Bah humbug again!

Time for another snarky, Grinchly diatribe against the commercial rape of the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus. Actually, I find that my last (and first) “Bah, humbug!” was three years ago (3 Dec 07). In fact, my illustrious blog, world-famous for its rapier wit and profound insights, has been practically dormant for the last year (one post in February and one in August), as it became evident that, world-famous as it was, nobody ever read it. But that’s another story.

Gosh, there’s so much to bitch and whine about! In ’07 it was about (1) the fact that it’s not Christmas until after the 25th, not before; (2) the mangling of Christmas carols blared from store speakers to make people spend more money; (3) the “war on Christmas” bullshit spouted by that demagogic asshole Bill O’Reilly. I could add “I’m dreaming of a black Kwanzaa” and “It’s the most horrible time of the year” to “Rudolph the purple-assed baboon,” “I saw Mommy blowing Santa Claus,” and “Roadkill roasting on an open fire.” I could note that the spending frenzy encouraged by the stores ultimately supports the economic growth of China and the stranglehold of the financial-services crime syndicate on consumers who are goaded into squandering money they don’t have and never will have. I could make more of an issue of obscenely opulent displays of decorations of such spectacular magnitude that they can be seen from outer space by the disrobed eyeball—displays which must create staggering amounts of greenhouse gases from the hundreds of kilowatt-hours of energy they use.

But this year I will attack Santa Claus—or, more precisely, what Santa Claus has been turned into by the secular-commercial society. Last year I was requested to act the part of Santa Claus in a fund-raising benefit at a local bookstore, and I replied that I’d only do it if I could call attention to the derivation of the present-day Santa Claus from St Nicholas, bishop of Myra (now part of Turkey) in the 4th century. Boy, did that ruffle some feathers among the secularists and atheists! (It didn’t help when a gay friend of mine asked to play the part of Mrs Claus.) Since St Nicholas’s feast day is 6 December, nineteen days before Christmas, it is rather curious how he became associated with the latter feast. According to the Wikipedia article on “Santa Claus,” he is derived from the Dutch figure of Sinterklaas, a “historical, legendary figure” who is said to bring gifts to the homes of good children on Christmas Eve. The legend has a hagiographic basis in the historical St Nicholas because of his generous giving of gifts. Nicholas is still revered as a saint in eastern Christendom, and up until recently was depicted in the regalia of an Orthodox bishop, which in western Christendom was gradually transmogrified into the ridiculous costume associated with Santa Claus today.

Enter Clement Clark Moore, the attributed author, in 1823, of that unspeakable abomination, “’Twas the night before Christmas,” for which I fervently hope he is eternally frying in Hell. It is to him that we owe this asinine business of flying reindeer pulling a sleigh through the sky and this fat fuck climbing up and down chimneys without getting a speck of soot on his absurd costume. I am warmly comforted by the fact that some children are terrified of this hideous apparition when they see him in stores during their parents’ spending orgy, and by the hundreds of jokes and cartoons which depict him as child-molesting old pervert who is often drunk when playing his part—as anyone would have to be to make such a monumental ass of himself in public. Then add that further atrocity Rudolph, who was introduced in a 1939 book before being enshrined in the 1949 song, and the debasement of Kiss-my-ass to a spectacular orgy of obscene prostitution is complete. Mind you, I’m not much more fond of some of the quasi-religious celebrations which focus on a sweet little Baby Jesus who looks distinctly Anglo-Scandinavian, and on immaculately groomed farm animals without a trace of cowshit anywhere in sight. (I still love the possibly apocryphal story of the choir that programmed a concert with “Here betwixt ass and oxen mild” followed by “Whence is this lovely fragrance?”) For my money, the best contemporary take on Christmas is still W. H. Auden’s For the time being, in which Joseph is the subject of town gossip because Mary is pregnant out of wedlock, and Herod is depicted as a liberal who resents being manipulated by God into being a bad guy against his will (i.e., slaughter of the Holy Innocents). I find it hard to beat these lines:

The garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Try singing “Santa Claus is coming to town” after reading that.

Happy Feast of the Nativity of Jesus.

Periodical literature review

As usual, I see no reason to apologize for five months of silence. Nobody reads my rambling drivel anyway, so no amount of silence will even be noticed. Actually, I had in draft in April an article about my recent addiction to Facefuck, but I never got around to publishing it and have now deleted it. I see no reason to make any comments on the continued plunge of the nation and the world into apocalyptic chaos and anarchy, except to opine that it isn’t happening fast enough for my taste. I see no point in making more than passing mention of the BP oil disaster, or Mel Gibson’s self-destruction in a flaming display of terminal assholism, or the media debates over whether Sarah Moosehunter will run for President in 2012, or whatever other non-events are the current fodder for the mass-opiate machine, or what Joe Bageant calls the American holograph. I stay remarkably busy with music gigs of one sort or another, and stay autistically isolated from a reality which I find unpleasant and boring. Life goes on, in spite of every effort to avoid it. It is, as Thomas Hobbes said, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I remember when the mainstream propaganda made considerable hay of Moosehunter’s failure to respond appropriately to some interviewer’s question of what newspapers and magazines she read. Having less presence of mind than an ordinarily bright turnip, she made the mistake of trying to cover her ass, instead of simply quoting the great line from none other than Jefferson, one of our revered floundering fodders, who said that the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers (but probably not better educated than the man who reads something besides newspapers). Presumably a candidate for high public office is expected to be conversant in the literature of the mainstream propaganda machine. I, however, not being a candidate for any office at all, rather pride myself on being essentially illiterate with regard to the mainstream media. If anyone were to have nothing better to do than ask me such a stupid question, I would reply that the only “news”-papers I read are the satirical Onion (stories you wish were true) and the local leftist Boulder Weekly, and the only magazines I make any effort to look at once in awhile are Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and the U.K.-published Economist. I may give a cursory glance at Time occasionally if there’s nothing else available, but I wouldn’t be caught dead with the Wall-eyed Journal. Mother Jones is to the Wall-eyed Journal as the Communist Manifesto is to Smith’s Wealth of nations.

