More War on Christmas

 

I wrote this last year, and I decided to post it again.

Conservatives often complain this time of year about a war on Christmas by the leftists – generally attributing it to leftist disdain for Christianity. Many leftists do have a problem with the Christmas season. It has become a point of political correctness not to say Merry Christmas. There are scolding warnings in various media that references to Christmas should be avoided to avoid offending or “marginalizing” people who do not celebrate the holiday. Ads for retail companies talk only about holiday shopping and holiday gifts, not Christmas shopping and gifts, as though the corporate weasels running those companies expect to make their numbers and get their bonuses based on purchases of Kwanzaa gifts or New Year’s presents. The conservatives have a point, but I think their explanation misses something important.

There surely are leftists who are hostile to Christianity, and that likely explains some of the so-called war on Christmas, but not all or, to me, even most. Leftists usually say or do nothing about Easter, and Easter is a far more nearly completely religious holiday than Christmas. Christmas in our time is as much a secular holiday as a religious one, and many non-Christians enjoy Christmas and the Christmas season. Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, decorating trees, decking halls, giving presents, Christmas dinners, and a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. I think that for many leftists, the real difficulty is not with the Christmas but with the merry. A season of ordinary, unsupervised people enjoying themselves and their lives, vigorously displaying good will to the people they meet, giving and receiving presents, and generally feeling benevolent and happy, on their own without external direction goes against many of the left’s fundamental notions of how the world is and should be. It is no wonder many lefties do not care for it and feel uncomfortable with it or even threatened by it.

They might feel worse if they knew how little effect their feelings and opinions have had. Except among cowardly corporations which can be bullied into just about anything and the generally left leaning traditional media, their efforts seem to me to have been mainly a failure. In their private lives people behave as they like and enjoy Christmas. That’s good. They should keep it up.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.

Troubled by Christmas

 

Conservatives often complain this time of year about a war on Christmas by the leftists – generally attributing it to leftist disdain for Christianity. Many leftists do have a problem with the Christmas season. It has become a point of political correctness not to say Merry Christmas. There are scolding warnings in various media that references to Christmas should be avoided to avoid offending or “marginalizing” people who do not celebrate the holiday. Ads for retail companies talk only about holiday shopping and holiday gifts, not Christmas shopping and gifts, as though the corporate weasels running those companies expect to make their numbers and get their bonuses based on purchases of Kwanzaa gifts or New Year’s presents. The conservatives have a point, but I think their explanation misses something important.

There surely are leftists who are hostile to Christianity, and that likely explains some of the so-called war on Christmas, but not all or, to me, even most. Leftists usually say or do nothing about Easter, and Easter is a far more nearly completely religious holiday than Christmas. Christmas in our time is as much a secular holiday as a religious one, and many non-Christians enjoy Christmas and the Christmas season. Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, decorating trees, decking halls, giving presents, Christmas dinners, and a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. I think that for many leftists, the real difficulty is not with the Christmas but with the merry. A season of ordinary, unsupervised people enjoying themselves and their lives, vigorously displaying good will to the people they meet, giving and receiving presents, and generally feeling benevolent and happy, on their own without external direction goes against many of the left’s fundamental notions of how the world is and should be. It is no wonder many lefties do not care for it and feel uncomfortable with it or even threatened by it.

They might feel worse if they knew how little effect their feelings and opinions have had. Except among cowardly corporations which can be bullied into just about anything and the generally left leaning traditional media, their efforts seem to me to have been mainly a failure. In their private lives people behave as they like and enjoy Christmas. That’s good. They should keep it up.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.

Not a War on Christmas, But

 

Many conservatives claim that American leftists are waging a war on Christmas. That is an exaggeration, but it is true that many on the left have some discomfort with the holiday. They have added “merry Christmas” to their long list of forbidden phrases and generally successfully pressured corporations into not mentioning Christmas in their ads urging people to buy their products as Christmas presents. Most replace it with “the holidays”, but some go farther. General Motors is running an ad telling people to buy a truck for the holiday, singular - a holiday which, one presumes, dares not speak its name.

The usual explanation from leftists that this is done out of some sort of sensitivity or concern for inclusion since there are other holidays people celebrate at about the same time of the year is nonsense. (To see how nonsensical, one can note that to be consistent leftists would have to stop mentioning Martin Luther King Day and speak only of the January holidays out of sensitivity toward and inclusion of the people who celebrate Elvis’s birthday or Confederate Heroes Day at the same time of the year.) Mentioning one holiday neither disparages any other left unmentioned nor implies that everyone does or should celebrate it.

