If you don’t see Merry Christmas in the window, no, you don’t go in that store! The Star of David used to do that trick.

This season’s War-On-Christmas email is pushing a holiday ditty whose refrain goes “If you don’t see Merry Christmas in the window, then you don’t go in that store.” Seems like it might be easier to mark those stores with a Star of David on the window, or would that be too obviously Nazi?
On the other hand, it is refreshing to see even Dumbfox recognize the imperative of targeting commerce to make your point heard. So, boycotts do work?

You can see the Christmas-lovers’ point of course. They’d prefer that merchants exploiting the Christmas purchasing season at least be paying lip service to Christmas and not the ever-looming Godless “Holiday” eclipse, supposed.

This song reminds us “it’s all about the little baby Jesus” and goes on to list all the things Christmas wouldn’t be without him. Of course, half the list traces back to pagan tradition, but what to Christian Holiday-goers know of that?

And the latter half goes back as far as they remember, as their grandmother and her grandmother before might remember, but no more. The commercial Christmas charts its provenance to the industrial revolution, the birth of consumer goods and marketing. Santa Claus as we recognize him stepped right off Coca-cola calendars of the last mid-century.

Christmas was the religious Trojan Horse to pitch the shopping holiday to reluctant hedonists. Now the same parishioners who don’t have an needle’s-eye chance to get to Heaven, feel like the can pay their tithes in Christmas presents.

Yes, I do think it’s funny that people who abhor the prospect of disruptive economic boycotts are willing to consider it at the drop of Santa’s cap. Unless of course they’re satisfied that making this video viral is a shot across the bow enough. I doubt their Christmas Spirit has any room for Lenten restraint.

Oddly enough, one of their potential boycott targets, and mine, has hung banners in its outlets to announce they will be open for Christmas, introducing a delectable dilemma. Starbucks says Merry Christmas in the window, so it’s exempt from this singing email picket, yet it disrespects Christmas by working through it. What do you do?

I answer that one unequivocally. Yes, boycott Starbucks. They fund Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. That may be somewhat directly related to their celebrating Hanukkah not Christmas, but that’s NO KIND OF REASON to boycott a business. If you want to boycott a store because it’s not Christian, take it up with the Anti-Defamation League. Leave bigotry to the Zionists.

A 1930 Spirit of Christmas Past

Black Agenda Report revisited this Christmas poem by Langston Hughes:

“Merry Christmas”: Published in New Masses (Dec. 1930), p. 4.

Merry Christmas, China,
From the gun-boats in the river,
Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,
And peace on earth forever.

Merry Christmas, India,
To Gandhi in his cell,
From righteous Christian England,
Ring out, bright Christmas bell!

Ring Merry Christmas, Africa,
From Cairo to the Cape!
Ring Hallehuiah! Praise the Lord!
(For murder and for rape.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Haiti!
(And drown the voodoo drums—
We’ll rob you to the Christian hymns
Until the next Christ comes

Ring Merry Christmas, Cuba!
(While Yankee domination
Keeps a nice fat president
In a little half-starved nation.)

And to you down-and-outers,
(“Due to economic laws”)
Oh, eat, drink, and be merry
With a bread-line Santa Claus—

While all the world hails Christmas,
While all the church bells sway!
While, better still, the Christian guns
Proclaim this joyous day!

While holy steel that makes us strong
Spits forth a mighty Yuletide song:
SHOOT Merry Christmas everywhere!
Let Merry Christmas GAS the air!

Rock Creek Free Press available in COS

The Rock Creek Free Press is available online, but if you want it in print, the DC monthly is available in Colorado Springs at the Bookman, 3163 W. Colorado. The September issue features a speech given by legendary Australian journalist John Pilger on July 4th in San Francisco.

Here’s the RCFP transcript:

Two years ago I spoke at “Socialism in Chicago” about an invisible government which is a term used by Edward Bernays, one the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays, who in the 1920s invented public relations as a euphemism for propaganda. And it was Bernays, deploying the ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud, who campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation calling cigarettes “tortures of freedom”. At the same time he was involved in the disinformation which was critical in overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala. So you have the association of cigarettes and regime change. The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together all media: PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising and their power of branding and image making. In other words, disinformation.

