Sunday, December 24, 2006

Christmas Ramble

This was meant to be an obligatory 'I hate it when people say Happy Holidays' entry, but I'm not quite in the mood. This year, I've discovered that I'm not really one way or the other about the war on Christmas. We've lost that war, and there won't be a rematch, so we might as well move on.

If you don't believe me, let me ask you a couple of questions: do you think about people getting upset when the word 'Christmas' is mentioned on TV? (I'm not asking you if you care that they're upset; I'm asking if you think of it). Are you somewhat surprised when you hear Christmas music being played in a shopping mall or store, then turn to your friend and say, "Hey, it's nice they're playing Christmas music"? Do you get a momentary sinking feeling in your gut (the kind of gut-speak that hits you when you think you've lost your wallet) when you hear the word 'God'?

Now, answer those same questions, but insert the words "Ramadan," or "Buddha," or "Kwanzaa," or "Allah," or "Chanuka." Case closed. The war's over. Saying those words in place of "God" and "Christmas" is more mainstream than Christmas nowadays. Words don't count without meaning, which is to say emotion. The very fact that you have to say "I'm glad they're playing Christmas music" is a sign that the culture has changed for good.

Another example in that vein come from that buffoon on Fox News, Alan Combs. He was giving an interview and when his guest opened with, "Merry Christmas to you," Combs replied with something like, "Thank you for that. I'm not offended. No war on Christmas here."

What a loser. He fell right into the trap the Unserious always do: not being able to see his own pathetic irony even whilst choking on it like last year's turkey dinner. Or in Combs' house, probably tofu with a side order of sanctimony.

The war on Christmas was fought from the inside. It is a self-inflicted injury. Indeed, it is strange that those on the Left despise Christianity and want nothing to do with it. Jesus was all about suffering. Apparently he suffered for everyone's sins, including theirs. It is strange that the Unserious don't dig that. Their idea of a good time is mental self-flagellation on a grand scale.

They beat themselves up for pollution, global warming, AIDS, homelessness, cigarette smoking, Big Macs, oil that powers their SUVs, trees in the forest, owls that live in the trees, trees that fall on trucks and kill a family of four. On and on. Baby seals but not baby humans. Baby ducks but not baby houseflies. Turtles, but not termites. Whales in the ocean, but not poor people in Darfur. I suppose anything is worth saving, as long as you care to look at it as a pet and not a pest.

It makes sense that sooner or later, they would confront the main foundation of Western Culture. No, not football. Christianity. Why bother chipping away at issues like the environment, abortion, and Japanese whaling rights? Going after Christianity is an assault on all Western beliefs at once. Tear it down, and you make every other issue stand naked in the shower.

Ronald Reagan once said that if the US did not stand as one nation under God, it would fall apart. Nobody in the audience booed, and it didn’t make the news as a negative piece about religion in politics. Today, if Harper or Bush did that they’d be villified. Hero of the Left JFK was a warmonger, a womanizer, and loved nukes. If he’d drank more, he would have been my kind of guy. He also said the word ‘God’ a lot, and was the first Catholic president. Today, the Left would cream him for all of the above.

Ben Stein has pointed out that the idea of the United States being an athiest country is relatively recent, but is picking up speed at a frightening pace. That can be applied to all Western countries. England, where they ban their national flag in prisons (it has a cross on it) lest it offend a Muslim inmate. Canada, where Stockwell Day was dragged through the mud as a ‘fundamentalist’ because he liked to take Sundays off and go to church. If that’s the case, then 25 years ago every shopowner in Burlington, Ontario was a fundamentalist. When I was growing up, the only store open on a Sunday was a Becker’s where I could get a freezy.

I was talking to an Australian guy once, and I made mention that Canada was a Christian country. Well, you might as well have clubbed a baby seal right in front of him. But let's face reality: every Western culture has had Christianity as its bedrock faith for the past 1500 years at least. The other religions were more or less around, but they had nothing to do with our ancient regal monarchs, or the founding of any constitution. Islam made a go of it at one point, until they got their asses kicked, and it only became trendy to mention Chanukah in December about 40 years ago.

I remember when I was a kid that the Happy Holidays thing hadn't happened yet. Back then, cards said Merry Christmas, then Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, then Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah. Then the guys at Hallmark probably got tired of surfing the PC tide and said, "Hell with it. Write Happy Holidays on it, print a billion, and sell them into the next century."

I still find it funny that all of these cards are still called Christmas cards. More irony to choke on. We all run around wishing everyone a happy whatever-the-hell, but when it comes to slipping pieces of cardboard into the mail, we still say, "Shit, I forgot to buy Christmas cards." When are we going to start calling them Holiday cards? My guess is 2010. Damn, I forgot. They’re Greeting Cards.

