Simply Having a Wonderful (and Early) Christmastime!!

Like the errant zombies or first cases of mystery plague foreshadow the oncoming apocalypse in a B horror movie, the first Christmas carols and movies of the season have signaled the coming onslaught of the Holiday Season.

It caught me off guard.  I just sorted through my daughter's Halloween candy this Thursday (and, just between you and me, I have been pilfering from it ever since).  Then on Saturday I am flipping through the channels and see that the Hallmark Channel is already showing its particular brand of Christmas movie (i.e. the ones that are so sweet they make you yak) 24/7, and today at Subway over the din of people ordering sandwiches I heard a ghostly 1990's version of Neil Diamond -- a Neil Diamond well past his prime but still with the power to fill the Roanoke Civic Center with adoring middle aged women and their abashed husbands -- wishing me a Merry Christmas in musical form.

I should have known, of course.  I and millions of others have noted for quite some time that Christmas comes earlier and earlier each year; it seems that we have finally reached the "All Hallows Eve Asymptote", the line that Schrodinger postulated the beginning of the holiday season might approach but not cross whilst he was taking a break from looking for his cat.

Admittedly, I am something of a humbug when it comes to the Holidays.  Christmas in of itself is okay, and its good to spend time with family and friends, and I admit I do enjoy a good Creme Brulee late.  Oh, and on Boxing Day there is always a full set of EPL soccer matches, which is a great way to spend the day after Christmas.  The British certainly got that one right.

But the Humbugs are many.  There are endless days of meaningless and often uninspiring College Football games. There is the crass commercialism.  There is the bad music -- Christmas may have produced Handel's Messiah, but it also produced "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer".  But most of all, I'd say my problem with the Christmas Season is that I find it impossible to sustain the much expected good cheer over its long length.

Look, as it is, I can store up enough happiness to maybe last three days.  After that, external factors come into play.  I generally have to avoid books and music.  The brunette who works at the Park Lane Tavern on Wednesdays can't call in sick.  The Browns have to lose all their football games.  Wolf Blitzer needs to keep his beard carefully trimmed at 3/35ths of an inch lest the increased gravitation pull of his whiskers throw off the delicate balance of the moon, wind, and tides, thus varying the progression of ocean waves as they crash into the shoreline while I sit on the beach writing bad poetry.  I prefer my waves to have a period between 22 and 29 seconds;  anything outside that range can send me slipping into a melancholy of moderate intensity.

So my happiness is a tenuous thing -- too tenuous to last for a couple months, too tenuous to last for the whole Christmas Season.

Ah, but if you look up there are an awful lot of "I"s.  Perhaps I have forgotten the....*sigh*.....the true meaning of Christmas.  And that is that we have been put on this Earth to "Be Excellent to Each Other", that the fullest lives are those lived in compassion and love for others.  Such things may not lead to the happiness that a new I-pad or a Trek road bike or the full set of Aubrey/Maturin novels might bring (hint hint), but it might just be enough to sustain a person for more than three days, and maybe even the whole damned Holiday Season.

  

Must Love Dogs

So this week Arizona representative Brenda Barton noted in a facebook post that:

“Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?” 

When asked later to explain her comments she stated:

“It’s not just the death camps. [Hitler] started in the communities, with national health care and gun control,” Barton continued. “You better read your history. Germany started with national health care and gun control before any of that other stuff happened. And Hitler was elected by a majority of people.”

Okay, Ms. Barton.  Three things of note.

First of all, how many times do I have to tell you its "Der Fuhrer", not "De Fuhrer" by which I think you actually meant "Die Fuhrer"?  "Fuhrer" is masculine and requires a masculine article, not a feminine one.  F over!  Try again.

