Gaga Over the War on Christmas

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[For those of you who don’t follow my Twitter or Facebook, Mom’s been in the emergency room twice in the past forty-eight hours, first for a slipped disc and painful kidney stone and urinary tract infection, then again because the antibiotic they gave her for her UTI caused her heart to palpitate.  She appears to be doing better now, but I’m taking nothing for granted at this point, and needless to say this has me kind of rattled.  Not that losing Mom would ever be easy, but losing her this time of year would be especially painful.  I’m not entirely focused right now, so apologies if I’m not as coherent as usual, and for any of you tempted to joke about how you can’t tell the difference, bah humbug to you.]

A couple of days ago I went to Barnes and Noble to use up one of the many coupons they’ve been sending me lately, buying yet another book to add to my “books I need to read soon” pile that may soon need its own zip code.  While I was looking through things I heard a customer say to the man behind the checkout, “Merry Christmas.”  The man, who looked to be about sixty years old or so,  replied something to the effect of, “Have a good holiday.”  More telling was the short but incredibly pregnant pause before the cashier made his reply.  It was pretty obvious that the man wanted to say “Merry Christmas” back, but he couldn’t, likely because there’s some policy at Barnes and Noble directing its employees not to say anything Christmas-specific to customers because they want to be respectful of all religions.  That’s certainly a philosophy I agree with, but that pause as the man reminded himself not to say “the C-word” was kind of cringe-worthy, and in situations like that, especially when the customer has brought the word up first, you want the old man to be able to say “Merry Christmas” back.

Still, there are few things that have vexed me as much these past holiday seasons as all the rhetoric from the irrational right about the “War on Christmas,” that somehow saying “Merry Christmas” and having Christian-themed holiday decorations and displays isn’t controversial at the least, but somehow saying “Happy Holidays” or putting up holiday displays for non-Christian religions is this huge, un-American affront.  Someone signed up one of my freemail accounts to the American Family Association’s mailing list, and of course I’ve been inundated with e-mails about how I need to boycott all these companies that are trying to be inclusive of non-Christian religions in their holiday displays.  I keep reading them because there’s definitely something funny about them and the bloated rhetoric they use, but at the same time this kind of “You aren’t a real American if you aren’t a Christian, by how we define Christian (which often has little if any to do with the actual teachings of Jesus Christ), and we will do everything in our power to minimize if not criminalize everything the rest of you sinners do” talk has led this country further and further down the rabbit hole of lunacy.  Part of me wants to yell at them at the top of my lungs about how sick I am of them, but I don’t because they won’t listen no matter what I say.  Thinking back to that episode at Barnes and Noble, I almost wondered if that woman who was getting checked out was one of those “War on Christmas” people, who was going to go e-mail the irrational right and tell them about the grave offence committed against her religious beliefs because the cashier didn’t say “Merry Christmas” back to her.

I have a related story to share, although it’s not really my story.  Back when I taught my first creative writing class, one of the things I instructed my students to do was to report every week on the strangest thing they’d seen since we last met.  The exercise helped sharpen their focus, make them more aware of the world around them and the oddballs and strange situations that could be turned into great poems and stories.  One of my students, Vanessa, worked at a local bookstore (and still does), and she seemed to have a knack for dealing with the strangest customers and reporting on them in ways that made all of us laugh.  Since taking my class Vanessa and I have kept in touch online; we’re friends on Facebook and we follow one another’s Twitter accounts.

Anyway, a few days ago Vanessa tweeted that in her store a young girl went up to the calendar display with her mother and said that she wanted a Lady Gaga calendar, to which her mother said, “No, honey, she’s a sinner.”  Now, please understand that I’m far from the world’s biggest Lady Gaga fan, if only because I can tell from what little I’ve heard of her music that it’s just not my style.  That being said, as someone who grew up as a fan of Madonna, I admire Lady Gaga if only because she’s the first real mainstream female pop singer since Madonna who you can tell manages her own career.  Unlike all the other singers we’ve been subjected to since then, from Debbie Gibson and Tiffany to Christina and Britney, you know that Lady Gaga, like Madonna, calls all her own shots, and like Madonna she knows just where “that line” is when it comes to pushing people, and she knows when to step up to it, when to put one foot over it, and when to just blow it away and force everyone to pay attention to her.  Say what you will about her music or her image, but she is one smart woman.  Whether or not Lady Gaga is a “sinner” isn’t for me to say, of course, and it wasn’t for that mother to say, and that’s just another example of the kind of things these religious right people do that drives me insane.

The reason these people can get away with so much is through the threat of boycotts, like the American Family Association loves to do to any company that tells its employees to say “Happy Holidays” or treats non-heterosexuals with even the slightest smidgen of respect.  Companies are so afraid of losing any money through a boycott, no matter how small, that they fold to them as fast as they can.  Just think back several months ago when David Letterman joked about Bristol Palin in a way that everyone but the most feeble-minded could tell was directed towards Bristol, but then a few thousand Sarah Palin supporters (what was that I said about feeble-minded …) believed Sarah when she said that Letterman was joking about one of her younger, teenage daughters possibly being raped, and launched such a huge stink about it and a potential boycott of CBS that Letterman was forced to make several public apologies, while Palin dismissing and denigrating pretty much anyone who doesn’t agree with 100% of what she says with much harsher rhetoric goes unchecked.

Then again, perhaps this isn’t surprising behaviour coming from a crowd that worships the almighty dollar far more than they worship Jesus Christ, that thinks that money makes right and that those who screw poor people out of their money should be rewarded even more through unnecessary and ultimately debilitating tax breaks on the upper classes.  That’s why I’ve decided that after the holidays, once 2011 calendars go on discount (because I don’t want to pay $15 each), I’m going to go and buy two Lady Gaga calendars.  I won’t be putting them up anywhere, of course, but it should hardly come as a surprise to any of you that I know lots of Lady Gaga fans, so I’ll have plenty of opportunities to give them away.  Honestly, I think we need to do more of this.  When you’re in the mall and you hear some self-righteous mother who thinks she and the right-wing figureheads she follows have the authority to determine morality for all of us tells her son that she won’t let him go to the Marilyn Manson concert in town, you go and buy two tickets, and even if you don’t use them (I certainly wouldn’t), maybe we can do some small thing to counter what these sanctimonious sycophants are trying to do to the rest of us.

In that spirit, Happy Holidays to one and all.

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