"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Thursday, December 22, 2005

I liked it better when I could dismiss Christopher Hitchens as a deluded born-again neocon drunk
Posted by Jill | 12:21 PM

I would have liked to have made it to last night's Laura Flanders-sponsored debate between Hitch and Scott Ritter in Tarrytown, but it was the night for Mr. Brilliant's and my annual Winter Solstice exchange of gifts.

If I've never extolled the virtues of Mr. Brilliant sufficiently, here's the kind of guy he is: He's a guy with a fair amount of musical knowledge, how knows how music is put together, who's a pretty fair electric bass player, who actually UNDERSTANDS what Miles Davis was doing when he recorded Agharta (a work that makes me want to stick icepick in own forehead and repeat unto death) -- and yet got me Green Day's new Live CD/DVD set Bullet in a Bible, even though he knows it's crap and it's ridiculous for a 50-year-old to listen to said crap. (But it's really GREAT crap, Mrs. Pressky...)

That's just the kind of guy he is. Of course, in my equal fabulousness, I don't ask that he listen to it.

So if you want to sustain a relationship over 20+ years, note well. Also, don't have kids.

But enough about me. Let's talk about Christopher Hitchens, who not content to eviscerate Sanctimonious Joe Scarborough on his own show, brings his poison pen to Slate today to continue his War on the War on Christmas:

Not long after I'd swallowed this bitter pill, I was invited onto Scarborough Country on MSNBC to debate the proposition that reindeer were an ancient symbol of Christianity and thus deserving of First Amendment protection, if not indeed of mandatory display at every mall in the land. I am told that nobody watches that show anymore—certainly I heard from almost nobody who had seen it—so I must tell you that the view taken by the host was that coniferous trees were also a symbol of Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers had endorsed this proposition. From his cue cards, he even quoted a few vaguely deistic sentences from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, neither of them remotely Christian in tone. When I pointed out the latter, and added that Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest were symbols of the winter solstice "holidays" before any birth had been registered in the greater Bethlehem area, I was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough's increasingly desperate staff. And when I added that it wasn't very Tiny Tim-like to invite a seasonal guest and then tell him to shut up, I was told that I was henceforth stricken from the Scarborough Rolodex. The ultimate threat: no room at the Bigmouth Inn.

This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy.

[snip]

And yet none of this party-line unanimity is enough for the party's true hard-liners. The slogans must be exactly right. No "Happy Holidays" or even "Cool Yule" or a cheery Dickensian "Compliments of the season." No, all banners and chants must be specifically designated in honor of the birth of the Dear Leader and the authority of the Great Leader.

By chance, the New York Times on Dec. 19 ran a story about the difficulties encountered by Christian missionaries working among North Korean defectors, including a certain Mr. Park. One missionary was quoted as saying ruefully that "he knew he had not won over Mr. Park. He knew that Christianity reminded Mr. Park, as well as other defectors, of 'North Korean ideology.' " An interesting admission, if a bit of a stretch. Let's just say that the birth of the Dear Leader is indeed celebrated as a miraculous one—accompanied, among other things, by heavenly portents and by birds singing in Korean—and that compulsory worship and compulsory adoration can indeed become a touch wearying to the spirit.

Our Christian enthusiasts are evidently too stupid, as well as too insecure, to appreciate this. A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.


Since once again I didn't get around to sending cards in time, I want to wish all my friends, and yes, all my foes, a very Merry War on Christmas. Just in case, in my menopausal brain fog, I forget to do so before Saturday.
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