It’s Christmastime! Gather round ye happy families, like it or not, however dysfunctional ye may be! Let us remember the true meaning of any American holiday: It’s an opportunity to pound home a political lesson about why We Are Good and They Are Bad.
Should culture war break out around the dinner table, you can take several tactics. You can accept that you will give yourself a series of mini-strokes trying to argue with them, and confrontation is a Republican tactic. Studies show that conservatives rely almost entirely on lying, cheating, stealing, conflation, and denial of facts because their brains are wired up that way – wired for fear and hate. Accept that no amount of factual evidence will get them to change their mind. They did not come to their current belief system with scrupulous analysis and study. They didn’t weigh the evidence and decide that the Republican position is most supported by the facts. No matter how well informed you are, no matter how logical your reasoning, it is very unlikely that you will get through to them. Happily, much of their idiocy is easily debunked, although facts don’t carry much weight with teatards, since they come from the radical communist Rachel Maddow and the Left-handed-Marxist-Trotskyist-Muslim-Gangnam-Style Daily Kos. Tell them you got your rebuttals from Matt Drudge.
Republicans most important issues of the day, that are – of course – not really important at all, so here are your talking points:
THE TOP 5 NUMBER ONE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES TO REPUBLICANS
#1: THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS
This nonsensical non-issue is a Republican favorite. Conservatives love to tell us we are not allowed to wish people “Happy Holidays,” even if we don’t know their religion, and even if we’re talking to freedom-loving Israeli settlers, or Wawa franchise operating Hindus, because everyone everywhere should be a Christian and therefore celebrate Jesus’ birfday. Point them to the RNC online store, where the RNC Holiday Ornament speaks volumes about how much they hate the baby messiah and his righteous Black Friday Taiwanese waffle irons, because, just where are we supposed to hang that stupid ornament? On a holiday tree? A Black Panther Kwanza bush? You just can’t fault his work ethic. I don’t complain that News Corp’s Christmas Card offends me personally, and is dishonest, because it doesn’t show a Roger Ailes/Rupert Murdoch/Koch love trifecta.
Explain that the true “reason for the season” isn’t jeebuses brfday, it’s because of the winter solstice, the end of the darkening and celebration of the return of light. Some say that no one knew when the baby Jesus was born, so “they chose a day at random”, which just happened to coincide with all the Pagan holidays. The moral of the story being that we have four different Gospels, hence you can make the text say whatever the fuck you want it to say. If you abandon the Jewish calendar in favor of the Roman (because Jews), peg the respective conceptions and births to the dates of the equinoxes and solstices at the time Caesar made his calendar (3/25, 6/24, 9/24, 12/25), forget about three of the four over the course of 2000 years, and only remember the December one because of Dickensian propaganda, and you the living Hell that is Christmas today!
Besides, if they REALLY wanted to get back to the true meaning of CHRISTmas, they would stop spending so much money on stuff, they’d go full Grinch and get rid of the tree, the roast beast and the who-hash, the decorations and the grossly inaccurate nativity scene and just have a small birthday party.
#2: BENGHAZIGATE
#NeverForget that it’s the ambient hypocrisy of the modern right that anything bad that happens on their watch (yes, even at home), cannot have been foreseen but if something tragic happens in another country on the other side of the world with a Democratic president…you better believe incompetence/treason/laziness is at the heart of it. What I’m saying it you’ll never win this one, so, swallow your pride along with your eggnog and admit that Obama deliberately failed to do anything to prevent Benghazi – maybe even killed those people himself to advance the evildoings of his Muslin Brotherhood friends – and your wingnut relatives will be happy. They will bristle like fucking porcupines if you even allude to how the Bush Admin did not exactly do much to prevent 9/11 from occurring, so don’t go there. The fact that Obama does not begin EVERY public appearance reading the names of those who died in Benghazi and beg for forgiveness is proof enough of his guilt. Don’t bring up the fact that W never read the names of any 9/11 casualties and his administration was so fucking bereft of human decency Dick Rumsfeld would auto-pen soldier death notices. It’s amazing that Obama had the time to orchestrate this calamity and still fit in 2 rounds of golf a day not to mention supervising the destruction of America.
#3: THE 2nd AMEND…..blahblahblah snooze.
It’s always fun when idiots decide to dive into Constitutional jurisprudence. If you have relatives who already exercise their rights to the fullest, yet say, “Hey, I really need more guns”, why not surprise them by them a sweet firearm – how about the DPMS Panther Oracle AR-15, that provides its owner with SO MUCH PROTECTION because you can fire a lot of rounds very quickly and comes with two 30-round magazines, so cousin Levi will be ready for some serious protecting the instant he slings it around his back. He won’t have to tell those neighbor kids twice to turn down that Hip-Hop, or not to complain that their pizza is cold!
#4: “OPERATION FAST AND THE FURIOUS” aka “Operation Waste of Time and Money”.