But greeting what?

Christmas Ramble (II)

Life is beautiful because it makes me laugh. You can keep your flowers blooming in the sunshine, and you can throw out the pretty poems. It's laughter that makes the world a damned nice place. Problem is, I have a comedian's bent of only laughing about what makes me angry. It's an old comedy rule: if you want to write a funny routine, don't think about what makes you laugh; think about what makes you angry, and then attack.

I knew a comedian once who made a joke about Poles during his routine. After the show, the hotel management asked him what he was thinking, told him that guests had complained, asked him to explain himself, so forth.

He was a British comedian, and he had a great Limey accent. He looked down at his fingernails for a moment, studied them, and shrugged. Then he looked up at the authoritative figures around him and purred, "Sometimes comedy is...cruel."

When I heard that, I hit the floor.

That comedian wasn't wrong. Comedy is cruel. At it's root, comedy is a mean art. Completely sado-masochistic. Anything in it's path, including the comedian himself, is apt to be spliced down the middle with a blowtorch. I say 'himself,' because women aren't inherently funny. Once in a while a Lucielle Ball or a Phyllis Diller comes along, but most of the time all we get is Ellen DeGeneres. A few yucks and then their shows have to break out the lesbian storyline to try and shock the viewers back into their seats. If the comedian isn't a lesbian, then they try the other route: they get her pregnant. Nine months of semi-giggles later, and the show goes in the can.

The last couple of weeks have had plenty of laughs in. There was Ahmandinejad saying for the 100th time that Israel should be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust never happened. There was Jimmy Carter releasing a book that compared Israel with Apartheid South Africa. There was the usual lame response from the politicians, saying that anti-Semitism is bad. There was Kofi Annan, saying that the US has to get in step with the rest of the world and stop causing so much trouble. And there was me, laughing.

Laughing, because as that English guy might have said, "What proper fools we are." A Holocaust-denying madman in the desert wants to blow Israel sky high, while the Left's idiot of an elder statesman says the Israelis are the problem. Meanwhile, the leader of the UN says not one word about Iran wanting to vaporize the Jewish state. Instead, he takes a potshot at US foreign policy. And when it's time for us to speak up, we say the usual mumbo-jumbo. Come on, you know the mantra by now. Two words. Outrage and condemnation.

Please. Like the Unserious or the bigots care if we're outraged. It makes no difference to them, because they know that talk is cheap. And condemnation? That won't even get you a cup of coffee at Denny's.

I'm getting pretty tired of anti-Semitism. I don't need to go into the history books to look for it (though I have), and I don't need to read the papers to find it (though I do). No, I look back at examples from my own life, and it is shocking how deeply imbedded anti-Semitism still is. In fact, it has been so shocking for so long, that I've come to realize that it will never end. It will always be around, this curious little monster that is so invasive, some people don't even realize they have the disease.

I was brought up in a Catholic school, and my parents are what you would call 'conservative.' But guess what? I didn't hear one anti-Jewish slur in my household or in my school. One of the great lies of our day is that Christians blame Jews because Jews were the Christ killers. I don't know anyone alive who has told me that they dislike Jews for that reason.

In grade 11, we had to study other religions. Our teacher put Catholicism on the back burner, and we went over Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism, and every other 'ism.' I can't remember one slight being levelled at any of those creeds. No one poked fun at the Jews, and our teacher never taught us that they were all that different from us.

When I left that class, I mainly thought Jews were different simply because they didn't read the New Testament and because they didn't believe Jesus was a bigshot. Fine by me. I don't think my friends and I ever discussed it outside of class. We were too busy planning the next party or, this being a Catholic school, watching kilts swish to and fro.

My mom dragged me to Church until I was about fourteen years old. Though my memory of those years is foggy, I'm pretty sure that I would remember a priest railing against another group of people. Not one of them did, ever. I heard a lot of boring sermons in my time, most of them revolving around not doing drugs or committing some sin or other. But fiery rhetoric about Christ-killers didn’t make it to the podium.

My first glimpse of Holocaust-denial came from two people in my high school. I didn’t know they too well. They were friends of a friend and we were killing time, waiting for her. I’m pretty sure they weren’t Christian, but they might have been. Anyway, they were a boy and a girl, and the girl had a German mom. Somehow WWII got brought up, and being young we thought we knew everything about it. I mentioned the Holocaust. The girl looked at me with hooded eyes and said something like, “There’s still an argument about whether that even happened.”

