Defending Christmas

            

Last year, just about this time, I posted a “Heartwarming Xmas Tale.”  I fully expected the piece to become a Yule classic and it was my sincere wish that families would gather every Christmas Eve and read the Tale aloud.  I envisioned the children each reading their favorite part and the glow of the story’s message of kindness would carry everyone through the season.

Unfortunately, the reaction to my offering was less than enthusiastic.  Pat and I hosted a small dinner party late last December and in keeping with the season I printed a few copies of the “Heartwarming Xmas Tale” and left them on an end table for our guests to pick up and read.  The first friend to do so, read the whole piece and then screwed up his face and asked, rather incredulously, “Did you make that up”?  Little did I know, his reaction would be the most positive one I would get.

Another friend began reading the post and periodically would look at me and shake his head.  My five and half regular readers, who often send me emails commenting on various posts, were ominously silent.

These reactions were a bit sobering, but I felt I could always rely on my family for support.  At least that was how I felt until Pat asked my mother if she had read the Tale and my sister reminded her that Pat was referring to “that stupid thing I had written.”  Even the Teacher’s reaction was tinged with embarrassment and shame.

All of this lead me to decide to sit this Xmas season out and not to write anything that would cause further distress to friends and family.  But that was before I heard Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly warning of a war on Christmas.  Apparently, this war has been going on for at least twelve years according to Bill.  I don’t know how I missed it, but the reaction to “The Heartwarming Xmas Tale” started to make sense.

Then my awareness of the war on Christmas was heightened when I heard a Fox News host express her distress at having to drive her kids around looking for a nativity scene.  I had no idea things had gotten so bad and I wondered what I, personally, could do to defend Christmas.  I figured that if our Fox News host was out driving around there had to be countless other parents in the same situation.  So I went on churchangel.com and found that there are 420 Christian churches in Minneapolis registered on the website.  I’m pretty sure there are at least a few more that haven’t registered with churchangel.com and I’m sure there are more Christian churches in Saint Paul and the rest of the metro area.  So, before you get in the car to search for a Christian Christmas display, I suggest you try this method to foil the anti-Christmas gang.  Go out side and spin in a circle.  At some point before you become too dizzy, stop spinning and run in the direction you are facing.  Given the number of Christian churches in our community, you should only have to run approximately three blocks in any direction to run into a Christian church.  Once you get to the church, it is highly likely it will have a nativity scene on display, or at the very least, will be able to tell you where you need to go to see one.

I’ve spent a day cleaning out the space under the stairs to our basement, so when the Teacher and Pako come to celebrate Christmas with us this weekend before they head to Mexico to celebrate the actual day with Pako’s family, we can eat down there without being disturbed.  It might be a bit cramped, but it is more easily defended and I swear, the forces of Satan will not get my Christmas ham this year.

As I thought more about the reaction to my Heartwarming Xmas Tale last year and put it into the context of the War on Christmas, I realized that the cabal that is trying to ruin Christmas had probably manipulated my readers’ subconscious.  Of course, some of my readers are just plain heathens and there is no explanation for them.  The more I though about it, the more convinced I became, that I too, was a victim of the War on Christmas.

My newly raised consciousness required I go all out to defend Christmas.  As I pondered what I could do to fight back, it came to me like a lightening bolt (I intend to write to Bill and ask if he thinks it was Divine inspiration).  So, in order to stick it to the hordes of anti-Christmasites out there, I have decided to defend Christmas by re-posting “A Heartwarming Xmas Tale.”  Enjoy it with your family and Happy Holidays.

Once upon a time there was a man who lived in a small town who made his living repairing shoes.  The town was not wealthy and people still had their shoes repaired rather than buying new ones and the man was able to make a modest living from his business.

The man rented a small cubby hole, not much larger than a walk in closet, in the town’s downtown, and there he sat all day surrounded by pairs of broken down shoes.

The man was not particularly good looking or bright but was a good soul whose one unfulfilled wish was to meet a woman, marry and have a large family.  The man truly loved children and wanted to surround himself with happy kids.  His problem in fulfilling his dream was his innate shyness and social ineptitude made it difficult for him to meet and woo a mate.

At around this time there was a woman who made her living walking all over town, with a small grinding wheel, sharpening knives, scissors and just about anything that needed sharpening.  As she walked through the various sections of the town she would whistle a sweet tune that would signal the housewives and business owners that she was in their vicinity in case they needed something sharpened.

