Jesus Christ is Coming to Town

12/14/05


As you know the holidays are rapidly approaching; at least we hope they are, if Bill O’Reilly is to be believed there is an insidious and creeping War on Christmas by, apparently, people who hate Jesus and possibly kittens. That’s not really what I want to talk about today, but I will spend just a few sentences on it since it’s just so damned funny.

Bill and a few other right-wingers are upset with what they believe to be the devaluation of Christmas, (the only National, religious holiday!) in our society. Bill says, and admittedly, he might be clinically insane, that Christians find the term “Happy Holidays,” instead of “Merry Christmas,” offensive; whether it’s printed on a card or in a storefront or just plain said to them as they pass by the donations bucket without a sideward glance. However, he also says that “Merry Christmas” is not offensive to non-Christians. How he would know this is beyond me and the weight of such massively hypocritical ideas should have caused his head to simply roll off his shoulders long ago. I guess he’s just feeling oppressed because the rest of the country is starting to take back a bit of its supposedly guaranteed secular identity after some 400 years of Christian stranglehold. Although, this too seems odd since not only are 80% of the people in this country Christian, but they also control the Executive Branch and Congress, and if Alito gets confirmed they’ll have the Supreme Court pretty much sewn up, too.

You’d think Bill would be pleased as punch to be rich, white and a member of the current ruling class, but apparently all these advantages cannot compare to the horror of receiving a “Holiday Card” instead of a “Merry-Jesus-Christmas-Jesus-Jesus”…card. Now I can’t assume that Bill O’Reilly is just kind of dumb, because anyone that fanatical over anything other than sports scores or the activities of mediocre celebrities is rarely dumb, but he just might be bat-shit insane.

All of this is just a prelude to what I actually wanted to say on a related topic. Today I overheard one of my coworkers engaged in a conversation about what Santa Clause is bringing this year to her daughter. I’m convinced that anyone with a child under the age of twelve, especially if it’s their first, is incapable of going for longer than thirteen minutes without mentioning them as if they are some new breed of fantastic homo sapian instead of just some average schmuck like everyone else. The breeders find this somewhat rude to actually say out loud, so I refused to join in the conversation about how little Billy was going to set the scientific world on its ear with his new chemistry set and the ability to turn water different colors…if he doesn’t manage to kill himself by swallowing the dozens of harmful substances under the sink first.

But as I pass, I hear this statement:

“I never believed in Santa Clause because my parents didn’t want me to grow up and find out he wasn’t real, then question whether or not God was real.”

This one took me a little time to digest, as it is far and away one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard come out of another human’s mouth, other than that bizarre, nuts-caught-in-a-toaster scream Howard Dean belted out during his campaign.

I believe we can infer several different things from this woman’s statement, none of them particularly flattering to her parents. I can only assume these people believe that the only reason kids believe in God is that their parents say so, hence if their parents told them about Santa and he turned out to be a farce, God must be as well. The logic of this is almost the reverse of something often used by politicians and governments as a whole. It’s a variation on the old “can’t prove a negative” trick. Goes like this: “Just because you don’t find something you were looking for, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. (Remember this one from the WMD argument?) And if one thing turns out to be false, it doesn’t mean similar things are false.”

In my coworker’s case, her parents went the other way of equally flawed logic, supposing that just because Santa turns out to be utter malarkey, their child would believe everything they’ve ever told her was bullshit. What kind of moron do they think they’re raising here? Did they have so little faith in her reasoning ability as to believe that she is incapable of differentiating between one thing and another, just marking everything across the board as exactly as important as everything else? “Oh no, there’s no Easter Bunny…that must mean going to school is total horseshit!” Maybe they did think that, reasoning that anyone bred by their rather less than Mensa-esque loins would spend her life doing whatever anyone in authority tells her.

But it does raise a further, more interesting if not severely unlikely possibility. Perhaps her parents reasoned that their child was of superior intelligence and would, by the time she was able to discover Santa’s falsity, make the connection that there is exactly the same amount of tangible and logical evidence for the existence of a jolly old elf living at the top of the world despite the utter lack of land, as there is for a virgin giving birth to some kid who was human and God and now lives in the sky and created all of us in His image despite the fact we have evolutionary holdovers like superfluous male nipples and non-functioning appendixes which serve no purpose but to burst and kill us; but He loves us all, except the gays. This is possible, but about as likely as the chance of me waking up tomorrow and not being vaguely disappointed that I’m still alive.

Whatever the reason, it is clear to me that this woman’s parents were deathly afraid of allowing her to make her own informed decisions in life or comprehending why the discovery that the fat man in red who left her all those presents was just a pleasant fairy tale. But I can forgive all this, because the chick has big cans.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m busy battling a viral infection with the power of orange juice laced with powerful amounts of vodka. Merry Holidays!