Conservatives blame leftists’ hostility to Christianity, and while it surely is true that many leftists are not fond of Christianity, I think the conservatives mainly are wrong. Christmas is at least as much a secular as a religious holiday. Millions of non-Christians around the world celebrate it. Santa, Frosty, Rudolph, presents, decorated trees, open houses, office parties, and proclaiming a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. Easter, which is a far more nearly entirely religious holiday than Christmas, does not seem to bother the leftists much at all. My conjecture is that the leftists’ discomfort is more emotional than theological and has mainly to do with the merry part. The notion of unsupervised Americans feeling happy with life and themselves, jollily benevolent toward the people around them, and generally full of good cheer, generosity, and warmheartedness goes enough against their world view to feel wrong and even threatening to them irrespective of any opinions about Christianity.

Regardless of why the leftists do it, the phoniness of the corporate weasels who go along with it is laughable and contemptible. They count on Christmas. They want to make their numbers from people buying Christmas presents and know Christmas is what matters for them. They probably know that just about everyone else who thinks about it also knows it. Yet they cave in and pretend otherwise. It’s a minor thing compared to some of the other phoniness and hypocrisy around us, but it is bad enough to be annoying and indicative.

No Longer Caring?

 

Arthur Koestler wrote that after the nonaggression pact, he no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called him a counterrevolutionary.   We may be  getting to a point where many people in this country decide they no longer care whether the allies of America hating looters and arsonists call them racists. It would be a good thing,  That trick and threat of the left has provided cover for a lot of wrong thinking, false claims, and bad actions.

We have scoundrels preaching that individualism, rationality and objectivity, a belief in hard work, self reliance, planning for the future, civility, and respect for the property of others are “white male” traits, inappropriate for and deleterious to non- whites and getting their actual racist nonsense accepted in surprising places including the Smithsonian. We have “educators” indoctrinating  white children to feel guilty because of their race. We have attacks on people such as Thomas Jefferson, when in fact Jefferson is honored for his achievements and his ideas and principles, not for his failures to live up to them.  We have demands for reparations to black people for slavery  which have  no more sense or justification than would an ultimatum  from today’s Englishmen to Italians for a payoff for Caesar’s conquest. We have assertions of white privilege and systematic anti-black racism when the main systems  in government,  education,  and corporations  are explicitly structured  for black privilege through affirmative action quotas, lower admission standards, contract set asides, and so on.

Most important we have a pervasive attempt to make white Americans accept undeserved guilt.  The leftists want to make people feel guilty to make them easier to rule. That is the game, and people need to refuse to play it.  No one alive today had anything to do with slavery. No one under the age of seventy eight could have voted for the politicians who supported and protected Jim Crow laws before they were abolished in 1964. There are anti-black (and anti-Asian, anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-Hispanic, and other) bigots and racists in the country. Most white people are not among them. There should be  no reason for any innocent person to accept a clearly false accusation, feel a need to refute it, or even become uneasy because of it. Instead people should stop caring what present day despicable and dishonest enemies of a liberal society say about them and either ignore it or tell them to go to hell  - or a polite equivalent of course.

They Don't Leave

In the 1930s, and particularly after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, many people saw a threat and danger of persecution and worse from the Nazis and left Germany and other countries in central Europe for the United States or Great Britain. The emigres included famous people such as Albert Einstein as well as thousands of ordinary people who had decided it was time to get out.   From 1918 on many people saw what was happening in Russia and left the Soviet Union for other countries. Those emigres included famous people such as Sergei Rachmaninoff  as well as thousands of ordinary people who had decided to get out. After the Soviets occupied much of central Europe after World War II, thousands of people fled  the Soviet empire, even though the Soviets put up an iron curtain of walls, fences, and guard stations to keep people in and murdered thousands who tried to escape.  In the last seventy five years vast numbers of refugees have fled communist takeovers and governments in Asia and Latin America, and vast numbers of others have died trying.

The leftists of the Black Lives Matter organization claim that they live lives of oppression in a hated systemically and pervasively racist America whose white citizens believe their lives do not matter. America hating hard leftists of various sorts in this country attack  its government and society as morally  evil and operationally inferior and extol the superiority Marxist states. 

