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.

Peacekeepers On Earth, Good Luck To Mankind

Merry Christmas! This time a purported Terrorist War on Christmas. The clock is ticking with the Cablegate revelations. Can the propagandists kick us into warp fear beyond the reach of Wikileaks?

The war on Christmas they worry about

Rise above itWhat it’s going to take to revisit 350ppm, to reverse climate change, is not carbon trading, wind turbines, miraculous scientific leaps, or a COP15 conference. The anti-technology has been known to us since sustainable times, when mankind didn’t have to transcend his wants, because it was challenge enough to seek for his needs. Conservation.

Little Eichmann Country-Western anthem

Of course, that describes most of the Pseudo-patriotic crap infesting the airwaves now…

But there’s one I heard “that’s the way things were and still ought to be”

Like honoring our preachers, leaders, teachers and heroes and believing everything they said

Charlie Manson was a preacher. Preached Armageddon really really strong.
Cotten Mather was a Preacher who gets quoted a lot by the Reich Wing, (Like Chuck Norris and Dawg the Bounty Hunter, just another couple of Wannabe Pigs) whenever they say that America should be a Religious Dictatorship…

Who also said that Native Americans were a construct of Satan because we’re not specifically mentioned in Genesis, that we had no souls and should be exterminated.
And that the people who allowed their kids to play with dolls were practicing witchcraft and should be killed.
And the Kiddoes themselves

Imagine, if you will, somebody offing your rug-rats because you gave them a Teddy Bear or let them watch Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny….
And the Good Pastor Mather also owned Slaves.

Leaders? McCarthy, for instance, with all the Liars, Murderers and Thieves who were and are his Fellow Travelers, like Reagan, Nixon, Bush (all the Bush Klan), Billy Sunday who was one of Their Crowd and also a Nazi Sympathizer (and, leave us not forget, a Preacher), People who could feel at ease at a Country Club or a Klan Rally?

We should believe everything they said or say?

Really?

We’re supposed to (here in Colorado Springs) Revere and Honor “heroes” like Custer and Chivington and Palmer…

Racist SCUM who tried to wipe a whole race of Americans from the face of the world.

When Custer is quoted in the book (and film) Little Big Man as saying

It’s more important to kill the women and children, because if we let them breed there wouldn’t be any point killing the men

It’s an accurate representation of what the punk murdering bastard actually DID say.

And we’ve got an Idol of his disciple William Jackson Palmer parked right in the middle of a busy intersection.

By the way, Custer and Chivington and Palmer also believed in and quoted Cotten Mather…

And the “War on Christmas” loudmouths should remember this, Cotten Mather was a Puritan… whose family had been run out of England for criticizing their Religious Dictatorship and, importantly, pissing off King James by opposing the celebration of CHRISTMAS because it’s a Catholic holiday

I don’t remember the name of the singer, but it’s one of those redneck punks who offers to beat up on anybody who disagrees with him.

Yep, real Role Model for a working Civilization.

The kid who sings the song is (to me) a youngster. Mid twenties, maybe thirties.

No way in HELL could this dude remember anything at all about the 70s even.

Far Less the 40s, 50s and 60s that’s he’s so nostalgic about.

When Apartheid was the Official Law of the Land in 20 states. People of “color” could be arrested or even hanged for not stepping off the sidewalk to let the Master Race walk past.

THAT’S the way things were, and I for one actually remember some of it…

So, is the stupid bastard really sure “that’s the way it still should be”?

Or is he merely hoping that WE are simple-minded enough to believe that?

Jesus vs. Santa rivalry is nothing new

A holiday detente: As Easter sprung from fertility celebrations befitting the rebirth of spring, so Christmas originated from offerings of the season’s greetings to the winter solstice. And while Christians might have taken over the party, they’ve had to retain the yule tree and other pagan party favors to ensure converts would still RSVP to the festivities. The struggle between Jesus and Santa is nothing new.

The First War on Christmas happened in Oliver Cromwell’s England when Christmas idolatry came to be forbidden by law. Popular merriment was deemed to have strayed too far from the Protestant message of the church, the Lord’s Day etc, so Lord Protector Cromwell reined things in, for a time, until the reformer’s dominance over the parliament and the influence of the Puritans waned.

I heard this story on NPR, half of it actually. They described Christmas having been made illegal for a period, but curiously didn’t mention which period, and who in England had done it.

Puritans you say? Might these have been the same Puritans who came to America’s shore? The same. Well, they shared forefathers (Our forefathers, if our WASP history books can be believed, emphasizing as they do our “Christian Nation” while minimizing Jefferson and the other 90% of our settlers). Thus religious intolerance, on the part of the Puritans, drove the rest of England to send them packing, post paid, to take their anti-everybody else’s Christmas to New England, where it was thought there were no revelers to be bothered.

