The War on Christmas Loses Again, Maybe
It’s a couple of days before Christmas Day, and I’m writing this column in advance so I can focus on what’s really important: family. I’m listening to Shaggy’s Christmas in the Islands for inspiration; I lived in the Caribbean for eight years and it will always be a part of my life.
This will be my last post of 2023. I’m taking time for a trek to the desert, enjoying family time, and gathering my wits for 2024. It’s going to be a historic year, culminating in an election that will chart a future direction for the country.
This year’s War on Christmas hasn’t made much of an impact beyond the addled viewers of Fox News. Of course, the fact that there really isn’t an assault on the holiday might have something to do with the lack of imagined transgressions reported in the sort-of-normal media.
Parker Malloy at The Present Age has a terrific rundown on the history of this gratuitous exercise, including former Foxette Bill O’Reilly’s resurrection of Henry Ford’s anti semitic crusade from the 1920s blaming Jews for making Christmas cards hard to find.
As is true with everything about the right wing these days, every accusation is actually a confession. There IS a cultural conflict in progress, an all out assault on everything and everybody not affiliated with neo-puritan evangelists (and billionaires backers) and their authoritarian agenda.
Rolling Stone has an in depth report this week (behind a paywall) on the parts of the GOP’s 2025 Project concerning abortion and contraception. A big part of their takeover once the Orange Jesus takes power involves using the power of the federal government to deny women access to abortion and birth control. The conspiracy set imagining Joe Biden spying on their lives and Antifa causing public disorder ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of surveillance. Medical records will be seized, healthcare providers will be prosecuted, and crossing state lines for purposes related to reproductive health will be a crime.
The Orlando Sentinel has published a list of the 673 books banned in Orange County Schools in 2023, ostensibly because they could violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students. And –surprise! surprise!-- the banned list goes beyond s-e-x to include literature featuring people of color, and not affiliated with approved religion:
From the Times of Israel:
A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools.
The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive.
All this religious morality stuff is complicated. On the one hand, younger generations are fleeing organized Christian religion in droves; in a few decades followers of Jesus will be a minority group. On the other hand, there’s the end of the world in a scenario evangelicals call the rapture. It’s the end of the world, where Christians will rise to heaven and the rest of humanity will be left in misery.
There are lots of variations in these views, including Israel and a figure called the antiChrist. Dominionists, who are core functionaries on the right these days, believe they must take over all aspects of society in advance of the rapture, which may or may not look like a nuclear war.
The bottom line here is that a small group has taken it upon themselves to impose their flavor of religion on the rest of us. They think Donald Trump has been anointed, despite his flaws, by their God to lead the nation to righteousness.
So the War on Christmas is really the War For Christmas as envisioned by self-righteous fanatics. You will like their Christmas, or else, even if you are part of the 36% of Americans not affiliated with Christian beliefs.
Aldous J Pennyfarthing at Daily Kos has dug up three War on Christmas classic movies, should you feel the urge to examine bottom feeders’ attempt to exploit this concept.
As my Christmas and/or holiday and/or solstice gift to you all, I decided to sit down and watch three “classic” War on Christmas movies so you don’t have to. It was the War on Christmas equivalent of storming the beaches of Normandy. I deserve a nice burial plot somewhere special after this is all over.
The three movies I picked are “Christmas with a Capital C,” “Last Ounce of Courage,” and “Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas.” They did not disappoint—unless you mean in the conventional sense of failing to inform, entertain, or enlighten. Then they did disappoint. Very much so.
No matter what holiday you celebrate adjacent to the winter solstice, I wish the best for you and yours. Make 2024 the year where you break out of your silo.
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A Few News Clips Not Found Under the Christmas Tree
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“IT'S A HUGE LOSS OF OPPORTUNITY," PANASONIC STRAYS AWAY FROM OKLAHOMA A SECOND TIME Via KWTV 9 News (Gosh, I wonder why nobody wants to move to Oklahoma?)
Panasonic has turned down a second multi-million dollar deal to open a battery plant in Oklahoma. This marks the third company to stray away from the state, as lawmakers work to figure out why Oklahoma can’t land these large deals.
“Volkswagen, Panasonic, Tesla and now Panasonic again have passed up on Oklahoma because they're feeling that they can't attract and retain high quality employees, when they tell them they must move to a state like Oklahoma,” Rep. Mickey Dollens (R-Oklahoma City) said.
Over the past few years, lawmakers have worked to attract companies, largely working behind the scenes, under non-disclosure acts. Around the capitol, these deals were known as “Project Ocean” and “Project Connect” but most of the companies involved, end up planting roots in other states or other countries.
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The Year's Most Spectacular Photos from the James Webb Telescope Via Time Magazine
Infant stars are born all over the universe, but the closest stellar birthing suite to Earth is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, located just 460 light years distant. A turbulent—even violent—place, Rho Ophiuchi is defined by jets of gas roaring from young stars. Most of the stars in this comparatively modest nursery are more or less the size of the sun. But one, known as S1, is far bigger—so much so that it is self-immolating, carving a great cavity around itself with its stellar wind, the storm of charged particle's all stars emit, though few with the gale-force power of S1.
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What Went Wrong for Ron DeSantis in 2023 - political obituary via The New York Times
If the great promise of the DeSantis candidacy was Trump without the baggage, Stuart Stevens, a top strategist on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said that what Republicans got instead was “Ted Cruz without the personality.”
“There was a superficial impression that DeSantis was in the mode of big-state governors who had won Republican nominations and been successful — Reagan, Bush, Romney — but DeSantis is a very different sort of creature,” Mr. Stevens said. “These were positive, expansive, optimistic figures. DeSantis is not.”