Via Shakespeare's Sister, the Green Knight alerts me to the existence of a book I'd rather not know about (but I forgive them): The War on Christmas : How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday IsWorse Than You Thought, by John 'whoever outed Valerie Plame was a hero' Gibson. The Green Knight does a lovely job on this idiot, and it's worth reading the whole thing, but there's one bit I'd especially like to highlight:
First of all, the "secularization" of Christmas that Gibson decries has been happening ever since Coca-Cola put Saint Nicholas into a red-and-white fur suit and turned him into Santa Claus. Yes, Virginia, that was a corporate action, turning a saint into a toy dispenser. The "secularization" has been noted and complained about ever since -- but it hasn't been done by the big bad libruls; it's been done by the corporate world.Indeed. It's as if Gibson found Christmas lying dead in the street in a pool of its own blood with Capitalism standing over it holding an axe, and leapt to the conclusion that Secular Humanism was the killer because it was standing around nearby. To, um, torture a metaphor.
But then this isn't the only way the conservative evangelicals are clueless about how to target their anger. Fundamentalist religious belief is inherently incompatible with 'free market' economies, and they just don't get it. (Islamic fundamentalists do get it...but that's another story.)
Families don't fall apart because Adam and Steve can get married in Massachusetts; economic pressures destroyed the extended family in America, and economic pressures wreak havoc with the inherently weak and unstable nuclear family that replaced it. People don't drink and smoke and take drugs because Secular Humanism tells them it's cool; it's all about the market. All of the sex, profanity, and 'anti-Christian values' they complain about in the media are there because of market forces--because people buy them--not because some evil cabal of Hollywood Libruls (headed by gay lovers George Soros and Michael Moore) forced them in there.
And here's the thing: in all the vast wasteland of television, there is nothing as soul-destroying, nothing as anti-spiritual, as the advertising--a vast, insidious, and incredibly sophisticated propaganda campaign designed with the primary goal of making people unhappy with their lives, and convincing them that only material goods (not family, not friends, not community, and fucking certainly not God) can make them happy.
I'll make a deal: when the conservative evangelicals back a massive, nationwide campaign to eliminate advertising from the airwaves, I'll switch from 'season's greetings' to 'merry Christmas'.
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