Santa up North

More prophets of a freer and more open tomorrow: Couple launches attack on ‘Christmas hell’. “Hell,” for these purposes, means Christmas as such, partly because it’s commercialized, but more fundamentally because it’s religious and thus exclusive. “Children are taught to worship this white, heterosexual man [Santa] who overeats. I mean, it’s wrong.”

Good point! The article leads off with the seasonal story of the mainstream movement to abolish Christmas in Canada. It then tells of a Vancouver couple who are waging their own private campaign against Christmas with billboards and emails. Their campaign brings the crusade against Christmas out of the bureaucracy and out among the people, and thus has particular importance.

All this brings us to the question of what kind of public holiday is possible, when the fact that someone might not buy into a holiday’s theme makes it exclusionary. The answer, of course, is that the only possible holiday today is one celebrating diversity. All other symbols and ideals are tainted with particularism, a.k.a. bigotry, and must be rigorously excluded from public life. Those who fail to buy into diversity are adherents of hatred whose concerns should be ignored. Which leads to a further question: what can the diversity be about, when all the particulars must be kept under wraps?
Posted by Jim Kalb at December 13, 2002 12:04 PM | Send
    

Comments

It’s an interesting point. “Diversity” is the avoidance of all particular being, because each particular thing is too limiting. However that can be done only by choosing non-being — that is, evil, death and the lie.

I do think it’s important to think about these issues on a grand philosophical scale. It’s obvious that current ways of thinking do not represent some minor mistake that happened to come up somehow. The problems are absolutely fundamental.

Posted by: Jim Kalb on December 13, 2002 1:10 PM

I suppose it was bound to happen that someone, like the Stone’s of Canada would roll an odd duality of anti-consumerism and anti-Christianity, with overtones of Feminazi anti white male hatred into a single anti-Christmas campaign complete with a script & anti-season music on their message machine.I’m sure that while she espouses hatred of the fat guy in red she’ll claims female solidarity with the femiglutton hostesses on “The View, or the “Fat Chicks Who Rock” on bottom dweller Jerry Springer’s Show.Thank God I’m not the poor accomplice she calls a husbband.
Its another blast from the loony left wing tree hugging men haters.
We are witnessing such a wide variety of left-loonie postures on all topics that now they’ve created a mix and match grouping for their outraged liberal anger parade. Sort of a mental wardrobe equivelant to match “vogueing” and the gtotesque costumery of Gay Pride Festivals.
I usually hear a Christmas sermon from my minister, some time during December, and he usually decries the loss of focus on Christ as the Reason for the Season.Wait till I show him this one - Hes gonna go off like a rocket.

Posted by: sandy on December 13, 2002 6:11 PM

What struck me is that Ms Scrooge has fond memories of her own childhood Christmases. The healthy instinct would be to want the same thing for her own children. But she is too much of a radical in following through with the principles of diversity to grant her own children this privilege.

Posted by: Mark Richardson on December 13, 2002 7:29 PM

“Children are taught to worship this white, heterosexual man [Santa] who overeats. I mean, it’s wrong.”

I got a good laugh out of this one. It’s true, of course, but it’s not exactly Christians who are responsible for doing the teaching. The dumb broad who said this needs to a) find a mirror to point into, and b) pick up a copy of the “Idiot’s Guide to Christianity.” Come to think of it, maybe we should send those to her for Christmas…

Posted by: Jim Newland on December 13, 2002 8:27 PM

“What can the diversity be about, when all the particulars must be kept under wraps?”

This is the essential reality of multiculturalism. A left acquaintance once insisted to me that the culture of ancient Athens was a mixture of many different cultures. When I asked her what those cultures were that Athens was a mixture of, she couldn’t answer, and had no interest in the question. As the anecdote suggests, the only true thing that can be said of anything is that it is “diverse,” but the diversity itself has no content. “Diversity” is thus a nihilistic slogan that is used to deny the existence of everything that is.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 13, 2002 8:35 PM

To be more precise, “diversity” is a nihilistic slogan that is used to deny the possibility of making a true statement about anything that exists.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 13, 2002 8:42 PM

“…’diversity’ is a nihilistic slogan that is used to deny the possibility of making a true statement about anything that exists.”

That depends. This is true if diversity corresponds to the proposition that absolutely nothing can be known to be true. However, that is not the diversity nazis’ position. Their position is that some things can be known to be true (e.g. “diversity is good”) while other things cannot.

Note that I’m not saying their position is ultimately defensible (how could I be, since it’s not); only that it seems to me that this is what they claim.

Posted by: Jim Newland on December 13, 2002 9:57 PM

Yikes. That last part sounded bad. When I said their position is indefensible, I wasn’t citing the position that some things can be known to be true while others cannot. That’s obviously true. I meant that many of the specific things they hold to be true aren’t.

Posted by: Jim Newland on December 13, 2002 10:02 PM

Wishing people a Merry Christmas instead of a Happy Holidays is helpful. It maintains a tradition and reminds people allies are around. I do it all the time. Sad that “Merry Christmas” has become partly a political statement.

Posted by: P Murgos on December 14, 2002 11:24 AM

Check this out. Here is what we are faced with, on both the Christmas celebration “in the public square,” and the immigration holocaust: here, staring you right in the face, is a pure example of one of those forces which are arrayed against sanity in this country (this was seen in today’s edition of www.Vdare.com ): Tom Piatak, who opposes the stamping-out by government of all manifestations of Christmas in the public square, received an e-mail:

“Another correspondent told me that he had come across my essay while looking for an ‘inclusive holiday e-card.’ Unsurprisingly, he was shocked by what he found [in my essay which defended Christmas], telling me that ‘[t]he position you had in the article seems to be in line with the thinking behind the Iranian Revolution.’ He also offered an instructive history lesson, making the obligatory reference to America’s dark past when ‘most slaves [were] converted to Protestantism,’ ‘most American Indians perished,’ and when ‘Americans chose [marginalization and isolation] and passed restrictive immigration laws,’ but cheerfully noting that ‘by the 1960s, the U.S. changed course and chose recognition and inclusion.’ And that’s not all: ‘what’s more, we opened the borders to allow Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, pagans, and people from around the world to join our society.’ Because of this change in direction, we ‘would not allow Christianity to dominate the public arena’ and we now have a ‘free society, one that is ever-changing and permissive, not static or oppressive.’ “

Piatak preceeds with his rebuttal and the rest of his article, as follows: “It may come as news to the multiculturalists, but America began in 1776, not 1965. … ”

( http://www.vdare.com/letters/war_against_christmas_2002_p3.htm )

This guy who wrote to Piatak has a problem with “most slaves having been converted to protestantism”??? What religion were they supposed to be converted to, by the southern plantation owners of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s — Islam? Or should they have been made into Hassidic Jews and given long black coats and big round fur hats to wear? I mean, GET REAL, PAL!! This guy really and truly needs a psychiatrist and that is not meant as any kind of joke. The extreme narcissism tinged with genuine paranoid schizophrenia — also my diagnosis of Abe Foxman, by the way — just explodes out at you with every word he writes! “We opened our borders to Muslims, Buddhists, and pagans from around the world, so as not to allow Christianity to dominate the public arena”???? But what if the rest of us had no objection to “Christianity dominating the public arena”??? I’ve got news for you, pal — “Christianity dominating the public arena” in the twentieth-century United States was the out-and-out best deal you ever got or are ever going to get from anyplace on the planet, bar none. From there it’s all going to be downhill for you, friend, with what you and your ilk have wrought on this country … and good luck — you’ll need it. Oh, and … by the way — A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU! And if you’re not Christian, or if you don’t celebrate Christmas, then ordinary politness obliges YOU to understand and appreciate my well-intended courtesy in voicing that greeting, not ME to fear that I might have offended a bigot like you.


Posted by: Unadorned on December 18, 2002 9:33 AM

This all raises in my mind an interesting question about the nature of democracy. Where do we draw the line between the will of the majority and the obligation of the government to protect people’s civil rights? If the majority of a community is vehemently anti-Muslim and suppresses all Muslim culture but does not commit any flat out ‘hate crimes’, does the government have the right to get involved in it? Basically the goal is try to find a balance between the will of the majority and this idea of universal fairness that was at least in some part a fundamental part of the Democratic vision when our country was formed.

Posted by: remus on December 18, 2002 2:15 PM

In many ways, the government today assumes that we are guilty unless and until we prove ourselves innocent.

White, conservative southerners like Trent Lott are assumed to be racists unless and until they prove otherwise —- by pandering to minority demands.

Christians are assumed to be intolerant would-be theocrats, unless and until they water down their Christianity and keep their “little light” from shining too brightly (to turn the old song upside down).

Divorced dads are assumed to be deadbeats, even when it was their wives who abandoned the marriage. Even when they make all of their child support payments on time, and don’t complain when their time with their children is called “visitation” rather than “parenting”, they still need to be closely monitored.

Corporations, as a result of their bigness, are assumed to be unscrupulous polluters, monopolists, or exploiters of the poor downtrodden workers.

The list goes on and on … in all of these cases, no evidence of criminal acts is required before the government steps in to “manage” the situation. The innocent need to be “protected” from those who are already condemned by their membership in a group that has fallen out of favor.

Posted by: Charlie on December 18, 2002 3:24 PM
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