The first time the shoe repairman saw the woman he was immediately smitten.  Every time he heard her whistle, he would frantically search for something for her to sharpen.  There interactions were very polite and formal and appeared on the surface to be nothing more than business transactions.

One day, when the man had everything he owned with an edge already sharpened, he, out of desperation, presented the woman with a spoon.  The woman smiled and realized the man admired her for more than her sharpening prowess. Gently, she led their conversation around to Saturday night and the man managed to mumble an invitation to the woman to go with him to a movie.  Thus began their yearlong courtship that ended with a small ceremony before the town Justice of the Peace.

The woman was soon pregnant, as the man, while not being overly bright or good looking, was blessed with highly potent swimmers.  Nine months later, a baby boy was born.  They named the baby Juan.  The man and woman lived in a small one-bedroom apartment over a hardware store and Juan slept in a dresser drawer.   As soon as it was humanly possible the woman became pregnant again and nine months later another child was born.  Neither the man nor the woman could agree on a name for the new baby so eventually they decided to name the child Two.

The man and woman were running out of available dresser drawers so alternative housing became a necessity.  Around this time the man’s only living relative, a bachelor farmer, named Eddie died and left the man a large, if somewhat rundown, farmhouse about three miles outside of town.  Uncle Eddie had lived in the farmhouse the last 25 years with his best friend Larry, who rented one of the many bedrooms in the old house.  Larry had died three months before Uncle Eddie and their misfortune solved the man and woman’s housing problem.  They moved to the farmhouse and before long the woman was pregnant again.   When the baby was born the same naming inertia happened and they decided to name the baby Three.

Life proceeded in kind, and over the next ten to fifteen years Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven and Twelve were born.  They were a poor family but generally happy as the man and the woman were kind and loving parents.  As time went on the man and woman noticed that their twelve offspring were taking different life paths.  Two, Four, Six, Eight, Ten, and Twelve were studious highly focused achievers while Juan, Three, Five, Seven, Nine, and Eleven lacked direction and, frankly, were a little odd.

Time rolled on and one by one the children left home to pursue their fortunes.  Two, Four, Six, Eight, Ten and Twelve embarked on successful careers as doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and college professors.  They married like-minded professionals and moved to all four corners of the country.

The other children, I will call them “the odd children” not in judgment but in order to facilitate the story, had tougher, if not more colorful, paths to adulthood.

Juan had several scrapes with the law over petty thievery and had spent a few months in the county lockup on various theft misdemeanors.  His passion was taxidermy.  He specialized in recreating famous scenes from history by posing various vermin and critters he found in the woods behind his house or along the side of the road.  His best-known piece was a recreation of Lee’s surrender to Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse marking the end of the civil war. He considered a recreation of Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak at the end of the Ice Bowl to be his masterpiece.  He agonized over how to recreate Chuck Mercein, a Packer running back, who had tumbled into the end zone behind Starr, with his arms raised giving the signal for a touchdown because the critters he had used to represent the 22 players on the field all had short forelegs and were incapable of raising them over their heads convincingly.  Juan lost sleep trying to figure out how to solve this problem and complete the piece he felt would rocket him to preeminence in the world of taxidermy.

Three was an extremely shy and socially inept child who only really felt comfortable in the presence of chickens.  Every birthday and holiday he asked for chickens and before long he was selling eggs out of the shoe repair shop.  When he turned eighteen he left home and used his egg money to buy a small piece of land in the country away from humans and started a poultry farm.

Five’s only distinguishing characteristic was his uncanny resemblance to Popeye the Sailor Man.  He briefly cashed in on his appearance when a local movie theatre ran a Robert Altman film retrospective that included his Popeye movie.  Five would stand in the lobby dressed as the famous sailor and spin a corncob pipe in the corner of his mouth.  This employment was short lived and he worked several menial jobs before settling in as a short order cook in a 24-hour greasy spoon.

Seven had problems with drugs and alcohol during her late teens and twenties.  She rocketed from one shaky relationship to another, always ending badly.  At one point in her late twenties she married Homer Swans, who she believed was the heir to the Swan’s ice cream fortune. When she sobered up, after a week or two, she discovered Homer was the heir to a dilapidated house trailer and nothing else.  The marriage lasted 39 days ending in a no fault divorce.  Seven’s marriage experience represented rock bottom for her and she resolved to change her life.  She took up endurance sports beginning with mountain bike racing and expanding to marathon running, triathlons, speed walking, mountain climbing, bungee jumping, steeplechase, and giant wave surfing.  Her latest sport was long distance swimming and she hoped to swim from Florida to Cuba by the end of the year.

