#101 - Dispatch from the War

Dispatch from the War

12/22/06 (#101)

The fighting has been lighter this year, with everyone in the nation except Bill O'Reilly and his elves grateful for the reprieve, but the relative calm belies the chilling truth: The War on Christmas wages on. Anywhere you see a simple star where a complex nativity once stood, know that one more manger has fallen to the enemy. (Unless the owner of the house is simply trying to save electricity, then it's technically not a war casualty, but a guy who dies of a heart attack while his plane is crashing is still considered a victim of a plane crash, right?) Anywhere a bell-ringer stands outside a mall punctuating the metallic din with comments like, "Policy prevents me from talking to you because I might inadvertently make a reference to egg nog, thus offending your holiday traditions and causing the mall to lose the $28 you had planned to spend on that Disney-character cheese-knife set", know that this war is far from over.

This confusing conflict over who is most worthy to drive the final float in the Macy's Parade might seem unworthy of a War, but such an attitude fails to take into account that America has a history of declaring war without concern for whether the war can be won. We declare war because people tend to rally around a war---even when there is no strategy for how we will achieve victory, even when there are no provisos for how to respond if the enemy refuses to adhere to our singular, narrowly focused vision of how events will transpire, and even when we have no clear sense of who we are actually declaring the war against.

I'm not talking about an actual war being fought by our armed forces (though the shoes described above seem to be a disappointingly good fit for recent events), but the metaphorical and ideological wars that allow leaders to name an enemy, then utter trite war-time analogies in hopes of co-opting genuine patriotic spirit for a task that is doomed by a terrible marketing concept.

Ever heard of The War on Poverty? It began in the 1960's, though I'm not really sure who the enemy is in that war---it seems that we declared war on a noun. (Of course, wouldn't it be just like our government to declare a victory in the War on Poverty, a triumph achieved by committing to future use of phrases such as "base economic strata" instead of "poverty level", and people who once suffered from poverty would instead be "unburdened by materialistic trappings.") I haven't researched the tensions that preceded the War on Poverty, but I am compelled to ask: If war is considered a last resort after all diplomatic efforts have failed, what diplomatic solutions were brought to the table when negotiating with Poverty: Sanctions? (I doubt it, because what had we ever given to poverty that we could later take away?) Economic incentives? (Poverty is unlikely to have believed our good intentions if it knew we were simultaneously negotiating AND preparing for war.) We've spent billions of dollars in this War, and all we've managed to do is fund a series of reports that read like vacation postcards from Poverty: "Enjoying myself here in downtown Los Angeles, where Tom Hanks makes $25 million per movie but 'skid row' has grown to be six-blocks square. Wish you were here!" I researched the status of the War on Poverty with two guys who were foraging though my recycling bin on Wednesday night---I can't confirm their credentials as analysts, but they assure me that Poverty is winning.

The 1980's brought us The War on Drugs, which sounds more like the title of a book of war essays by Hunter S. Thompson than it does a public policy measure. I regularly hear news stories about people dying of heroin overdose or losing their lives (literally or figuratively) to meth addiction, yet I never hear about any drugs suffering casualties from that war---I'm sure I'd remember if The Oregonian had run the headline, "Hashish found dead in Southeast Apartment." Sure, we've had some successes in the War on Drugs---pharmaceutical companies have valiantly labored to replace the scourge of dangerous, cheap street drugs (the kind that ruin your life) with a vast arsenal of dangerous, over-priced prescription drugs (the kind that make your life wonderful), and the fact that you have to knock on the bullet-proof glass that surrounds the pharmacy section of you neighborhood drug store and ask to fill out the paperwork that will allow you almost enough Sudafed to declare war on your sniffles shows how we've got crystal meth on the run---but all in all, drugs seem completely unconcerned about the war that we've declared on them. (Frankly, I think it's only the government that declared war on drugs; several of my glassy-eyed friends have obviously negotiated a peaceful detente.)

The significant difference between these wars and the War on Christmas is that in the earlier examples, America is the aggressor, the defender of morality and justice and government appropriations. The War on Christmas is a civil war, pitting neighbor against unwitting neighbor, a resolute defense of the right to put an enormous flood-lit manger scene on your front lawn without the neighborhood infidels (commonly referred to by the political left as "children") stealing the baby Jesus and replacing it with a brown-skinned Cabbage Patch Kid. It's about the right to self-righteously chastise anyone who devalues one of our most sacred traditions by referring to it in print as "X-mas". It's about the right to have someone say "Merry Christmas" to you and your wallet when you arrive at the door of your local electronics behemoth in early November instead of that offensive phrase being perpetrated upon the nation by the Hollywood liberals who hate America enough so much that they are shredding the very fabric from which this great nation was sewn. That phrase?

Happy Holidays.

What seems to have been lost in the debate over this phrase---along with all logical sense of proportion for the various issues that are facing us individually and collectively---is that "Happy Holidays" is not a covert political action being perpetrated by the ruthless KGDF (Kwanzaa Global Domination Front), but is in fact a phrase born from the unlikely marriage of mid-December cheer (when, suspiciously, all of the "holidays" in question occur) and unabashed anti-social laziness. Radio pundits like to talk as if "Happy Holidays" was first uttered by Michael Dukakis in his so-called presidential campaign, but the origins date back decades before, to the first person working the register at Woolworth's department store who mistakenly said "Merry Christmas!" to a Jewish customer and had to endure a dull, droning explanation of the menorah and Passover and why the yamaka doesn't cover the ears. On that day, a more efficient phrase was born, one that was not intended to represent a blurring pluralism that would one day take down Jesus (already weakened by his yearly wrestling match with that fat bastard capitalist Santa Claus), but which was designed to be as inoffensive as possible so that each retail-addled lemming might quickly exit with their bag of future return items and make room for the next surly chump who has spent 90 minutes scouring the aisles of the K-Mart for a useful, tasteful, and beautiful gift that costs less than ten bucks.

I have said "Happy Holidays" for years, and have never considered myself a pawn to the anti-Christmas forces. I said it because I'm really bad at guessing who is Jewish, and I get embarrassed when I constantly have to say, "I'm sorry, Mister Rodriguez" and "My mistake, Mister Murphy." Concerned I might have inadvertently contributed to the salvation of several 6-foot Noble Firs, I recently poured over the statistics on national trends in holiday participation (published annually in "Holidays Monthly" magazine---ironically not a true monthly since they have no August issue) and have noted that Hanukah has not grown in popularity since I began using the phrase. (There was a brief spike in the early 70's that coincided with Woody Allen's early film success, but it faded in 1978 with the release of Interiors.) If Hanukah is making no gains, and Kwanzaa remains a mysterious vagueness worthy of being named in the axis-of-holiday-evil (but not worthy of reading even the brief Wikipedia posting in order to understand what it is), then it seems Christmas is doing just fine.

It amuses me that some blustering egocentric media boob thinks he should to come to Jesus' defense regarding which party the flock attends on his birthday. O'Reilly seems to think that if we can push aside the man who founded America (Christopher Columbus, whose "discovery" of a nation is less celebrated since we collectively realized he "discovered" a fully-populated continent and brutally vanquished its residents) then, apparently, the founder of Christianity is sure to be next. But Jesus has weathered two millennia---including crusades, plagues, inquisitions, even Scientology---with what can only be described as incredible staying power. I think it's going to take more than a cheerful two-word salutation to bring him down.

Happy Holidays!

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