A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Regular readers, you already know that I publish my ON THE AVENUES column on Thursday, a slot inherited from the pre-merger Tribune.
However, you may not be aware of your curious non-existence as regular readers. On closer examination, it seems the page views and hit counts recorded here are entirely figments of my imagination, and the curiously timed denunciations and rebuttals emanating from purportedly non-reading public officials and functionaries are mere coincidence.
There is no dissent in the Hermetic Dixiecratic Disney Republic(an) of New Albany, where the referendum of support for the Main Street Disprovement Project passed with 98.6% tally in favor, but disclaimers aside, I am informed that today is a religious holiday of some vague sort – a forever confusing proposition for an atheist like me – so I’ll try and keep it short.
Let’s begin with a ritual denunciation, perhaps more appropriate for the Airing of Grievances than National Chinese Carry-Out Day.
In spite of Indiana’s flagrantly fascistic proclivities, substantial progress has been made in freeing innocent tipplers from the oppressive yoke of the preacher man’s hellfire and damnation, and yet we retain at least one world-class example of prohibitionist backwash.
It remains illegal to sell any alcoholic beverages on Christmas Day, a ban that violates church-state separation so openly and brazenly that I’m surprised the ACLU hasn’t parachuted into Indianapolis to help save us from ourselves.
Maybe I’ll ring them when I finish writing this column.
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Often I’m asked: Roger, why not relent and embrace the Christmas spirit?
Would it be so hard to be human, just for once?
Contrary to popular perception, I do relent – after a fashion – and in spite of my best efforts, Vulcan-caliber logic continues to elude me. It is enjoyable to have a (relatively) work-free day, to spend time with loved ones, to plan parties, to eat and drink, and to do what anyone else does on a holiday.
But you see, as an unbeliever, I simply cannot indulge the Christian aspect of the day as it pertains to my sphere of individual conscience. For the same reason, I cannot support Christian displays in the sphere of public property. There is secular rule of law in America, and it reaffirms and protects an individual’s religious or non-religious conscience, whether it speaks to no gods or many.
Without this fine line, Mike Pence really will try to tell me which church to attend – or else.
At Christmas time, I respect the wants and needs of the genuinely devout, for whom the day is an expression of deeply held belief. More grudgingly, I acknowledge with deep groans the annual recitation by Ayn Rand fetishists of a belief in hyper-consumerism and pervasive materialism as a capitalistic manifestation of self, one worth glorifying in priestly fashion.
That’s fine.
Just know that you can count me out. Perhaps religion remains the preferred opiate because too much of the other addiction is in the hands of the 1 per cent.
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In fact, I do have a favorite Christmas story, one I haven’t told in a while.
My sole “corporate” day job lasted from 1988 to 1989, with a solitary Christmas in between. So it was that in 1988, management at our office in downtown Louisville declared a contest for best work station decoration.
With an entirely uncharacteristic zeal, my friend and co-worker Jeff Price, who was well-connected within local radical leftist circles and later would meet me in East Germany to take part in the “summer of ‘89” volunteer student brigade, went to work toward his stated goal of winning first prize.
He soon appeared with scissors, glue, armloads of construction paper and dusty old copies of the English-language edition of the “New Albania” propaganda magazine, as borrowed from a socialist workers group somewhere in town.
Who even knew we had such an organization?
Come the day of judgment, Jeff had transformed his pod into a veritable showplace of dully-colored agitprop, with a few bright red placards bearing impenetrable phrases in the Albanian language, photocopies of stiffly posed Communist leaders like Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia, and a genuinely demented final touch, which I’ll never forget.
Snaking along the tops of the dull gray office partitions stretched strands of coiled barbed wire fashioned from silver holiday tinsel.
Jeff’s display was dubbed Christmas in Albania – at the time, the world’s only officially atheist state – and while the judges could not quite bring themselves to give him the top prize, second place was decreed his from sheer creativity alone.
In short, exactly my kind of Christmas, but please, feel perfectly free to enjoy yours. I’ll be eating egg rolls, Singapore rice noodles and Happy Family.
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