Nine was a joiner.  Unfortunately, she most often joined cults.  Her extreme devotion to principle and rigid adherence to every rule soon alienated everyone in the cult and she would soon be asked to leave.  Her latest obsession was linked to a rogue priest in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who advocated dancing as the cure all for the world’s problems.  Utilizing Nine as his chief disciple, the priest instituted the Mash Potato Mass during which the flock would get up and dance for an hour straight.  Any dance was acceptable and it was not uncommon to see the mash potato, boogalou, fox trot, polka, and all manner of free style twitching going on at the same time.  The local bishop was threatening to have the priest defrocked if he didn’t stop his dance ministry but Nine assured him that if he was defrocked she would continue ministering to the religiously funky.

Eleven became the world’s worst daredevil.  He never failed to clear five of the six cars he was attempting to jump on his motorcycle. He always managed to blow himself up or set himself on fire when he performed standard daredevil stunts.  He worked a regional circuit of stock car races, small county fairs and church picnics and became a local legend.  He never failed to entertain and had broken nearly every bone in his body at one time or another.  He also held the record for walking away from small aircraft crashes and had attracted a small following at the local airport where he hung out.  His latest endeavor was to form a Piper Cub (a small prop airplane) precision flying team.  They perfected one trick, which consisted of two columns of five planes in parallel lines nose to tail.  Eleven lead the other fliers in this formation, which he called “the pipe.”   They were in great demand satisfying America’s curious desire to see planes fly over sporting events and had flown over high school football games in three different states.

Time passed and the shoe repairman passed away peacefully at home.  The woman continued to live in the old farmhouse, now alone, and grew to be old and fat.  The even keeled children slowly stopped visiting home citing busy schedules, deadlines, travel distance and various other career pressures for their absences.  Unspoken, but none-the-less real, were their feelings of embarrassment at their humble beginnings, the run down farmhouse and their overweight mother.  So it was left to the odd children to make sure that their mother was not alone on holidays and birthdays.

So it was on a December 25^th morning, Juan was busy strapping a fruit tree he had dug out of his neighbor’s yard the night before to the roof of his van.  Just as he was tightening the last strap, Juan looked up and saw Three coming up the street.  Three was carrying a small cage containing two Crevecoeur chickens.  Under his other arm he carried a large Tupperware tub.  Three had contacted Juan a couple of nights before to see if he could get a ride to their mother’s house.

Although they hadn’t seen each other in over two years, Juan and Three greeted each other as if they had been hanging around together the night before.  Juan knew that Three wasn’t much of a conversationalist and the four hour drive would be done mostly in silence.

Juan took the cage from Three and put Three’s French chickens in the back of his van.  Juan asked Three what was in the Tupperware tub.  Three told him he had been contacted by Five who told him he had to work at the diner on the 25^th and wouldn’t be able to go with his brothers to visit their mother.  Five, knowing his mother’s love of onion rings, had made up a batch to send to her as a present.  Three popped off the Tupperware lid and showed Juan Five’s golden rings.

Juan and Three got in the van and were backing out of the driveway when Juan suddenly hit the breaks, put the van in park and ran back in the house.  A minute later Juan came back out carrying a stuffed bird.  He told Three he was going to attach the bird to the branches of the tree when he transplanted it in his mother’s side yard.  He thought she would get a kick out of seeing the bird in the fruit tree.

They rode in silence until they cleared the outskirts of the town.  Once out in the country, Three turned to Juan and asked him if Seven was going to be there this year.  Juan told him she wouldn’t be there because Seven Swans a’swimming to Cuba as they spoke. Three then told Juan that Nine’s laity was dancing and she couldn’t get away this year, either.  Juan told Three he had heard from Eleven and was told he would meet them at the farmhouse and he was planning something special for their mother.  Thus the conversation ended until they were about a quarter mile from the farmhouse.

As they approached their mother’s house, Juan heard a faint droning sound and spotted a series of small specs in the sky.  He pulled the van over and he and Three got out and looked up in time to see Eleven’s pipers piping over their mother’s house.

Three and Juan stood transfixed, as they were not immune to America’s strange love of flyovers, until the pipers had disappeared from view.  Juan then looked at the farmhouse itself and saw what looked like flames shooting out the upstairs windows and smoke billowing from a section of the roof. The boys jumped back in the van and raced the last quarter mile skidding to a stop some 25 feet from the front door.  Juan and Three burst from the van and charged up the front steps and into the house.  The first floor was beginning to fill with smoke and Three went from room to room calling his mother’s name.  Juan dashed upstairs and ran down a very smoky hallway where he found his dazed and disoriented mother sitting in a heap.  Juan called to Three and the two of them struggled to get their rather large mother to her feet.  Once she was standing each of the boys took one of her arms and guided her down the hallway, down the stairs, through the living room and out into the front yard where the three of them gulped in the most delicious air they had ever breathed.