The guy nodded. I was dumbstruck. Not by the guy. It was pretty obvious he wanted to get into her pants, so he would have agreed with her if she’d said the earth was flat. But the girl was a young, vivacious, attractive, smart-sounding chick. I knew she was a grade ahead of me in school, and I therefore knew that she’d already taken Mr. Canham’s class on the war. I knew she’d seen the pictures I’d seen, and read the texts I’d read, and heard Mr. Canham’s lectures on the subject. And learned nothing.

In University, I had a Jewish girlfriend. I was visiting her family and they were all downstairs watching the tube while I took a break and perused the old man’s library. I found a book on Hitler and the Holocaust. I sat down and read it (I already considered myself a WWII history buff and still keep up with it today). And you know, the whole time I’m reading it, I’m thinking about my girlfriend. For the first time, the war became emotional for me. I’m thinking about someone putting a bullet in my girlfriend’s head, or lighting her on fire, or making her eat crap in a ghetto.

While I was leafing through the book, she walked in. She’d told me once that she didn’t like to talk about the Holocaust. Her father had lived through it, and it upset her too much. So I closed the book and looked up at her sheepishly. And then I started to cry. Just like that.

You see, when she walked in the room she was early twenties, pretty as hell, smart as a whip, and had the damnedest smile. It was obvious she had come into the room to see me. Not because she had any big news, not because the TV show they’d been watching was a bore, not because of anything. Just to see me. And I looked up at her face and thought of all those people who died at the hands of those murderous sonsofbitches, and for a moment I saw her there, in a ghetto, persecuted. And I started crying.

She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that if someone laid a hand on her head, I would kill him. Kill him. And you know what she did? She laughed. She put the book away and put her hand to my face, and she told me that no one was going to lay a hand on her head, so relax. She played it so matter-of-factly, and she never brought it up again.

Imagine the dignity in that. The courage, to be the one to say, “There-there, everything’s going to be all right,” when victomhood was hers for the taking. Instead, she comforted me. Incredible.

As time went on, I met a lot of sonsofbitches. I met a Greek man some years ago, and he became a good buddy of mine. And, as anti-Semites do, he waited until we were good friends to open up his thoughts. He told me that Hitler had all the right answers about the Jews. He told me that I didn’t understand it now, but I would when I was older. He wasn’t my friend after that.

I once met a Hungarian girl and I asked her if she was Jewish. She looked utterly revolted. Her face changed into a snarl. She told me no, and then asked, “Do I look Jewish?” And she was worried. Worried that I would say yes. If I had, it might have destroyed her twisted self-image for life. Instead, I told her I didn’t know what Jews looked like, changed the subject, and didn’t talk to her again.

Anti-Semitism runs deep. I don’t know where it grows, but it doesn’t grow in the church. Neither does it grow at the movies. I like Charles Krauthammer a lot, but he was way off when The Passion of the Christ came out. Charles said that it would spread anti-Semitism, and was a massive setback for Jews.

Sorry, Charles, but you were overreacting. I’ve met a lot of Europeans, and therefore a lot of anti-Semites (that isn’t to say that Europeans have cornered the market, though they might; they just expose it much more readily). Two hours of cinema are no going to make someone hate Jews. The Christ-killer theory is a load of bull on both sides of the coin. Anti-Semites are not born of it, which means Jews shouldn’t look to it as a reason for anti-Semitism. I firmly believe that all Jew-haters I have met learned their stuff at a very young age, too young to be let into violent movies made by Mel Gibson.

But what does all this have to do with Christmas?

Good question. I guess I’m just looking back at Christmas past, and bemoaning the fact that Christmas is taking a nose-dive in the popular culture as a spiritual event. Not because I am all that spiritual, but because I liked it when other people were. I liked knowing that people were praying, and giving a little thought to what the spirit of Christmas meant. More than that, I liked knowing that they didn’t have to feel any kind of guilt about it. Christians are not all racist, anti-Semite, whackos. They’re just people.

Christianity is painted as some sort of cult nowadays, which is as sad as it is wrong. Evil things have been done in the name of Christianity before, but it is self-evident that more good has been done than evil. Every Christmas movie, message from the Queen, Christmas story, and Christmas carol sends messages of love, forgiveness, joy, and hope. Can an evil, cynical faith inspire such messages? If so, how? Certainly a Spanish Inquisition from hundreds of years ago doesn’t outweigh Mother Theresa and so many others like her. Does it? Should one feel guilty for praying for someone on December 25th?

I sure know that we don’t need to feel any from the Jews. An email arrived from another old Jewish girlfriend of mine, wishing me a Merry Christmas. If she is supposed to be different because she is a Jew, she doesn’t know that. All she knows is that she is happy for me because I am celebrating something. And she acknowledges that by celebrating me as a person she has known and loved.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas to her. And you.

No comments: