The Columnist Manifesto

On New Years Eve, my quiet-evening-at-home personality meshes with other aspects of my personality -- too-cheap-to-pay-outrageously-inflated-prices, resistant-to-forced-hilarity-in-a-crowd -- to push me toward a New Years Eve consisting of... well, a quiet evening at home.

What are you doing New Years Eve?

To get you in the mood to answer this question, here's an excerpt from the Clay Aiken song:

Maybe it's much too early in the game
Ooh, but I thought I'd ask you just the same
What are you doing New Year's
New Year's eve?

Wonder whose arms will hold you good and tight
When it's exactly twelve o'clock that night
Welcoming in the New Year
New Year's eve

Maybe I'm crazy to suppose
I'd ever be the one you chose
Out of the thousand invitations
You received

Ooh, but in case I stand one little chance
Here comes the jackpot question in advance:
What are you doing New Year's
New Year's Eve?

Asked by military leaders for millennia: advance? or hold and fortify your position?

Today, my version of this question arises. Should I

a) stay put and build a snow fort?





OR

b) drive five hours in a northerly direction to visit my father-in-law?

What do you think is the better way to improve blog traffic: posting pictures of (a) cute dogs?



or (b) alien spacecraft?

Let's see how good your detective skills are.



This photo depicts my current situation. What can you surmise about it?

Clearly, since I'm only posting now, late in the day, I've been on the road. Indeed, I'm holed up in the guest bedroom at B's brother's house -- note the title of this post ("In-law unit"), and the tell-tale luggage in the foreground.

I'm grading papers and exams. It's that time of year. There they are on the bed.

My prospects for a good night's sleep are somewhat in doubt. To begin with, doing work in bed is bad sleep hygiene. And that most excellent wall painting is pretty darn vivid for sleeping under.

They have Wi-Fi! (That's Phantom Scribbler on my laptop screen.)

Does it get any better than this?

My parents, though not particularly religious, were resolute that their children should not drift into Christianity, and so in my boyhood we celebrated Chanukkah with an 8-night present-exchanging vengeance. I carried this bit of religio-cultural upbringing into adulthood, and for many years I refused to have a Christmas tree under my roof.


But I softened on that. How can you be "principled" about refusing a Christmas tree given all the contradictions inherent in the Yuletide celebration? To name just a few:

1) Christmas is a widely acknowledged opportunity for a secular seasonal retail sales boom.
2) Christmas is an official holiday in a nation that is supposedly based on separation of church and state.
3) Some of the most festive Christmas traditions -- including, especially, the tree -- have pagan origins.
4) Gift-exchanging is not an organic Chanukkah tradition, but rather a purposeful add-on to offset the allure of Christmas gift-exchanging.

Early in our relationship, B called me in tears from her father's house on Christmas day. It was her family's first Christmas together after her mother died, and her dad, in his gruff way of grieving, had jettisoned many of their key traditions that year -- even to the point of buying a fake Christmas tree.

B flew home later that day, and I met her at the airport, and brought her back to my place. She didn't notice the telltale pine needles on the back seat of my car. I had bought a real tree to perk her up, stuck it in my living room, and -- lacking any "real" Christmas ornaments -- decked it out with bits of gift wrap I had around the house. The ornament pictured above was at the top of the tree. That's how the tree thing caught on in my house.

I've really come to enjoy having the decked out tree in the living room, with wrapped presents sprouting underneath like mushrooms. So there it is -- my personal addition to the contradictions of Christmas time.

Taking the Lord's name "in vain," in the 10 commandment's sense, means using it in a disrespectful or irreverant manner, but there's a pointed ambiguity. The more common contemporary meaning of "in vain," of course, is fruitless, pointless or unavailing. And it makes you wonder: who is taking -- or using -- the Lord's name pointlessly these days?

The Christian right got its collective nose out of joint because W the Boy President sent out holiday cards that didn't say "Christ" or "Christmas." And now there's this whole book by one of those Fox News clowns about the liberal "War on Christmas."

But isn't the greatest secularizing "threat" to Christmas the whole retailing angle? Having an economy that depends on a societal frenzy to buy stuff at Christmas time seems to drain more religious meaning out of the holiday than does the blandly pluralistic salutation "happy holidays," which merely recognizes that not everyone is religiously celebrating the birth of Jesus.


Why doesn't the Christian right take issue with that? Is it that they're just too pleased to go pray at Wal-Mart the other six days of the week?

You know how popular musicians will try to put out a Christmas song as a personal cash cow? Like Bruce Springsteen doing "Santa Clause is Coming to Town"?

There's a similar thing in movies, I think, where they'll put in a somewhat gratuitous Christmas scene in order to make it a "Christmas movie" and release it during the lucrative holiday season.

On Christmas Eve, we saw the funny and offbeat About a Boy -- I wasn't thinking of it as a Christmas movie, but the fact is, it has no less than two Christmas scenes, including the finale.

We also rented Donnie Brasco, with Johnny Depp playing an undercover FBI agent who cozies up to wise-guy Al Pacino. B and I realized a few minutes into it that what we really meant to have rented was Donnie Darko. I like to think this was an understandable mistake. Donnie Brasco got kinda boring and we stopped watching it after about 20 minutes. But it had a surprisingly funny Christmas scene in which the two mafia thugs -- Pacino and Depp -- exchange Christmas presents, thanks and emotional hugs. The funny part was that the presents are each an envelope with a large wad of cash.

I'll never again be able to give a money Christmas present without thinking of the absurdity of two guys exchanging gift-wads of cash. It's the thought that counts.

I love the idea that people are reading blogs on Christmas. Here I am blogging at Grandma Moses, and the place has a nice crowd: there are five people sitting by themselves -- three on laptops, 1 reading a book, 1 writing. Near the window, there's a couple of regulars who I know to be a couple just from seeing them around the neighborhood. They're having a serious, intense conversation, and I can only catch snippets of phrases, but it seems like they're breaking up. Breaking up on Christmas!

She is forging ahead with what appears to be a well-managed presentation -- like from a self-help book -- designed to exhaust all avenues of making things work. She keeps saying the word "frustrating." But the way he is resting his chin on his hand, with an air of settled hopelessness -- words will be spoken, he'll say some himself, but he knows that words have already failed.

Me, I'm having a great time, blogging and thinking about who is reading blogs on Christmas. A year ago, I wrote:

maybe by nightfall, many of my many readers will be going, “I can’t take this anymore – [name of relative here] is driving me crazy,” and rushing off to their computers to reconnect with the disconnected world of cyberspace and feel like themselves again.

If you're reading this, does this describe you? Or maybe it's just the simple realization, "Hey, it's Christmas! Why can't I catch up on a few blogs if it will make me feel cheery?"

Traffic is down, and comments are down, but I was really pleased to see from her comment thatJanelle Rene reads blogs on Xmas eve. Merry Christmas, Janelle.

Christmas traditions are just habits that you get all gooey about and attached to. Like watching Mr. Magoo's A Christmas Carol on Christmas eve, or whatever. I'm going to make an addition to my Christmas morning tradition: checking Althouse, who seems to be starting a tradition of being self-conscious and funny about blogging on Christmas.

Last year it was a snippet of dialogue during the opening of presents:

".... Wait a minute."

"She's blogging."

"She stops Christmas to blog."

This year its:

Blogging on Christmas? Oh, please. I'm up at 4:30 and reading the NYT. How can I not?

Is that not delightful? Now for some iced coffee!

... and replace it with another one!

We have Christmas music album produced by Windham Hill -- elevator music for accoustic-loving yuppies like me. A couple of songs sound just like they were performed by W.G. "Snuffy" Walden, the TV music-theme guru who created the catchy, elevator-music-for-accoustic-loving-yuppies theme music for Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life.* In fact, Walden plays a lovely guitar version of Oh Come All Ye Faithful.

A Snuffy Waldon wannabe plays a languid, slowed-down version of Jingle Bells on accoustic guitar. I think you can imagine the sound. Every time I hear it, I supply the classic alternative lyrics, below. (Elipses and line breaks are inserted to simulate the dirge-like tempo).

Jingle . . . . bells

Batman . . . . smells

Robin . . . .

laid . . . . an egg

Batmobile . . . .

lost a wheel . . . .

Joker . . . .

got away

Happy holidays!



------
*To be fair, Walden's theme music credit list is huge, and includes a variety of styles.

... or does my backpack look a lot like Jabba the Hut?




Several months ago, I pointed out that Jabba the Hut bears a striking resemblance to Justice Scalia. Under the transitive principle, does my backpack therefore look like Scalia?

With several inches of cumulative snowfall in December, plus temperatures comfortably (if that's the right word) below freezing, we were well on track to have a picture-postcard white Christmas.


Then, wham, temperatures in the mid 40s, serious snow-melt and, of course, New York City style dirty slushy.



Can we please have a soft white blanket of snow tonight?

Most of us believe that, barring an unforseeable tragic event, we will be longer-lived than our parents. It's a kind of life-span "upward mobility" theory. Life expectancies have generally been going up in the history of our society, so why shouldn't that trend continue?

Well, let me suggest some reasons.

The pace of technological change seems to be increasing rather dramatically, and may be affecting our environment in ways that we don't yet fully understand.

What if ubiquitous telecommunications signals -- electromagnetic fields or god knows what -- from cell phones and wireless internet actually do contribute to cancer?

What if the huge increase in technological inputs into our food supply (pesticides, genetic modification, growth hormones and antibiotics, chemical additives) and fat and sugar in our diets (fast food, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc.) pulls down life expectancy? We know we're getting fatter, and there may be other health effects as well.

What if pollution and population density have reached a tipping point that will exert a depressing effect on lifespan?

What if the dramatic increase in global trade and travel has made us more vulnerable to exotic disease outbreaks?

The point is that all these things are new enough that we won't be in a position to fully understand their effects until the next generational cohort starts dying off: perhaps the baby boomers, perhaps the generation Xers. It will be interesting to see whether baby boomers live longer than their parents.

I'm feeling a bit down today. In the hope of bringing you down too -- or, I don't know, maybe picking you up with a small laugh -- here are a couple of photos I took on Madeleine Island in Lake Superior this past fall of the World's Saddest Mini-Golf Place. Bear in mind: this was a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon.

A Christmas tale -- re-posted from December 25, 2004

Last night I was disappointed by the bare, snowless ground. As a Jewish kid, I didn’t grow up with Xmas and did not really establish much in the way of annual Xmas rituals, but I do like Christmas carols and snow on the ground on Christmas morning. So did my mom, ironically; although she adamantly forbid a Christmas tree in our house, she too liked snow on the ground on Christmas morning. Maybe it had to do with her love of Broadway musicals. As a semi-professional writer and director of musical theatre, she had a professional respect for Irving Berlin, the Jewish songwriter who gave us "White Christmas."

Our non-sectarian Christmas ritual was TV Christmas specials. In my childhood, there were no videos or DVDs that we could force our parents or baby-sitters to run three times without break. What we had – all we had – was the annual, ritualistic airing of The Wizard of Oz around Thanksgiving (Halloween?), and the Charlie Brown holiday specials, of course, starting withe the classic A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s kind of fun to know It’s A Wonderful Life by heart, and it seems like they still show that. But my favorite was always Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. It was my favorite annual date: attention was paid to the TV schedule (not by me, I was too young to read), and the day was planned to be sure that my sister and I were plopped in front of the TV when the curtain went up on Mr. Magoo. And it was always better if we could bully our parents into watching it with us.

In my distant-childhood-recollection way, I have this sense that it was on every year for many years, and that I watched it several dozen times. The math doesn’t work though, since that would have me watching it annually until age thirty-eight. I probably only saw it an improbably small number of times, like 5 or 6. The TV networks dropped it a long time ago, which has always burned me, because I remember it as being so good, running my young emotional frame through a gauntlet of emotion: scared, haunted, laughing, and deeply moved.

I’m not one who believes that technology is an unalloyed good, but I may never have appreciated the miracle of DVD more than yesterday, when browsing the holiday section of my video store I found – only moments after sharing the reminiscence with my companion – a copy of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Guess what I did last night.

I have to say that, other than the color (we had a black-and-white TV in those days), it was much as I remembered it; where it differed, it was better than I remembered, or else forgivable. The animation is quaint – not state of the art even for 1962, since it was made for TV – but charming. And though, as a 50 minute cartoon, it is necessarily fast-paced, Magoo is a remarkably true and moving adaptation of the Dickens story. The cartoon uses a clever conceit of presenting the story as a Broadway musical production of A Christmas Carol. Magoo, who you may recall is a seriously myopic character whose comedic schtick comes from his visual confusion, bumbles his way to the theatre, and the curtain goes up on him starring as Ebeneezer Scrooge. The visual frame of the stage disappears as we get drawn into the story – just the way it does in a real theatre – and returns only at the end of each act, when presumably the TV version would cut to commercials. Although the pure wonder of my childhood perception is gone, Magoo really stands the test of time; it’s funny, still charming, and packs emotional punch. The ghost of Christmas future is as haunting as ever, and the moment at the end of act two, with Magoo/Scrooge on hands and knees in front of his own gravestone, singing “I am all alone in the world” made me weepy.