It’s becoming clear that if this era in American life and politics is remembered for one thing, it will be the Justice Department’s “Operation Fast and Furious”, a government sting operation that allowed guns to enter Mexico in order to trace them to drug cartels. I’ve never understood why the government would name an operation after a movie about a sting operation falling apart….Anyway, Darrell Issa – the sort of paranoid schizophrenic swindling grifter that Sarah Palin can only dream of being – is the subpoena-wielding chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee whose duty to America is stickin’ it to Obama over one grossly exaggerated scandal during an election year. Evil authoritarian and uppity negro Barack Obama had the nerve to evoke executive privilege – Issa’s committee, meanwhile, voted beleaguered Eric Holder in contempt. Thing is, Fast and the Furious was conceived in the Bush administration. For those keeping score, that’s before Eric Holder got his job. Please ask why Democratic presidents are hounded by shit, but none of the shit the War Criminal administration did was ever investigated for anything. Republicans, including Oil-soaked arsonist car thief Mr. Issa, need to be forever ejected from the legislative process, for the sake of civilization. And they’ll always have that Roger Clemens conviction. Moral of this story is you can tell Republicans are being disingenuous when the thing they’re complaining about involves buying more guns.
#5: OBUMMER CARE
One Million Years Ago, America’s churches paid for everyone to get medical care and the world was perfect. Available care protocols included aspirin, opium, leeches, splints, and a bullet to bite on during amputations. And payment by fowl. Affordable care for all! None of those socialist MRIs or lithotripters. Usually, what your visibly unhealthy Republican relatives really want to do is to echo the sentiments expressed at that GOP debate LET HIM DIE!’ for folks unlucky enough to take jobs that don’t offer health insurance or who can’t afford to pay $800 a month for COBRA coverage after Bain loads up their employer with debt and then sells off the assets. Global circumnavigations are controversial, not just because they cost money, but also because some critics, primarily conservatives, contend the ships will fall off when they reach the edge of the planet. Die free or live, sheapals! They can have my pre-existing condition/freedoms when they pry them from my cold dead hands!
Other Challenges you might face this Christmas:
THE PAPAL PROBLEM
Catholic relatives at Christmas are a whole other kind of problem. They are insufferable, holding up the Blessed Virgin Mary as a model for women, extolling life-long purity, and being generally judgmental and boring. And what kind of society would we have if we didn’t allow the pedophiles to dictate to the rest of us what we should and shouldn’t be doing in the privacy of our own bedrooms? It certainly adds moral weight to their message of humility and godly privation, idolizing a former Hitler jugend member gliding through St. Peter’s Basilica pushed by white-gloved bellhops as though he were the world’s most expensive piece of luggage at the poshest hotel in the world, encrusted in gold and marble fit for an emperor. Assisting in covering up child sexual abuse on an institutional level while preaching love, responsibility, morality and ethics, decked in grotesque levels of opulence just isn’t Christmasy, like midnight Masses and mangers are. Pontificating against the The Girl Scouts of America as an abortion factory that ought to be divested of Catholic Church moolah posthaste is also not Christmasy. Read your Catholic Aunt the part of The Bible that says something about about it being impossible for the filthy rich to go the Heaven. Jesus Christ Our Lord said that. He also said that anyone who believe in Him shall give away all they have and follow Him. Or, alternately, dump a billion dollars into the marquee architecture and fine art markets, to impress the Koch Brothers.
THE LETTER CARDS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO KILL SOMETHING:
If the great fiction stories enclosed within those banal cards from suburbanites and their average offspring make you vomit, consider having a group dramatic reading of the stories, followed by in depth analysis of what was really meant by the author if you read between the lines, accompanied by copious amounts of booze/prescription cough syrup.
SHOPPING MALLS:
Get over it. The modern Christmas is a paean to capitalism, American-style (and has been since long before people were trampled outside Wal-Marts on Black Friday). If you were too stupid to buy your stuff on the internet from work 3 weeks ago, you’re fucked.
TOOLS/WEAPONS FOR THE APOCALYPTIC WANDERER:
– Car keys and an escape pod. 4 wheels and a tank of gad just became your new best friend.
– Infallible wifi connection.
– A good book and space, no matter how small, with a door that closes. If worst comes to worst, sit in the bathroom. Tell them you have the big D, it’s worth it. Sometimes I’d take multiple showers a day, just for the solitude it provided.
– Decent coffee. Nothing is more ruinous to both body and psyche than a tepid cup on Maxwell House on a cold morning. Bring a French press or something.
– Your people: I realized, back when I had a job touring the country in the 1990s, that every city, no matter how gross, has a liberal urban corral. Sometimes it is just a sliver of a block with a gourmet foods market and a lesbian bookstore. The subculture has become an omniculture and its denizens can be found in every city, their sensibility having boomeranged back to the small towns. Salt Lake City has 9th and 9th, Minneapolis has Uptown, Atlanta has Little Five Points and Idaho has those idiots in Muldoon Canyon.
– Alcohol or Benzos, better yet both. Before I got sober, I wouldn’t have been able to get through the holiday without lots of Vicodin, Xanax and Ambien, plus swigs of codeine cough syrup when the going got tough. For those lucky enough to have thresholds, pills are the #1 holiday survivalist’s tool. Inebriation is key. Do a shot of something every time one of them responds with “I’m not racist, I have black friends” or some such variant (make sure there’s a toilet handy, or you’ll be dead inside an hour).
So, get happy, people! Because it’s Christmas and we’re celebrating a birthday that almost certainly did not happen on this day and firing up all sorts of pagan rituals to honor Jeebus. Remember – the War on Christmas begins at home. The best way to defeat Christmas is to leave it alone. Nature will take its course, allowing it it turn into an empty, materialist shell and a soulless amalgamation of various pagan traditions mushed together into the most base elements of America into a corporate-whipped mob of fear and shopping. In other words, leave it in the hands of the Christians. So, Merry Christmas all Ye Christians trying to live the exemplary life, and to all other Ye others, good luck, comrades. See you in 2013.