And I suppose I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement, the rise of Barrack Obama and the silencing of much of the left. But all of this has a history, of course and I’d like to go back, take you back some forty years to a sultry and, for me, very memorable day in Viet Nam.

I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village in the Central Highlands called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a unit of US Marines who had been sent to the village to win hearts and minds. “My orders,” said the Marine Sergeant, “are to sell the American way of liberty, as stated in the Pacification Handbook, this is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Now, page 86 was headed in capital letters: WHAM (winning hearts and minds). The Marine Unit was a combined action company which explained the Sergeant, meant, “We attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays.” He was joking, of course, but not quite.

The Sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up on a Jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody we’ve got rice and candies and toothbrushes to give you.” This was greeted by silence. “Now listen, either you gooks come on out or we’re going to come right in there and get you!” Now the people of Tuylon finally came out and they stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey Bars, party balloons, and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery operated, yellow, flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.

And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow, flush lavatories unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and took out a handwritten speech,

“Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” said the colonel, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts, they carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen there’s no place on Earth like America, it’s the land where miracles happen, it’s a guiding light for me and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky as having the greatest democracy the world has ever known and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.”

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrope sitting upon a hill got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Bangled Banner playing softly in the background. Of course the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about, but when the Marines clapped, they clapped. And when the colonel waved, the children waved. And when he departed the colonel shook the Sergeant’s hand and said: “We’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here, carry on Sergeant.” “Yes Sir.” In Viet Nam I witnessed many scenes like that.

I’d grown up in faraway Australia on a cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan. The American way of liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook. I’d learned that the United States had won World War II on its own and now led the free world as the chosen society. It was only later when I read Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion, a manual of the invisible government, that I began to understand the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad histories on a grand scale.

Now, historians call this exceptionalism, the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls “liberty” to the rest of humanity. Of course this is a very old refrain. The French and British created and celebrated their own civilizing missions while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties. However, the power of the American message was, and remains, different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an Age of Innocence. American motives were always well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said, “There was no ideology” and that’s still the case.

Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main feature is its denial that it is an ideology. It’s both conservative and it’s liberal. And it’s right and it’s left. And Barack Obama is its embodiment. Since Obama was elected leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as, “a nation of moral ideals”. Those are the words of Paul Krugman, the liberal columnist of The New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Mark Morford wrote,

“Spiritually advanced people regard the new president as a light worker who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs. Or a Pakistani child whose house has been visited by one of Obama’s drones. Or a Palestinian child surveying the carnage in Gaza caused by American “smart” weapons, which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter, and I quote; “Only after the Obama team let if be known, it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.

In a sense, Obama is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never “change”, it was power. “The United States,” he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement, “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world; that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders.” Words like these remind me of the colonel in the village in Viet Nam, as he spun much the same nonsense.

Since 1945, by deed and by example, to use Obama’s words, America has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements and bombed countless men, women, and children to death. I’m grateful to Bill Blum for his cataloging of that. And yet, here is the 45th (sic) president of the United States having stacked his government with war mongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, promising, not only more of the same, but a whole new war in Pakistan. Justified by the murderous clichés of Hilary Clinton, clichés like, “high value targets”. Within three days of his inauguration, Obama was ordering the death of people in faraway countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. And yet, the peace movement, it seems, is prepared to look the other way and believe that the cool Obama will restore, as Krugman wrote, “the nation of moral ideals.”

Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest. When messages about their nation’s great mission were lit up; these included tributes to the; “…exceptional Americans who saved a million lives…” in Viet Nam; where they were, “…determined to stop Communist expansion.” In Iraq other brave Americans, “employed air-strikes of unprecedented precision.” What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times, but the shear scale of omission.

Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have very much in common. The wars of both presidents and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America. A myth the late Harold Pinter described as, “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist; partly because it is indeed extraordinary to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century and race together with gender, and even class, can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe above all, is the class one serves. George Bush’s inner circle from the State Department to the Supreme Court was perhaps the most multi-racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary. Obama’s very presence in the White House appears to reaffirm the moral nation. He’s a marketing dream. But like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he’s a brand that promises something special, something exciting, almost risqué. As if he might be radical. As if he might enact change. He makes people feel good; he’s a post-modern man with no political baggage. And all that’s fake.

In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia in 1983; he describes his employer as, “…a consulting house to multi-national corporations.” For some reason he doesn’t say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation; which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action and infiltrating unions from the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia. Obama doesn’t say what he did at Business International and they may be absolutely nothing sinister. But it seems worthy of inquiry, and debate, as a clue to, perhaps, who the man is.

During his brief period in the senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority, but instead he has excused torture, reinstated military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact, and opposed habeas corpus.

Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblower, was right, I believe, when he said, that under Bush a military coup had taken place in the United States giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates – a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s powerful Secretary of Defense. And by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.

In the middle of a recession, with millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes, Obama has increased the military budget. In Colombia he is planning to spend 46 million dollars on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in that region.

In a pseudo-event in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience, mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China. In another pseudo-event, at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that America had gone to Iraq to bring freedom to that country. He announced that the troops were coming home. This was another deception. The head of the army, General George Casey says, with some authority, that America will be in Iraq for up to a decade. Other generals say fifteen years.

Chris Hedges, the very fine author of Empire of Illusion, puts it very well; “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and brand Obama gets you to believe another.” This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they make you feel. And so you are kept in a perpetual state of childishness. He calls this “junk politics”.

But I think the real tragedy is that Obama, the brand, appears to have crippled or absorbed much of the anti-war movement – the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress; 30, just 30, are willing to stand up against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June the 16th they voted for 106 billion dollars for more war.

The “Out of Iraq” caucus is out of action. Its member can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March the 21st, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The out-going president of UFPJ, Lesley Kagen, says her people aren’t turning up because, “It’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty Move On, these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what, exactly, was said when Move On’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met Barack Obama at the White House in February?

Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him? Working to elect the Democratic presidential candidate may seem like activism, but it isn’t. Activism doesn’t give up. Activism doesn’t fall silent. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics which like exceptionalism, can be fake. These are distractions that confuse and sucker good people. And not only in the United States, I can assure you.

I write for the Italian socialist newspaper, Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February I sent the editor an article which raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why, I asked? “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more positive approach to the novelty presented by Obama. We will take on specific issues, but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.” In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history, is ordained and depoliticized by important sections of the left. It’s a remarkable situation. Remarkable, because those on the, so called, Radical Left have never been more aware, more conscious of the inequities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions, so that almost every child knows something about global warming. And yet, there seems to be a resistance, within the Green Movement, to the notion of power as a military force, a military project. And perhaps similar observations can also be made about sections of the Feminist Movement and the Gay Movement and certainly the Union Movement.

One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera,

“The struggle of people against power is [the] struggle of memory against forgetting.”

We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy.

Long ago Edward Bernays’ invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The “American way of life” began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.

Today we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity. Thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for many ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity, within our grasp, is to recognize that something is stirring in America that is unfamiliar, perhaps, to many of us on the left, but is related to a great popular movement that’s growing all over the world. Look down at Latin America, less than twenty years ago there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. Today for the first time perhaps in 500 years there’s a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and language, a genuine populism. The recent amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. The successes in Latin America are expressed perversely in the recent overthrow of the government of Honduras, because the smaller the country, the greater is the threat of a good example that the disease of emancipation will spread.

Indeed, right across the world social movements and grass roots organization have emerged to fight free market dogma. They’ve educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem, rather than a solution to global poverty. They’ve politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. Look at the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign, BDS, for short, aimed at Israel that’s sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and Western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to build a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities in the United Kingdom have begun to sever ties with Israel. This is how apartheid South Africa was defeated. And this is how the great wind of the 1960s began to blow. And this is how every gain has been won: the end of slavery, universal suffrage, workers rights, civil rights, environmental protection, the list goes on and on.

