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

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Politics, Religion

Tags

atheism, Christianity, Christmas, Media, Pundits, Right Wing Politics, Santa Clause, Secularism, War on Christmas

Got this here: http://savannahchristian.com/blog/christmas-with-a-capital-c

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!

…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.

I 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

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.

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 danielwalldammit in Politics, Religion

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

Aisha Harris, Christmas, Fox News, Irony, Megyn Kelly, Reza Aslan, Santa Clause, Satire, Slate Magazine

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.