Secondly, a quick spin around the interwebs at various sources show that your history is debatable at best.  It looks as though strict gun laws were put in place in Germany as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, well before Hitler came to power in 1933.  Hitler's gun laws of 1938 actually seem to have increased access to guns for most Germans, Jews excluded.  National medicine was also already under way in Germany before Hitler came to power.  And even if Hitler was a stern advocate of these two policies, it was hardly the lynchpin of his rise to power or the rise of the Nazi state.  There were many other key factors and I don't think it particularly matters what Hitler's health and gun policies were.

So my third thing, Ms. Barton, is a question.

Do you love dogs?

I'm going to bet the answer is yes, because even if you don't there are thousands of registered voters in your state congressional district who most certainly do, and you don't want to alienate them in any way.  So you love dogs.

Well guess who else loved dogs?  This guy:

Hitler loved dogs.  You probably do too, Ms. Barton.  That doesn't mean you want to invade Canada to make more living space for our retirees to hang out in during the summer, and it doesn't mean you want to throw all the red heads in a concentration camp in the name of American Purity.  No.  It just means that you happen to have something in common with a horrible, horrible person.

Matters of policy may be more important than dogs, but even so if Hitler and Obama had similar gun policies it would mean only that they have one thing in common and little, if anything, else.  To suggest otherwise is as insane as suggesting that you are a Nazi because you love dogs.

I do tire of this whole comparing politicians to Hitler.  Rather than remember him as a representative for how low the human race can descend, Hitler has been made into something of a boogieman lurking in the closets of our nation, representing its most irrational fears.  We really should cut it out.  But sensible government is in short supply these days, so I see no end in sight.

Though perhaps there is one politician we can compare to Hitler....

Happy Happy Happy All the Way to the Bank

Usually on Wednesday's around 10 you'll find me sitting in front of the television with a grin on my face, watching the Robertson clan do anything but sell duck calls.

I started watching the show during the fall of 2012, in the midst of the second season (though I wonder if we need a new word for television season.  Calling it a run or a set might be better, but la da di da dee) a wee bit before it became a thing.  I admit the first time I saw it I didn't like it, but a few weeks later I gave it another chance and I watched Si Robertson go to the eye doctor.  

I was hooked.

It was only this past summer, walking around the Virginia Beach Aquarium in the midst of a family vacation, that I noticed people walking around with Duck Dynasty t-shirts.  In short order I learned that you could get Duck Dynasty garden gnomes, and towels, and calenders, and greeting cards, and Duck Dynasty sleep pants, bed sheets, socks, hats, boots, contact lens cases, chia pets, sleeping bags, christmas lights, cookbooks, coffee mugs, and so on and so on forever and ever, Amen.  

The merchandise didn't bother me too much, though I wasn't about to buy any.  It made me a little sad because it left me with a feeling that the show would collapse under its own weight, that the banal and casual brilliance of seasons 1-4 is simply impossible to sustain.  Maybe the Robertson family understands this, and that's why they are grabbing the lime-light while they well and truly can. 

But then there is the planned Duck Dynasty Christmas Album, due in stores on October 29th.  I think that's the last straw for me, a commercialized reach for a bridge too far, and my interest in the show is diminishing.
  

I'm not even sure why it matters to me.  I mean, it's not like I went to see Starry Night at MOMA Queens and there was Van Gogh himself trying to sell me a Paul Gauguin bobble head doll.  This is a show about some rich rednecks who rather enjoy hunting ducks and blowing stuff up, so who cares if it gets mired in commercialism just like everything else in this country does?

I would argue that in a world where most "end of men" sitcoms and movies suggest that the lest vestiges of manhood are merely a crass, unwavering interest in large breasts, it was nice to actually see something relatively wholesome that is nonetheless funny, featuring characters who meet a changing world by sticking to values of faith, family, and ducks.  It will be interesting to see how fame fits into that list.  For me, once you make a commemoration of a phenomenon by putting an old man's face on a t-shirt (as well posters, wall paper, key chains, cumberbunds, physics textbooks, regulation NFL footballs, and Roman Abromavich's bemused soccer watching smile) it loses some of what made it special in the first place.

Yeah, they exist.