And that brings us back, here, to the United States, because I believe something is stirring in this country. Are we aware, that in the last eight months millions of angry e-mails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. And I mean millions. People are outright outraged that their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the passive mass presented by the media. Look at the polls; more than 2/3 of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves, sixty-four percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone, sixty percent are favorable towards Unions, seventy percent want nuclear disarmament, seventy-two percent want the US completely out of Iraq and so on and so on. But where is much of the left? Where is the social justice movement? Where is the peace movement? Where is the civil rights movement? Ordinary Americans, for too long, have been misrepresented by stereotypes that are contemptuous. James Madison referred to his compatriots in the public as ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. And this contempt is probably as strong today, among the elite, as it was back then. That’s why the progressive attitudes of the public are seldom reported in the media, because they’re not ignorant, they’re subversive, they’re informed and they’re even anti-American. I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian, Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what anti-American is,” she said in her forceful way, “its what governments and their vested interests call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States, they are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms though they would call it common decency. They are not vain; they are the people with a waitful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.” Truly exceptional, I like that.

My own guess is that a populism is growing, once again in America evoking a powerful force beneath the surface which has a proud history. From such authentic grass roots Americanism came women suffrage, the eight hour day, graduated income tax, public ownership of railways and communications, the breaking of the power of corporate lobbyists and much more. In other words, real democracy. The American populists were far from perfect, but they often spoke for ordinary people and they were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. That was long ago, but how familiar it sounds. My guess is that something is coming again. The signs are there. Noam Chomsky is right when he says that, “Mere sparks can ignite a popular movement that may seem dormant.” No one predicted 1968, no one predicted the fall of apartheid, or the Berlin Wall, or the civil rights movement, or the great Latino rising of a few years ago.

I suggest that we take Woody Allen’s advice and give up on hope and listen, instead, to voices from below. What Obama and the bankers and the generals and the IMF and the CIA and CNN and BBC fear, is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action as they’ve done so often throughout history.

“At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Thank you.

Your Right to a speedy trial under US law? Where? What? When?

Here is the case of a child ‘arrested’ and held subject to US laws in 2002, who is in jail still held without any conviction ever brought against him in court! Where is your Right to a speedy trial under US law? Where is this Right under our supposed democracy? It doesn’t exist, does it? Gone with the wind, if in fact it ever existed? Did we ever even have a democracy in this country? I rather doubt it. Who told you that anyway? Do you still believe in Santa Claus, too? Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child

Oh? Did we mention yet that the child has been continually tortured under US law confining him to a torture chamber, too, for all these long years without a speedy trial? Don’t let that bother you though. Just go about your business and be careful. Can you pick me up a bottle of Tylenol at the store when you go out?

Ask.com you to believe in Santa Clause

Bill Gates is honest not to call your erased files trashedThis is rich. Ask.com is hoping to lure googlers with a feature where users can “erase” the records of their internet searches (a product for people who believe they can “erase” files on their own hard drives* no doubt). It would seem Ask.com wants to play sleuth and go through your garbage/trash/recycle-bin!
Ho ho ho.

Considering that Ask.com accumulates records of not just your queries, but your unasked queries through javascript, and considering their searches are actually subcontracted to Google, meaning Google acquires the records as well, the only thing the “erase tool” will accomplish will be to remove the list of your queries which reappears for you as a typing aid. Thus you won’t be reminded of your past searches, which is handy if you share a computer and prefer other users not see where you’ve been browsing. But that can be accomplished by purging your browser’s history.

Actually, the main thing “erasing” accomplishes besides giving you a false sense of privacy, is to give Ask.com one more set of data about you, and a red flag doozy of a blue light special for intelligence files: the searches you feel bothered enough to want erased. Ho ho ha ha ha.