There are no barriers to a person leaving the United States. The exit door is open, and a person can walk through it any time he likes. There are dozens of countries in Africa and the Caribbean with governments completely controlled by black people where one can assume there would be no possibility of systemic anti-black racism or oppression of black people because of race. There are a few places left where the Marxist principles of the hard American left are put into practice – Cuba, North Korea, China partially. The opportunity is there.  Yet the leftists don’t leave.  It is a cosmopolitan world, and many Americans choose to live in foreign countries for various reasons, but one never hears of refugees from the United States. ( Given the prejudices of most of the people in the traditional media, one can assume such refugees would be treated as big news if there were even a good sized  handful of them.)

It is interesting and useful to think about why this is so and what it might tell us about our leftists.

Decency?

Young children are easily frightened.  They tend to believe what they are told. (Years ago my daughter spent a few days at her Montessori pre-school in stressful worry because one of the neighborhood brats had told her that her parents would drop her off at the school one day and never come back to get her. It was all we could do to get her to tell us what was bothering her.) Unnecessarily frightening a kid intentionally is repulsively wrong.  Doing so  and then exploiting that fear for some sort  of gain or advantage  is worse.  

That is what leftist politicians, school teachers, and media people are doing to children to promote and get publicity for their schemes to deal with “climate change”.  Whatever one thinks about  much the climate is warming and how much human activity is responsible for it, the world is not about to end. No Armageddon is upon us. We will not all be dead in one, ten, twelve or, according to some green prophecies, minus several   years.  Yet the lefties are scaring ignorant kids to death with apocalyptic nonsense and then using them as props for political theatre.

It is time to remember a question from history and ask  them “at long last, have you left no sense of decency?”.  On the evidence the answer would be no. They should be ashamed, and they certainly should be called out. Politics is a nasty game, and we should not expect its players to behave honestly or  honorably, but it is not too much to demand that they pick on people their own size and  leave the poor kids alone.

By Any Other Name

Turgidson: “Strangelove? What kind of name is that. That ain’t no Kraut name is it, Stainsey?”

Staines: “He changed it when he became a citizen. It used to be Murkwurdigliebe.”

Turgidson: “Well a Kraut by any other name”

-          Dr Strangelove, 1964

Speaking in Miami yesterday, New York mayor, Democratic Party presidential candidate, and hard leftist  de Blasio used  a well-known catch phrase of communist mass murder Che Guevara in his speech. One can wonder if now the mayor, whose real surname after all is Wilhelm, will go back to New York and offer his constituents there some of the inspirational sayings of that other famous 20th Century paladin of strong, vigorous, progressive,  activist,  central government  Reinhard Heydrich. That would be appropriate for the guy in more than one way and even more amusing that the bit in Miami.

He has since backtracked, “apologized”, and said that poor uninformed  fellow that he is, he had no idea that it was Guevara’s slogan, an odd claim from a someone who spent time in Central America   and was well connected with the Sandistas. Well, as the man said, a gaffe is what occurs when a politician slips up and says what he really wants or believes.

A Big Parade

Conservatives are wrong to be focusing on Ocasio-Cortez. She is not what is worrisome.  To paraphrase an old columnist, she is only the majorette twirling a baton as she struts  in front of the marching band while the parade was planned and the music selected by someone else.  The thing to worry about is that  some people who make the decisions for the American left and  the traditional media now want this particular parade.

It does not matter that the Democrats’ next nominee for president probably will not campaign on killing all beef cattle and dairy cows in the country, banning air travel, and partially or completely demolishing all buildings in the country (though several supposed serious candidates of theirs have endorsed a plan demanding these thing among others).  Neither does it matter that a Soviet-style direct expropriation of people’s property via a so-called wealth tax is not likely  either.  What does matter is that many of the American leftists who count now feel safe to drop pretense and  demand that level of power openly. 

They’ve wanted it all along, but with a few infrequent  exceptions such as the McGovern campaign most of them kept it mainly to themselves because they knew Americans would not go for it.  For many of them that fear is now gone, and that is something for the rest of us to take seriously and deal with instead of fretting distractedly over the twirlers.

A Holiday Thought Experiment

Tomorrow is a legal holiday in the United States with banks, stock exchanges, most offices of governments, and many schools closed. Everyone paying attention knows the holiday is in honor of Martin Luther King, and that is the legal designation of the holiday. However let us imagine that some people decide not to recognize that, preferring to speak   only of the “mid-January holidays” and making a point of it. Suppose further that most people in the traditional media and   timorous corporate executives go along with them and make that  term  their standard.