The moral of the story:  Appreciate your odd children because they may someday pull your fat out of the fire.

HO HO HO!    Merry Xmas, Everyone.

Ambiguity

            

Recently, we celebrated Veteran’s Day.  Let me begin by saying, everyone who honorably served in the military deserves a day and probably a whole lot more.  But, Veteran’s Day reminds me of a bit comedian, Louis CK, does in his stand up entitled “Of Course, but Maybe.”  The bit is built around certain facts that every right thinking person should embrace, but there are these darker thoughts that creep into one’s mind that may be wrong, but have a certain rationale to them.

I think part of the uncertainty I feel about Veteran’s Day is that it is just too easy.  The NFL hands out camouflage towels and underwear, finds a local member of the military to sing the national anthem and everyone feels good.  People slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and thank soldiers in the airport for their service and then go on with their day.  These are nice gestures, but are they enough?

Since the inception of our all-volunteer military, we have placed tremendous burdens on a tiny sliver of our population.  We have been at war for over ten years now, yet our citizens have not been asked for any contribution beyond standing at attention when the jets fly over the stadium.  The press has treated these prolonged wars as not being worthy of coverage and we end up treating war like it’s a bad reality show that has run its course and now bores us.  There is no pressure applied by the press or public to end the war because it doesn’t affect the vast majority of us.

I wonder how the veteran, who is number 750 thousand on the waiting list to have his or her disability claim processed, feels when they are being thanked for their service in an ad sponsored by Walmart.  Did the many hundreds of service members who have committed suicide in recent years feel they were appreciated?  Does the show of public support ring hollow for the soldiers in Afghanistan, whose rations were cut to two meals a day this year or the soldiers who were sent to Iraq without the armored vehicles they needed to protect themselves from the enemy’s most prolific and deadly weaponry?

It all just feels like a PR campaign sometimes.  In my lifetime, the country has engaged in three major wars and numerous military operations that haven’t risen to full-scale war.  The older I get, the more convinced I get that when the first bullet is fired both participants have already lost.  Vietnam was fought, supposedly, to keep the dominoes from falling in South East Asia.  We lost that war, yet the dominoes did not fall as predicted.  Was all the blood and horror and killing worth it?  Was all the money that could have been used for research, education, food programs, and infrastructure, better spent killing tens of thousands of American soldiers and at least a million Vietnamese?

After 9/11, a shocked and frightened nation was rushed into a war in Iraq despite the Iraqis having nothing to do with the attack.  The plan for this war was drawn up years before the Bush administration brought the neocons into power and the trauma of 9/11 was used as a triggering event to justify their dreams of restructuring the Middle East more to their liking while securing hegemony over the region and its resources.  A compliant press beat the drums of war and administration officials gave the public visions of mushroom clouds and poison gas labs to build support for their war of choice.   The voices of caution or protest were labeled naïve or un-American.  And, over three thousand of our soldiers died and tens of thousands were wounded as a result. 

What did the Iraq war achieve?   An evil dictator, who was our evil dictator a little over a decade before, was removed.  We spent somewhere in the neighborhood of two to six trillion dollars, lost thousands of our soldiers, brought about the death of at least 100 thousand Iraqi civilians and displaced as many as two million and strengthened Iran’s influence in the country.  Today, Iraq is a country torn apart by the instability brought about by our war.  This year, more than 8000 Iraqi civilians have died in terror bombings and targeted killings.  If this war was a success, I would hate to see a disaster.

In Afghanistan we are wrapping up twelve years of war and we have no idea what victory looks like.  Our Afghan allies have killed as many of our soldiers as our Afghan enemies in the last couple years. In 2012, more U.S. military personnel killed themselves than were killed by the enemy.  Again, we have spent enormous amounts of money and spilled more of our soldiers' blood without seeing much of a return.  Now the Obama administration is in negotiations with the Afghan government to reach an open ended agreement to keep our troops there for at least the next ten years.