Mr. Magoo was the star of a long-running cartoon short in the early 60s, and his voice was always performed by Jim Backus, famous for his role as Thursten Howell, “the millionaire” on Gilligan’s Island. The Magoo role called for broad comedic acting, and yet, there’s something commendably post-modern and talented about playing a cartoon character who is himself an actor playing another role – not Backus as Scrooge, but Backus as Magoo playing Scrooge. There is some other notable voice work on Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Morey Amsterdam – yes, Buddy Sorrell from The Dick Van Dyke Show – is somehow snuck in there. I have to watch it again to figure out who he is, because there was no Jewish comedian in the tale. Paul Frees does several characters, like Harry Shearer nowadays on The Simpsons. Frees was a giant of voice-over work in that era, and you’ll probably recognize his voice as the host of Disneyland’s “Haunted Mansion.”

I was also taken aback to find that the Ghost of Christmas present (the hale and hearty one) was played by Les Tremayne. You probably don’t know who Les Tremayne is, though in his day, he was a famous radio actor – acknowledged in 1940 as the third most recognizable voice in America, after President Franklin Roosevelt and Bing Crosby.

Why was I taken aback? You see, Les Tremayne and I have a bond. He died a year ago, the week before Christmas, and his obituary appeared exactly one year ago, on Christmas day 2003. On the same page of the newspaper was the obituary of my mother.

My mother died of cancer on the solstice, December 21, 2003. In recent days, I’d been thinking that I’d like to speak with her, and I’ve been wondering "why can’t death mean that you can no longer see the person, but you can still talk to her on the phone?" I think I could handle that.

Mr. Magoo, a Broadway musical, Christmas day obituary... I think you see where this is going. I was warned about this anniversary, and I said, "Bah, humbug!" If you’d read my blog on December 22 and 23, you might have detected the manic quality of someone experiencing mood swings of a bottled-up emotion. "Coffee? What's really going on?"

I didn’t observe the anniversary of my mother’s death on the solstice, or the next day, or the next. Then Les Tremayne appeared, this time in the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past, and took me to where I could cry.

When I woke up this morning, it was snowing.

No, this is not a typo -- I know this is not the proper spelling of "whoopee cushion," (if there is a "proper" spelling). It's a reflection of my limited acronym skills. But don't let that detract from my official announcement:

"W" is the WOrst President In Combined United States History In Our Nation

Yes, it's official. Here are just a few of the key facts about how W the Boy President is our worst ever.

1. Winning the Iraq War -- again and again. May 1, 2003: Bush announces victory in Iraq. December 15, 2005: Bush projects confidence about the prospects for victory in Iraq.

2. Making the world less safe for democracy. The reason we were supposed to put up with all the other bullshit (e.g., the far right wing domestic agenda, drilling for oil in Alaska nature reserves, privitizing Social Security, etc.) is because Bush was supposed to be strong on national security, particularly in leading us in the war on terrorism. But it is now widely agreed even by bipartisan and middle-to-conservative experts (e.g., 9/11 Commission, Council on Foreign Relations) that the Iraq war has not only stretched our military resources dangerously thin, but has also been a dangerous diversion of leadership attention from the real security issues. This is no joke: the attention and energies of people in charge are a resource, and it's all going into the Iraq war, rather than actual terrorist threats and the growing potential for nuclear threat from rogue states, terrorists and criminal organizations.

3. Fighting against our rights here at home. Bush is now "vigorously" defending the recently disclosed domestic spying by national security agencies on U.S. citizens, in blatant violation of the 4th amendment. What were they going to do with this illegally obtained evidence, when it would not be usable for prosecutions in a court of law? Oh, right, I guess they'd use it in the unconstitutional military tribunals in which the Bush administration claims power to try, convict and punish people without having to go through the court system.

4. Wrecking the economy. Turning a budget surplus into the largest deficit in our nation's history was a challenge, but was accomplished with the creative idea of cutting taxes (primarily for the rich, of course) during a war.

5. Scandal and corruption. Waging a thinly-justified war that creates an opportunity for war profiteering of historic proportions by business interests connected to the administration tops this list, in my book.

6. Dismantling the government. This story, while largely below the national news radar screen, is one of my favorites. Because the Bush administration has no interest in enforcing our environmental, civil rights and antitrust laws, there is not enough work for lawyers in those divisions of the Department of Justice. To fill up their time, the Bush administration is putting the department's civil rights and antitrust lawyers to work on deportation cases. That is, the entire justice department is going into the business of getting rid of "illegal aliens." Meanwhile, the Bush administration is driving out career professionals from DOJ and replacing them with political hacks.

WOPICUSHION Meme: do YOU think Bush is the Worst President in Combined U.S. History In Our Nation? What are your top 6 reasons?

# posted by Oscar Madison @ 8:11 AM 14 Comments