say that it’s okay, because it’s not. At that moment Mother crushes the heart of hope itself. World Peace, the love of God and country, even the taste of really great candy; all these things fail when you hear those words; “You’ll shoot your eye out.” No movie villain has ever taken more away from a protagonist than Mom did in that moment when she first uttered those terrible words.

But that is not all. Let us not forget how skillfully Mother wielded the winter-clothing torture against our little brother! Let us not forget how he cried all the way to school, how he fell in the snow, and how we had to help him up! Let us not forget the vision of our poor dear brother crying as no child has ever cried before, all because Mom insisted on packing him into such a bundle of cloth. What villain could possibly have been more ruthless?

Let us not even speak of the lamp! …that beautiful lamp that father loved so much, the one she destroyed, thus proving her total domination of the household! No, let us not speak of these things. It is enough to remember them.

…and cry.

Yes, my friends, the mother of A Christmas Story is perhaps the most powerful movie villain ever. Who else could possibly block our greatest ambitions with a single phrase, bring our closest kin to tears, and destroy our father’s prize possessions? Who else but Mom? Worse still, who could do all that and make us love her for it? With her gentle strength and calm demeanor, the Mother of this story seeks to seduce us all, to help us find in her what we loved most about our own Mothers, all the while inflicting upon us that which we most feared in them. She beckons us to find reasons to thank her for every crime against our hopes. She insists that we learn to see it her way. There is no quarreling with this mother, no chance to fight back against her charms. She is relentless!

Who could make us love her even as she rules over us with a gentle but overwhelming smile?

Only Mother.

Best villain EVAR!

Great Movie Villains, Volume V: God Damn Us Every One!

19 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Movie Villainy, Movies

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Yeah, that’s right folks! I’m talking about Tiny Tim here. Don’t even pretend you don’t know what I am talking about! Or did you think maybe it was those damned spooks that brought about the downfall of a Ebenezer Scrooge?

No, I am telling you Scrooge wasn’t afraid of no ghost! Nor even three of them. He may have hesitated a bit with the first one, but I am telling you that stalwart icon of good business sense rose to the occasion. He faced those ghosts down like a true champion. Were it for their vainglorious efforts, I feel quite certain that Scrooge would have gone to his grave a good thrifty capitalist, just as he was at the beginning of this terrible tragedy.

And it is a tragedy, make no mistake about it. A Christmas Carol is a dark and terrible story about the downfall of fine American. Don’t even try to tell me that Scrooge was British! Just listen to the man! Asked to give to the poor, how does Scrooge reply?

“Are there no prisons? Are there no poor houses?”

American, Hell! If only Scrooge were still around, the Republican party would know just who to run against Obama. I’m telling you, Scrooge was a good American even if he was British. What this country would not give to have someone of his moral fortitude around today! But no, sadly the old man is dead. And not just dead. His spirit was broken long before he entered the grave. All on account of that sad-adorable little boy, Tiny Tim!

It’s enough to make you want to puke.

Scrooge was a man of principle. He was a man of industry. A man who understood what happens when you subsidize sloth by saving a life instead of letting the market work its magic. Scrooge was all these things, and above all he was a man of wit and reason. He handled life’s problems rationally, and all he asked of others was that they do the same.

And then along comes this poor boy with a treatable illness and just like liberals everywhere the damned ghosts go to work on your heart-strings. Oh look, Ebenezer, look at the poor sick child! Can’t you pay Cratchit a little more? Can’t you save little Tim, Ebenezer? You have so much money, surely you can save him! Oh look Ebenezer, if you don’t help him, poor little helpless Tim is gonna die.

And the little runt plays his heart perfectly, acting so sweet and innocent. The ghosts don’t show Scrooge a moment of Tim slacking off instead of doing his homework. Hell, they don’t even focus on the fact that he doesn’t have a job as every good working class kid his age should have had by that age. And they sure as Hell don’t show him sneaking an extra helping of mashed potatoes or pulling on his sister’s pig-tails. No, they only show him Tim at his most pure, most adorable, most pathetic.

Sad to say the old man cracked.

I know, we are supposed to say that his heart melted, that he found his inner goodness, or some such rotten sentiments. We are supposed to believe that this is a story of redemption, that Scrooge was a better man on account of the story of Tiny Tim. We are supposed to believe that Tiny Tim was the instrument by which Scrooge became a better person.

More than that, we are supposed to be inspired by this story. We are supposed to learn to care. It is supposed to warm our hearts and help all of us to become better people.

Bah Humbug!

A Godless Reason for the Season

26 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in atheism, Religion

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Knowing that I don’t believe in god, people sometimes ask me if I celebrate Christmas.

My answer?

I can celebrate rampant commercialism just as well as any Christian.

…I could also celebrate giving, togetherness, family, kindness and charity, just as well as any Christian, but I am increasingly convinced that this doesn’t have much to do with the holiday in question.