By all accounts, our soldiers have performed well, but that is a different question than whether the sacrifices we have asked of them were worth it. Can we honestly say that the U.S. is better off today because of these wars?  Therein lies another conflict that pops up for me when we celebrate Veteran’s Day.  I know it is a day to honor our veterans, but it seems to me that in honoring our men and women in uniform, we too often conflate their service with the policies put forth by the civilian leadership of our military.  I fear that supporting our troops gets perverted into supporting disastrous military actions that are paid for with the blood, bodies, and minds of our troops.

In the last couple of years, tapes of Lyndon Johnson talking about the Vietnam War at the beginning of his administration revealed that he knew before he escalated the war that the cause was lost.  He escalated it anyway fearing he would expose himself and his party to political attacks along the lines of the “who lost China” debate after Mao’s revolution.  Tens of thousands of American soldiers died because of domestic politics, not to mention somewhere in the neighborhood of a million Vietnamese.  In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected partly on the promise that he had a secret plan to end the war.   At the end of his first four-year term the war raged on. Our veterans paid the price.  No amount of medal ceremonies, Veteran’s Days, or proclamations of support can make that right.

When I hear some pundit piously intoning how the troops are protecting our freedom, I can’t help but think about Vietnam and Iraq and wonder how our freedom was protected by these policy disasters.  The deaths, displacements, suicides, PTSD victims, the draining of our resources, the corrupting influence of war (torture, etc.), and damage to our prestige around the world seem the more likely result of these wars than any defense of freedom.

I think if we really want to support our troops, we need to step back and ask ourselves some very hard questions.  Why are our troops stationed in 132 countries around the world and who’s interests are they serving?  Why do we have over 700 U.S. military installations, not counting “black sites” around the world and, again, who’s interests are they serving?  What exactly are we getting for our $700 billion a year in defense spending (not counting the billions being spent by the various Intelligence organizations whose budgets are top secret) and who is profiting from our spending more than all other developed countries combined on defense? One has to wonder how that 700 billion a year is being spent when our soldiers or their families were out buying their own body armor and back home their families needed food stamps to keep from going hungry.

 

These are the big questions that are never even discussed.  The topic is taboo and so we go on and on.  If we really want to support our troops, we should make sure when they are committed to war, the vital interests of the country are at stake and not just the interests of the energy extraction industry.  When we spend such stupendous amounts every year we make it more likely we will engage in continuous war.  Not only do we create a very powerful war lobby, but also it is unreasonable to believe a society that spends like we do on defense will not eventually feel tremendous pressure to use the machinery it has spent such a large portion of the national treasure creating.  I am not even necessarily arguing for drastic cuts in the military budget.  What I am arguing for is an honest debate.  The people of the U.S. really need to more fully understand what is being done in their name and weigh in on whether or not they think we are pursuing the right, or even a sustainable, course of action.   That would do more to support our troops than all the flag-waving ever could.

And one last thing makes me queasy.  There seems to be this idea out there that everyone in uniform is a hero.  From all reports of people on the left, right and center, the people in our military are exceptionally dedicated to their mission and represent some of our best and brightest citizens.  They are not all heroes.  Doing your job well, even exceptionally well, does not make you a hero.  To say so is to cheapen the concept and if everyone is a hero than no one is.  I have a good friend who was a clerk typist on a U.S. ship during the Vietnam War.  We joke about him being the hero of the Subic Bay bars.  He scoffs at the idea that everyone is a hero.

Why does it matter?  Because when things go seriously wrong, (for example, the record of rape committed by military personnel upon other military personnel and the complicity of the command structure), it makes it harder for voices to be raised and for people to criticize military behavior when it needs to be criticized.   No organization on earth is made up of all heroes.  The concept of an all hero military makes it easier to indiscriminately throw money and resources into the defense pot and deflect inquiry whether or not it is in the best interest of the country.  Demagogues are well stocked with pithy sound bites to use against anyone who questions policy when it involves an organization made up entirely of heroes.

 

In 2012 we had a presidential election.  Not once during the numerous Republican debates or the three debates between the President and Mitt Romney were the 132 countries, 700 plus military installations, or the $700 billion dollar defense budget seriously addressed.  It wasn’t discussed or debated in the 2008, 2004, 2000 elections or any other election in my memory either.  We need to ask ourselves about the state of our democracy when fundamental issues like how and when we use our military and what we will spend on it aren’t even issues for public discourse.

Supporting the troops should go beyond lip service and we as a nation need to examine the role our military plays in the world and when and where we will ask our men and women of the military to spill their blood and endure the horrors of war.  I don’t pretend to know the answers but I sure as hell would like to hear the discussion.