Politically, Christmas this year began on the evening of December 13th. Many of us witnessed the seasons' greetings on CNN.
At 10:00 p.m. Eastern, George W. Bush was scheduled to deliver his presidential acceptance speech from the Texas House of Representatives, the site of his occasional bonding with a Texas Democrat. An hour before, Al Gore -- skewered by a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling -- had conceded the election.
On CNN, Bernard Shaw and Judy Woodruff waited for signs of Bush's appearance; finally, the network switched over to Austin. The first thing that caught the viewer's eye, however, was not the new president's elfish grin, but an enormous Christmas tree, rising out of floor of the legislature as the cameras panned in. The tree appeared to have roughly the breadth of a California redwood; streaming gold ribbons, it dwarfed everyone in the chamber. And yet somehow, in later discussions of Bush's speech, it went largely un-remarked upon. Assuming that the tree's presence wasn't accidental, it's well worth asking: What was Bush trying to say, in his first appearance as our president, that couldn't be said without a Texas-sized Christmas tree in the audience?
Christmas has special meaning for many Americans, but the effect it can have on conservatives is particularly powerful. It reduces some to babbling sentimentality; others it fires with a culture warrior's rage. Each December, "put the Christ back in Christmas"-majoritarians renew their grumbling attacks on popular culture, with a rhetoric of spiritual decline that has all the annual consistency of an evergreen. Christmas also inspires flatly contradictory right wing arguments: Celebrations of market values mix with excoriations of the commercialization of the holiday; paeans to Christ's holiday are penned by conservative Jews.
It's precisely these sorts of contortions that makes Christmas such a fine season for Rightwatching. Each conservative writer inspired to do a Christmas column -- and they greatly outnumber liberals -- grafts his or her pet obsessions onto the holiday. Consider:
Buy This Book. The columnist Thomas Sowell apparently sees in Christmas an ideal opportunity for covert ideological warfare. After a standard gripe about the tribulations of mall shopping, he devotes an article to cataloguing conservative books to buy as presents, and conservative magazine subscriptions to get for friends. (For aspiring Rightwatchers, here are the publications to keep an eye on, as per Sowell: City Journal, Conservative Chronicles, Hoover Digest, Insight, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Commentary, Policy Review, and The American Enterprise.) Essentially, then, Sowell's piece is a guidebook for purchasing propaganda for your loved ones -- which, needless to say, is kind of spooky. But there's something missing to Sowell's column: He forgets to recommend that, when Christmas shopping for George W. Bush, keep an eye out for Nintendo 64 games, but avoid the conservative books or subscriptions at all cost. Our new president hates to read.
Conservatives also have a lot to say about what not to purchase . . .
Invasion of the Bodyslammers. It's always something. This Christmas, the scolds have targeted the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) as the latest corrupter of youth. Brent Bozell, founder of the Parents Television Council, is leading the charge; Bozell himself writes that of all the depraved toys to protect your children from, WWF paraphernalia tops the list. The cause is in turn taken up by Michelle Malkin, who laments the passing of the WWF's good old days, invoking much the same declension model that conservatives frequently use to describe the corruption of Christmas itself:
Gone are the days of Gorgeous George, Andre the Giant, and Hulk Hogan. Today's professional wrestlers peddle no-holds-barred degradation and denigration. Former wrestler-turned-Christian ministry leader Ted DiBiase, who once managed WWF thug Stone Cold Steve Austin, now forbids his own sons from watching the WWF. "It has taken the low road," DiBiase told Christianity Today magazine. "There are no more heroes."
The above, of course, is hardly the only case in which conservative writings on Christmas end up reading very differently than their authors had intended . . .
This is NOT a Feminist Column. It's a little remarked upon fact, observes Karal Ann Marling in her Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday (Harvard, 2000), that the task of yuletide gift buying, wrapping, etcetera, falls disproportionately upon American women. Somewhat surprisingly, that's just the sense one gets from Center for Equal Opportunity president Linda Chavez's Christmas column, a fatigued chronicle of the difficulties of multi-generational present-shopping, which at one point reads, "I wish there were a way to stop this ever-escalating gift-giving....I, for one, would welcome a respite." Of course, Chavez, no fan of Patricia Ireland-style feminism, doesn't take her piece to its logical conclusion -- that Christmas, as practiced in our culture, overburdens women.
But when the contradictions really start to bubble up is when you get members of minority religions defending the cultural tidal wave that is Christmas:
Jews for Jesus. Don Feder, the righty columnist for the Boston Herald, is Jewish. So it's really hard to understand why his column deploring the decline of Christmas (yes, another one) seems so comfortable with the holiday's overwhelming role in American life. He even gets a bit biblical for us: "The Magi brought gifts to the babe in the manger. The herald angels (to whom we are to harken) were the bearers of glad tidings . . ." Feder says he's simply not offended when someone says "Merry Christmas" to him, not knowing he's Jewish -- apparently, he's more offended by secularist attempts to keep Christmas out of the public square. Which raises a question: How many anti-Semitic flubs by Jerry Falwell will it take before conservative Jews understand that if the religious right finishes off secularism, they'll be coming after Judaism next?
Sadly, that's not the worst to report. This year, Christmas even led one free market enthusiast to write a lengthy defense of that Christian hero, Ebenezer Scrooge . . .
Coming UnScrooged. The Scrooge article, written by the controversial CUNY philosopher Michael Levin for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is devoted to bah-humbugging Charles Dickens and other assorted promoters of generosity. Its body, which picks apart Dickens' A Christmas Carol, is worth quoting at length:
No doubt [Scrooge's underpaid clerk Bob] Cratchit needs -- i.e., wants -- more [money], to support his family and care for Tiny Tim. But Scrooge did not force Cratchit to father children he is having difficulty supporting. If Cratchit had children while suspecting he would be unable to afford them, he, not Scrooge, is responsible for their plight. And if Cratchit didn't know how expensive they would be, why must Scrooge assume the burden of Cratchit's misjudgment?
There is not a trace of irony to be found in Levin's article, despite the fact that he pushes defense of the free market far into the realm of self-parody. It is an astounding piece of writing; impressively logical, rigorously heartless. By the end, you get the sense that the writer truly empathizes with the plight of Ebenezer Scrooge, that poor fictional businessman who was so abused by an influential, downtrodden-defending novelist. Never mind that had Dickens not given us A Christmas Carol -- he played a tremendous role in inventing the modern holiday -- there might not even have been a mega-cultural event called Christmas for Levin to use as a hook for his article. Or at any rate, people would treat Christmas differently. Perhaps they wouldn't feel as compelled act generously. Perhaps they wouldn't be so competitive about the size of their Christmas trees.