The stated reasons for the change would be concerns for sensitivity and inclusion.   Those pushing it would point out that there are other holidays in January  that some people celebrate such as Confederate Heroes Day and Elvis’s birthday. They would say they are worried that  people who do not celebrate MLK Day  might be made to feel “marginalized” by others mentioning of it. They would either indignantly reject claims they were antagonistic to MLK Day or laugh them  off as paranoid fretting by their political opponents.

Most people would not buy it. Instead they would assume that what they were seeing was prejudiced hostility, willful and hypocritical ignorance, or both. And they would be right to do so.

Now consider how people, mainly on the left, treat the legal holiday of Christmas  and the customs,  events, and shopping tied to it and ask whether similar conclusions are appropriate. I believe they are, and that  the leftists and their spokespeople in the traditional media have a problem with Christmas.  I do not agree with conservatives that it is based on hostility to Christianity, though that may be motivation for some people. Easter gets left  pretty much alone, and it is a far more Christian holiday than Christmas.  As I have written earlier, I think it is the merry rather than the Christmas that so many leftists cannot stand. Happy, self-sufficient people who are feeling benevolent and having a good time on their own with no supervision from authorities are not the sort of potential subjects would be masters want or need.

A Helpful Suggestion

Thanksgiving traditionally is a time for Americans of all beliefs to display gratitude and appreciation  for this wonderful country and its bounty.  For many religious people it is an occasion for expressing prayerful thanks for what they see as the divine blessings which have been bestowed on this nation.  It has not been associated with politics. Yet some Democrats  suggested that this Thanksgiving people should be offering thanks to Barack Obama – not merely  for him, but to him.  The idea of families gathering around the table for their feast, solemnly bowing heads, clasping hands, and offering a blessing  to a politician may seem a little excessive to some, but one  should remember the special place Obama holds in so many hearts.

The man has done so many wrong and harmful things that those who opposed him may feel gleeful he will soon be gone and might even experience some schadenfreude over the mournful distress of his worshipful followers as the end of his administration nears.   However others believe they  should rise above that, be sensitive to the leftists’ feelings, and try to be helpful.  In that line one can try to think of a way for  Obama’s enthusiasts to  give him a boffo final  tribute in keeping with their feelings for him.    

It is well known that the Romans were among the very best at honoring their rulers spectacularly.   So Obama’s acolytes might consider  borrowing  a mixture of  the Romans’  customs and throwing him a triumph.  One can picture Obama  leading  the procession from the White House to the Capitol mounted on a Segway and escorted by  members of traditional media organizations  acting as his praetorian guard.  They would be followed in train by diplomats from Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and China bearings gifts, carts with  Lena Dunham, Beyonce,  and Amy Schumer as vestal virgins and  Al Gore as Pontifex Maximus, and hundreds of   young children and their teachers marching it step and reciting panegyrics in his honor. On the steps of the capitol Nancy Pelosi would present him a garland,  and Harry Reid, in the name of  part of the senate,  would solemnly proclaim him a god.

Obama probably would love it. It would make fine TV, and it could help give his followers some closure, as they say. 

Seeing Obama Clearly

A devout Baptist expired in his sleep one night and awakened happily to find himself in heaven. While looking around and taking in his surroundings, he noticed an old, white bearded fellow outfitted in cowboy boots and a ten gallon hat strutting around, barking out orders, and generally behaving in an overbearing manner.

“Who’s that?” he asked the person next to him.

“Oh,” the person replied,  “that’s God. He thinks he’s Lyndon Johnson.”

old joke circa mid-1960’s

Change the costume a bit, and you would have a perfectly good Obama joke, fitting his  personality and ideology as well as the old one did Johnson’s. In many ways there really is not that much new or different about Obama. Regardless of the fear mongering of conservative pundits and the fantasies of his press agents in the traditional media, Obama is not a historic man of destiny, reshaping the nation  to his will. He is not Napoleon (he just has the complex). He’s not even Mussolini, despite the remarkably similar jutting of the chin. He is just a typical American leftist doing what leftists do when they get the chance, as a quick look at history can help to illustrate.

Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged the depression and left the nation’s economy in many ways more hamstrung and regulated and its bureaucracy more powerful than today. The country was definitively far more union-ridden, and Roosevelt’s attacks on business, success,  and wealth make Obama’s seem mild.  Certainly none of Obama’s questionable or even illegal executive orders comes close to Roosevelt’s sending a whole class of innocent, loyal Americans to concentration camps by executive decree.

 Johnson’s left wing agenda and authoritarian vision were at least as grandiose as Obama’s, and he was far better at getting his plans enacted into law. He was fully as arrogant and power mad as Obama, and his corruption and abuses of power were perhaps greater. (As an aside he was probably also slightly more vulgar.)

 Though Carter’s ideology and failures are obvious and well known, people sometimes forget that the celebrated moderation of the later years of Clinton’s administration was a result of and a pragmatic reaction to political defeat. In the first couple of years when he was proposing the things he actually wanted, Clinton was about as far to the left as Obama has been. Hillarycare, his  most important proposal,  was more socialistic and authoritarian than Obamacare – Obamacare for example having, as far as we know, no provisions for criminal penalties for people selecting their own doctors.

While we can accept that some of Obama’s notions, hatreds, and desires may be unusual, his actions and behavior are mainly typical of the American left when it gets power. He is doing what leftists usually do. He is harming those leftists usually harm. He is favoring those leftists usually favor. During his first two years in office, he had the votes in congress to run roughshod at least some of the time. He no longer does. Obamacare is a mess that will have to be fixed or repealed some day. It is not permanent or politically untouchable.  His opponents need to keep their heads. He is a crafty, dedicated enemy of liberty and limited government who should not be taken lightly. He is not Attila, the booger man, or the destroyer of the republic. Those conservatives who paint him as such overate him as much as he and  his sycophants do and play into his hand. What is needed is a clear headed recognition  that he is  another dangerous  opponent, one to be taken seriously and opposed seriously, but not one to be panicked or awed by. A little less gloom and a few more good, offensive jokes might be a good place to start.

Something for Leftists to Worry About

It is fairly commonplace to note that we are in some ways living in a reprise of the 1970’s, complete with a bad economy, expanding state power, a fearful population, worries about national decline, a bull market in gold, money being made selling water purifiers, freeze dried food, garden seed and survivalist manuals, and, of course, our own Nixon and  Carter in Bush and Obama.  As in the 70’s leftist or left leaning political notions and policies have been ascendant .   This is obvious with Obama, but also  true of  Bush. Much like Nixon, he increased  the government’s reach and power and expanded spending and deficits at rates that would have earned him a place in the leftists’ pantheon if he had been a Democrat.  Though this is  good news for the left in the short run, I believe that, again as in the 1970’s, it is leading to real and serious danger for the leftists.

The basic enterprise of  the American left is to take money and resources from people who earn and produce them and give them to  its constituents. That is not the only goal. Other things - such as weakening national defense, opposing traditional mores and social norms, exercising more control over people’s daily activities, and assorted “green” proposals -  matter too. However, since the end of the Cold War, nothing has mattered as much as the imperative to take and distribute money.

The ability  to keep taking that money rests on the acquiescence of the people who earned it. The great danger for the left is that the suckers will someday wise up en masse, realize that they are being taken, and decide to do something about it. This danger is compounded by the fact that the conflict between wealth producers and tax consumers is fundamentally different from the disputes between labor and management in the first part of  the 20^th Century.  Then, bitterly as they might go at it, each side objectively needed the other, and sensible people on both sides knew it.  That is not the case with the present division in the country. The taxpayers could do quite well without the tax consumers. The tax consumers are  totally parasitically dependent upon the taxpayers.  Productive self-supporting people would fair better  if the most of the  regulators, bureaucrats, officials, welfare recipients, and corporate welfare recipients were left to do something else with their time and without the taxpayers’ money. Stated bluntly, they do not need most of  those people and would be no worse off without them. It is very much in the interest of those on  the left that that blunt fact never be noted by enough people at once  to upset things. 

That came at least somewhat close to happening at the end of the 1970’s. The marks were thoroughly fed up and catching on to the game  in significant numbers. Things settled down after the election of 1980, and we saw almost a quarter century with very little in the way of unrest from those of us footing the bill.  Now, though, that seems to have changed.  The left has once again gone too far and failed too much. The natives are restless. The rubes are wising up again. The left may again be able to hunker down, compromise and temporize a bit, and wait out the storm. However leftists should not be certain of that. The suckers could stay awake longer this time. If so, there may be real change.