The Puritans fled religious intolerance to THEIR intolerance basically. What BS to assert that English merry folk did not accord them freedom of religion. England wanted freedom FROM the Puritan’s brand of religion. For some reason our historians seem content to leave open the suggestion that the Puritan party-pooper recount being expelled from the party because of his “wild and crazy” ways!

Just as in Old England, the American puritanical pin heads every so often revive to prominence, usually in reaction to economic or social catastrophe, to prescribe austerity across the board, from no drinking to unhappy holidays. In their current incarnation they’re Fundies aghast at what’s become of their Christmas. The “true meaning” having become too commercial, too secular, not enough infant Christ worship, etc.

We’ve got a nation of party-poopers, wanting to repo the universal Xmas holiday and its international message of brotherhood: Peace on Earth, Goodwill To All Mankind. Puritans aren’t about being good, they’re the fine folk who who accepted the turkey, then thanked the Lord, not the heathens. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!

The real war on Christmas

Baby Rudolf, Baby Bratz, no Baby Santa 
A rabbi in Seattle wanted to put a menorah in the municipal train station to accompany a display of Christmas trees. Was he thinking the trees were another faith’s religious symbols? Did he mean to ask to juxtapose a dreidel instead?

The train station administrators backed down and removed the trees altogether, a concession I’d argue they needn’t have made, but certainly one that fueled the Christian backlash. A now knee-jerk indignation about a supposed war on Christmas!

I’ve got news for the Christians, there is a war on Christmas, you’re fighting it, amongst yourselves. You fundamentalists are wanting Christmas to mean something religious again, but the materialists among you, by my count, every last one of you minus Jesus, already ceded the holiday to commerce long ago.

“Happy Holidays” is neither religious nor irreligious. “Merry Christmas” does not belie a believer or non-believer. The international holiday as demarcated by what’s believed to have been Jesus of Nazareth’s birthday and New Year’s (for non-Chinese), is called Christmas. It represents a huge surge in retail sales, for some merchants up to 90% of their yearly gross. Retailers of every denomination celebrate Christmas.

Put a menorah next to a manger if you must, but neither of them belong at the North Pole with Santa, Rudolf and Ol’ Tannenbaum. Joyeux Noel, Gud Yule, and Boldog Karácsony everyone!

War On Idiocy

The WAR ON expression has come to mean what any more? War On Drugs. What did that mean? Trying to address the drug addiction problem, obviously. Wouldn’t it have been better to call it: “addressing the drug addiction problem?” Declaring a war on the noun drugs has meant thousands incarcerated for being victims.

Similarly, the War On Terrorism is having a disasterously misguided effect on the world. Horribly hilarious, if the world was made of words. Instead of addressing the problems that lead to terrorism, we are fighting a word. As if there is a culture of people whose highest ideology is terrorism.

The WAR ON expression began with President Lyndon Johnson, not with the War On The People Of Vietnam, but with the War On Poverty. That description fit. The problem at base level was poverty.

The idiocy-mongers at the helm of our national shipwreck, at their most disingenuous, are inventing other fictional wars against which they hope to rally public support. There was a War On Christmas apparently, and now they are rallying defenders against the War On Christianity. The attack is coming from the godless left, from the culture elites, etc.

Was there a War On Christmas? Is there a War On Christianity? I’d add a few more and let you decide. Is there a War On Republicans who vote against their own self interest? Is there a War On Corporations who deny Global Warming? Is there a War On Union Members who continue to vote for free trade and globalization and slave labor? Is there a War On Religious Revelers who believed there was a War On Christmas?

There for damn sure is! It’s called the WAR ON IDIOCY. It’s the effort to make Americans into less mal-informed, less mal-educated global citizens, for everybody’s good, especially their own. To paraphrase an early American patriot: it wasn’t the idiots who got us our democracy, it won’t be the idiots who help us keep it.

And you capital “C” Christians who think the end of the world is nigh -and you are trying to hasten it- if you don’t want “idiocy” to define “Christianity” it’s going to be up to you to behave yourself.

The War On Idiocy is a bastard of a fight. It’s the front of the class finally having to turn to the back of the class and say “Shut the fuck up you moron, you’re holding all of us back with your inanity! Believe what you want to believe, whatever, but kindly leave the curriculum to Miss Hillhoople and sit down, PLEASE!”

And then, because this is a war after all, can we help but add: “IDIOT!”