Way, way back before the Reagan administration let the Aussie-Brit smut peddler, tabloid publisher and promoter of crypto-fascism, Rupert Murdoch into the United States, allowing the porn-merchant lying scumbag in to pollute the United States through electronic media ownership - he had to become a U.S. citizen in order to do that for the Republican-fascists - before his neo-pagan Mammonist crew at FOX "news" invented the "war on Christmas" to rekindle and take advantage of the backlash that the boobs of the ACLU had set off in their quixotic quest to rid the town hall lawns across the country of Baby Jesus, I remember a rather quaint effort and protest against American stuff-style Christmas, the "Put The Christ Back In Christmas" campaign.
At least I think it was something of an organized campaign. I remember the little tiny corner store in Somersworth, NH - owned by, I believe, a French Canadian family - had a decal with that slogan and an ever fading image of a white Baby Jesus permanently affixed to the glass door of their place. No doubt it had been put there by the owner before one Christmas and not removed out of some notion of piety, left there to express that imperative to those who went in in flip flops and cut offs to buy stuff for a trip to the beach many an August later.
I remember, back during the secularization craze among we liberals being a bit offended by not only that but any overt expression of religiosity, though I was never an atheist I rather brainlessly absorbed the propaganda that they spread in some kind of notional secular scrupulosity. No doubt my callower, stupider self felt all good and virtuously lefty about it. Now I realize that whole thing was a catastrophic load of uselessly gratuitously counter-productive horse shit. If they put Baby Jesus and the Cecil B. Demille publicity stunt "10 Commandments" on every courthouse lawn to be ignored and overlooked that part of the wildly successful backlash that Murdoch and his mountain of merdre are ever seeking to expand and use to fertilize fascism in the United States would not have been available to them. I learned that lesson, after watching its results for 50 years and more, the highly educated members of the ACLU and the secular-lefty scribbling class have not and would be ready, in the bat of an eyelash, do it all over again no matter how stupidly it plays into the hands of FOX and Friends, Trump, the Graham family of pseuo-Christian grifters, that reported fan of photographed kinky sex, scion of an ordained sleaze, Jerry Falwell jr.
Considering who dominates the governments of the West, today, you tell me who is the stupider party in that pathetic history.*
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The real question about Christmas is why the birth of Jesus is worth celebrating or remembering two thousand years later. And, if you do take Jesus seriously - for real, not in the White evangelical, Mammonist-fascist pose - that reason isn't in the two narratives of his birth, it's in what Jesus said and did when he was in his early 30s, the things that got him killed by Rome.
The only reason that Christianity was adopted by so many in the last centuries of the Roman Empire is that Jesus did, in fact, bring the good news that life has meaning, life has purpose, the purpose of life is sanctity and is open to all, that God is manifested, not only in appearance but in reality in the least among us, that the highest life is to do unto even our enemies as we would have done to us, to sell all we have, give the money to the poor and to follow Jesus in spreading that good news.
I'm not going to shy away from comparing the degeneracy of Western intellectualism, today, of the post-WWII period, the neo-paganism of secular-atheist popular culture to the decadence of pagan, imperialist Rome. One of the things, among others, that David Bentley Hart has pointed out in the nostalgia for classical paganism is that in the generally ignorant view of it, it was believed to have been optimistic and light filled when it was dead gloomy and pessimistic.
I long marveled over the attraction of pop culture to gloom, darkness and frightening clap-trap - the ridiculous mania for zombies as imagined in the B-movie classic Night of the Living Dead as good an example as any. The bizarre goth identity as well - I was rather shocked to find out that there are people who adopt that as their daily style about fifteen years back.
But you can say the same about the once fashionable existentialists whose view of life was dead awful, anyone who really took them seriously would most rationally conclude that their best option was to shoot themselves in the head to end the kind of existence they were presented by such as Sartre and Becket.
And even earlier than that, the atheist-classicist-poet who I've written about before, A. E. Housman and the mania for his poetry giving exactly that advice, to kill yourself while young, or to just die then - advice which the sour old asshole didn't take for himself, is another example of the awfulness that can be contrasted to the Good News that life has meaning, that our lives, the lives our our fellow creatures, nature and, indeed, the universe has purpose.
But with the Good News is also the facing of reality and the obligations we have as participants in existence.
I have been thinking about a line in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," and how before recently, I'd always taken that as an expression of passive acceptance, of the will of God as some kind of acceptance of fate. Now I think that's a misunderstanding. I think it's an active assertion of our responsibility to be a part of that kingdom coming, of the will of God being done and becoming real through our assumption of responsibility to put the beatitudes, the teaching of Matthew 25:31-46, etc. into practice. To move the universe, to bend it in the direction of justice, in the small way which is within our power. To do that despite the fact that it will be of only local and limited effect, in so far as our efforts go, though the more people encouraged to do that, the bigger the effect will be. That we are only responsible for doing it, not for the ultimate universalizing of it, we not being gods, certainly not God.
The Good News is that we are a part of the ongoing Creation, that we have significance, that we are not the puppets of fate, either the old-pagan notion of the playthings of their all-too-human gods nor of the modern paganism of material and genetic determinism - there are no greater pagans than the scientistic materialists, only they're too stupid and ignorant of history to understand that.
That Good News is all worth anticipating and celebrating, though what's even more worth waiting for is continuing with it past the time the faded decal on the door is too familar to notice as you go in to buy your picnic supplies, tripping over your flip-flops that you shouldn't be wearing anyway because they're friggin' dangerous.
* The other day I found a pirated pdf of the English translation of Raymond Aron's great and largely forgotten book, The Opium of the Intellectuals, online. I can't stop reading it. It is rather shocking to me that a lot of the things I'm figuring out for myself , so long after his death, he wrote and more in a book published 65 years ago.
The complete decadence of modernist intellectualism is rather more obvious now that its burning and crashing phase is underway, it devolving back into the conditions that led to fascism and Nazism are recurring, with the heirs of Marxism taking that tiny little baby step into fascism from Marxism. Only the intellecutals are still as addled with the same shit they were spouting back then, incluidng the "democratic socialists" who I had hoped were better than they've turned out to be. I think the only real hope for socialism is in non-nationalistic religious socialism - I'd point to the awful denoument of Zionist socialism as only one example of what happens when you mix nationalism in with it. It's as bad as what happens when you mix Christianity in with nationalism, "socialist" or not.
Note: I just noticed this got posted before I did my last edit, it was supposed to go up tomorrow but there are enough hits on it that I won't take it down. I've got to go to family Thanksgiving, I'll edit it later. Sorry.
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