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The Crucifixion of Christmas
NY Times, Nov.25th 2009 - Appeals Court Upholds SOMA Holiday Music Policy
The South Orange Maplewood School District’s policy prohibiting religious music from holiday performances was upheld Tuesday by a federal appeals court. The case stems from a suit filed in 2004 by Michael Stratechuk, the father of two children in the school system, who objected to the district’s policy that allowed the use of chorale and instrumental religious music only if it served the purposes of the curriculum; it also prohibited the use of such music for holiday celebrations during the holiday season.
What this means, folks, is no Christmas music other than fluff like “Frosty” and “Rudolph”, “Jingle Bells" and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”. No "First Noel", no “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, no “Silent Night”, no “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring . . . . Now that's a properly modern American school system -- Nativity replaced by Sensitivity -- and fear of lawsuits. Last Christmas my grandson's Fort Worth school choir had to sing "I'll be home for winter"!
What in the HELL is happening here? Why are we letting a small minority of philistinian zealots crucify what was for three centuries America’s most spiritual and positively delightful time of the year -- the Christmas Season? No other season came close to evoking such a joyous spirit of brotherhood; of optimism and of giving and receiving. All in all, the season lifted people to an unusually pleasant and robust emotional plateau -- several weeks of marvelous vibrations, all rooted in Christianity and its remarkable values.
I am so dearly thankful I was born when and where I was. My “seasonal” childhood consisted of, among other things, Christmas trees twinkling in and around government buildings and on other public property, including schools; lovely carols of Christ’s birth sung or played everywhere, including schools; school Christmas pageants; a beautifully Christmas-decorated downtown plaza with, of course, a crèche; golden candle-lit luminarios set out on sidewalks and roofs for Joseph and Mary to find their way; a huge beautiful electric star lying on the rocky mountainside above the city. We were an overwhelmingly Christian nation doing what came naturally – following a nearly two millennium-long tradition of celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.
Everyone, including non-believers, got caught up in the friendly fever -- or at least everyone except those types whose capacity to peripherally enjoy someone else’s celebration had been self-strangled -- and were thus incapable of inhaling the infectious joy in the air. For the vast majority, permeating that air was an annual reminder of mankind's possibilities – and of one's own possibilities. This was not just my house; this was El Paso; this was America at Christmas at mid-20th century.
Scrooge Grinchly Hires Lawyers and Joins the ACLU -- or -- When In Rome, Sue the Romans
If you had moved to exotic Quaziland, where they worship Brouhaha, and every year you – a non-believer -- had to endure their annual month-long celebration of "Brouhahamas" honoring his birth, how many more of your fellow non-believers would have to arrive in Quaziland before y'all began feeling the Quazis were being inconsiderate and insensitive; before you began being offended or feeling excluded by the celebration, and began asking your lawyers to have such nonsense removed from the public sphere?
Whoa -- Don’t give me that “separation of church and state” lame-brained rationale for this Christmas crucifixion. The celebration of Christmas was never about the government “establishing” an official church. It was an organic, from-the-ground-up, cultural outburst that had been going centuries before our government existed. Our government didn’t have to lift a finger to promote the occasion.
Other religions were left entirely alone and allowed to flourish – and did. No court during George Washington’s time desired this Christmas crucifixion; no courts in Abe Lincoln’s time called for this crucifixion; no courts in FDR's or Dwight Eisenhower’s era demanded this crucifixion. But that was then, this is now . . .
The Ghost of Christmas Present
So . . . What happened? How did Christmas get pummeled into this modern ghost of its former self? Indulge me in a few background paragraphs.
After Christmas in America had been going along nicely for three centuries – and at about the exact same time as our country was at last living up to all of its marvelous Constitutional ideals, we had a backfire recoil-revolution of sorts. In the late 1960’s “boomer” college radicals were so thunderstruck-dumb by their own superiority – so self-misled into believing they were blessed with an insight, wisdom, and goodness that towered over all previous generations -- that they felt emboldened to seize control of their elite universities and start dictating their own curricula. “Why should adults be telling us what we should learn?” they reasoned. This was hubris writ major-large.
Having been born into peacetime luxury and having never known even the slightest taste of adversity, they were instant utopians. All the blood spilled, all the bitter struggles, all the trials and tribulations that had eventually led to their miraculously blessed American births – all that was as invisible to them as the air. What was left for them to “see” were America’s historical mistakes and shortcomings. Superior souls all, they confidently set about ridding America of her remaining imperfections. They joined hands and sang “All you need is love”!
Soon their prophets came down from the Big Crock Candy Mountain holding a new bible. It was called the Bible of Political Correctness, and it's Commandment #1 was: Thou shalt not speak any truth, nor engage in any activity, that might offend certain preferred minorities!
The PC bible advocated a Janus-faced morality rooted in secularism: One “face” smiled benevolently, and ordained that the “formerly oppressed” were to be absolved of all past and future sins, and henceforth were to be treated -- not with objectivity – but with “sensitivity” and sincerest ass-kissing. “Preferences” was the coin of the new realm.