But sometimes, in browsing through the magazine rack at my favorite coffee shop (which is NOT Starfucks!), I run across some rather interesting alternate realities, in some ways more bizarre than the Onion. The other day I picked up an issue of something called Real Simple, under the fatuous illusion that, judging from the name, it might have something to do with “simple living.” Not hardly. Roughly 200 of the 280 pages were devoted to advertisements, all of which, every one of which, were targeted to women, most of them for feminine health, beauty, and vanity. I subsequently learned from a Wikipedia stub that it is indeed a “women’s interest” magazine, to which I should have been clued in by the fact that the vast majority of customers at the coffee shop are women; I sometimes feel like I’m in a henhouse. There are no copies of Guns & Ammo, or even Sports Illustrated, in the magazine rack. Obviously no men except queers or transvestites are expected to look at it, and as one of the former, I can tell you the royal we were thoroughly disgusted. I can’t imagine how Time Inc., the publisher, came up with the name Real Simple, because the lifestyle it advertises is about as simple as the court of Louis XVI; I wonder if the millions of people on earth who live in grinding poverty, gnawing hunger, and squalid filth, or even the people in the “developed” nations who pursue authentically simple lifestyles, would consider it “simple.” I think Time Inc. should be sued for false labeling.

The real find, however—and, characteristically, I can’t remember where I found it—was a magazine called Kush: Colorado’s premier cannabis lifestyle magazine. Now, this is interesting on so many levels that it’s difficult to know where to begin. But let’s start with:
(1) The fact that a magazine devoted to “Colorado’s … cannabis lifestyle” is published in Calabasas CA, an exceedingly affluent, yuppie suburb west of LA, and there’s no indication that anyone on the editorial staff has anything to do with Colorado.
(2) The fact that the name “kush” refers to a strain of cannabis which is particularly popular with the medical pot community, and which is named for its origins in the Hindu Kush Mountains, in the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan—which will come as a great surprise to anyone who knows diddly-squat about the geopolitics of weed.
(3) The fact that the issue I picked up had an issue date of “June 15, 2010 – Volume 2, issue 6,” which may or may not indicate, depending upon what upscale publishers trying to sound like stoners mean by such terms as “volume” and “issue,” that the mag has been around for a year and a half, and I’m just now seeing it. I move in the wrong circles—obviously.
(4) Most basically, the fact that there even exists a magazine—a large, very glossy, rather pretentious magazine—devoted to “Colorado’s cannabis lifestyle”—or, more accurately, devoted to hundreds of ads for the doctors and dispensaries that the new industry has spawned. We’ve come a long way since the days when we had to furtively toke up in friends’ houses, paranoiacally looking over our shoulders for narcs lurking in the shadows; and frankly, I pine rather nostalgically for the good old days. (Who remembers the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers?) Now you have to go to all the hassle of getting some charlatan quack doctor to write a phony prescription for you. And you can buy (or pick up free, as I did) your own glossy yuppie mag to show how hip you are in your use of something that thousands of people are spending their lives rotting in prison for because of possession of miniscule amounts. There are, of course, still many knuckle-dragging troglodytes, lots of them in positions of political or “law enforcement” power, who would like to continue locking people up for seeking relief from chronic pain. These miserable cretins, who are lamenting the passage of all the bills legalizing the use of cannabis as presaging the downfall of civilization, are still stuck in the 1938 mentality of that monumental piece of cinematic propaganda bullshit, Reefer madness. There’s a special place in Hell for these creatures.

Well, till next time, as Red Green says, keep your stick on the ice. (I don’t think he’s referring to a hockey stick.)

Brief political inquiry

Could someone please tell me why the Republicans are enjoying such a huge resurgence of popularity among the masses when they’re the ones keeping the Administration from doing anything constructive, automatically and mindlessly saying “No no no no no” to anything Congress or O-bomb-a tries to do? The “Tea Party” phenomenon has been shown, by numerous commentators, to be basically a crock of stupid shit embraced by political imbeciles and moral cretins, who are led around like mindless puppets by raving psychopaths whose rhetorical techniques seem to include crying like a baby, lying like Pinocchio, and fomenting as much fear and hatred as possible. And yet the “Tea-baggers” seem to be growing in strength, which presumably argues for an increasing number of political imbeciles and moral cretins deciding the movement expresses their feelings (I hesitate to credit them with thoughts or ideas). Granted, they have a lot of ammunition in the catastrophic debacle which this Administration has turned out to be, but they themselves are part of the reason for this, another part being the total spinelessness and treachery of the Dummy-crats.

Well, I said this would be brief, and I’ll keep my promise, uncharacteristic as it is for me to be brief. Just thought I’d throw that out and see if anybody would shoot it.