*NOTE: Dragging a file to the trash does not erase it. Emptying the trash does not erase it. Files are not “erased,” only the addresses to the files are erased. “Wiping” a drive will erase the actual files, but not from the eyes of forensic experts. Data recovery specialists can reconstruct files many overwrites back.

John Edwards for Santy Claus

Ho ho ho. John Edwards declares himself a candidate for aught eight, counting no doubt on the votes of Virginians who haven’t been told about Santa Claus.
 
John Edwards, half of the Kerry-Edwards day-after concession speech givers will, instead of doing his upmost to get to the bottom of vote tampering, vote fraud, voter intimidation and obstruction in the 2004 election, will instead ask the Barnum and Bailey crowd to throw their votes at him again.

In a carefully stage-managed photo-op in a black-Ammerican’s backyard, in New Orlean’s still neglected Ninth Ward (for whom he did what exactly?), Edward’s voiced the same middle of the road platitudes which -we’re told- endeared him to the American public the first time. “Let me be clear.” “Let there be no misunderstanding.” Ad infinitum, sin explicity. The Republican strategy in Iraq is wrong, no mention of what could be right. But he wants it firmly understood, so there’s no misunderstanding, it’s so clear it doesn’t need saying, know what I mean, nudge, nudge?

This is the straw man technique used by the Republican yellow press. Put a spotlight on the weakest opponent and pretend he’s the best they got.

No John Edwards, if you’re any bit the patriot at all, step aside and let somebody lead the Democrats to reclaim justice for the people. We do not need your poison pill of Benedict Arnoldry. You are a baby-faced son of a bitch God-damned traitor opportunist carpert bagger fraudster’s shill. Confess now or go down with the rest of them. Fall all the harder for the extra effort your treachery presents.

You could have contested the 2004 vote, if nothing else to bring to light the rigging of American elections by the well-placed Republican voting officials and their black-box contractor cohorts. You could have spent some of the Democratic Party funds earmarked for the fight instead of capitulating and forcing appalled Americans throw in even more contributions to aid the likes of Bev Harris and independent party candidates challenge the voting irregularities. Instead you handed George Bush the keys to the hen house, with already thousands burning inside it, and slithered away to surface another day, Christmas 2006, to ask for a chance to do it again. Fat chance Mr. Edwards, no promotion for you, you’ve been very bad elf.

Have a Holly Jolly Saturnalia

Me Christian, which simply means that I admit that I am not perfect and therefore can’t get holier than thou and (especially) I am not allowed to punish and certainly not kill anybody else for not being perfect.

Christmas being on the exact date of the end of Saturnalia, in the Roman/slash/suddenly/slash/Christian calendar is not a coincidence, Constantine wanted to ease the transition from bloodthirsty pagan to bloodthirsty Christian amongst his friends and countrymen.

By all the text in the Bible about it, Jesus was born when the lambs were being born. That’s the only time of the year that the shepherd’s have their sheep out of the folds, in the field and “watch their flocks by night”.
Which is in March, or February.

Santa Claus wasn’t going to be invented, as the Ultimate American Corporate Marketing Tool, for another 1850 years more or less.

Jesus was anti-capitalist. Capitalism was the system of Rome, and as the Romans pointed out in the fall of their empire, depends on pillage just to sustain it. Jesus said not to lend money for interest. THE basis for capitalism.

Now we are down to imaginary money. Credit being based on a buying and selling of IOUs.

We are told that we must buy the latest and greatest toys, coincidentally released for sale in LIMITED quantities just before Saturnal… oops Christmas. We must do this so Junior and Sissie don’t lose their childish innocent faith in … Santa?
So we have ridiculous scenes like the people fighting over XBox toys while in the background a carol is playing “…peace on earth, and mercy mild”

And the modern kicker to it, the percentage of retail profits from Christmas shopping is in the double digits, relative to the rest of the year.

So we have a pseudo-patriotic guilt trip laid on us, to keep the pseudo-religious guilt trip company.

If we don’t go out and spend more of our borrowed non-money debt than we will ever be able to repay, it would cripple the American economy.

I can’t speak for Him, but I think Jesus is a little ticked off at this mess…