The other face scowled and ordained that one group – the “oppressors” -- the white males who’d invented everything and cured diseases and written all the great symphonies and plays and stuff, and also founded America – deserved lasting contempt and retribution for previously oppressing the parties of the first part – even though the “whiteys” had confessed their sins and repented and amended their laws accordingly. Forgiveness, that precious quality so deeply enshrined and cherished in Christianity, had no place in this new PC church. Victimhood was to be a permanent status, immune from the passage of time. (“Time ain’t ‘bout to heal my wounds!” -- sang bluesman Legally-Blind Carnie Melon.)
In a nutshell, this new religion preached that citizens were no longer to be treated equally as individuals, as our Constitution mandates, but unequally as members of separate groups – and Christians were definitely not one of the groups qualifying for A-List treatment.
Thus, since the 1970’s PC priests and their converts have been attempting to shove their new-age bible’s double-standardized morality down America’s gasping throat. Not an organic morality springing from the ground up; not a religious morality springing from some prophet of God -- but a court-ordered mechanical "Metropolis" morality -- created and delivered by a relatively small group of self-righteous, guilt-ridden, left-leaning men and women who worship -- devoutly -- at the altar of their own virtue.
They worship their own virtue to the astounding degree that they have even convinced themselves that American History prior to their quite recent arrival is something to be frowned upon, if not ashamed of -- an unfortunate prologue to their glorious ascension.
Christmas Crucifixion as a Weapon
"With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization--the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is "in principle" an endlessly flexible thing.” Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski
Something is deeply, fundamentally wrong here. As a character in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon states: “I cannot say how, but I believe I have been cheated.” This variant, virulent form of leftist zealotry, political correctness, is being spread via our NY Times-led mainstream-media and by our courts, particularly those courts dominated by progressive judges. Their intent is to force American society into being something that, rather than being organic and naturally human, is “engineered” -- engineered by elitists who believe they can, via propaganda and court coercion, override the realities of human nature and design a new human being that is more to their liking.
This failure to grasp the hard-wired realities of human nature -- and to harness rather than squelch those realities -- is exactly the fundamental flaw in Communism that has caused that ideology to inevitably fail; and it is the same reason this new Puritanism -- Political Correctness -- is also destined for the ideological scrap-heap. The question, of course, is how much damage it will do before it is exposed as the disease rather than the cure.
“What in the world has caused more damage than the follies of the compassionate?” F. Nietzsche.
I leave you with this thought: Some of the loveliest threads and patterns in the traditional fabric of American life are being righteously ripped out by these crusading do-gooders, who hope to succeed in rendering the celebration of the birth of Christ less visible, and of no more national concern or consequence, than Valentine’s Day.
These same elitists -- who are now attempting to twist the rudder of America away from the Constitution and onto a course that stresses group rights rather than individual rights -- onto a course that champions identity politics rather than E Pluribus Unum – onto a course whereby minorities are treated as sacred cows and the majority as a piñata to be clubbed until it disgorges its bounty – these same elitists imagine they are being supremely compassionate in crucifying Christmas. They exhibit great anguish at the possibility of offending the non-Christian minority -- while at the same time feeling splendidly virtuous about spitting in the face of the majority.
Devout Mulim Ali Babaloo expresses his disgust and anguish
at seeing a Christmas Tree in City Hall. "I felt I'd been victimized
and intimidated" he told his family.
Should they succeed in removing all traces of Christ from this “holiday”, having thus “bettered” us all, these societal roadside bombers will move on with their compassion, carefully examining all aspects of American life for opportunities to demonstrate their moral superiority -- perhaps devoting their energies to convincing judges that a wink is sexual harassment, or that a stolen kiss is attempted rape; or insuring that a citizen be allowed to smoke a cigar only on the moon, or making sure no athletic team’s mascot is referring to Native Americans, or insuring that any parent spanking their child will be arrested, or insuring that you don't make too much money, or lobbying for illegal immigrants to be granted all the rights and privileges of American citizens, or insuring that the school nurse may legally take your daughter to have an abortion without telling you, or ridding us of that silly requirement to have an ID to vote, or, or, or . . .
And, of course, they will continue to concentrate their hyper-compassionate gunsights on stigmatizing and slandering anyone stupid enough to believe in God – as did Bill Maher at the Oscars.
“But someday, we all have to confront the notion that our silly gods cost the world too greatly.”
And really, what better icon of that "silly" religiosity to destroy – Taliban-like – than the celebration of Christmas?
Well, I say Triple-Bull, Quadruple-Shit! These priests are dangerously wrong, and we must soon disarm these crucifying quacks of their court-ordered hammers and nails, and wrest back the celebration of Christmas – and that celebration’s acknowledgement of Christian morality’s matchless contribution to the historical success of America – from their compassionate hands.
The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever. – Doris Lessing
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