New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
I've chosen to allow NA Confidential to run its course, and so to close out the dreadful pandemic year of 2020, I'll be making a daily post from the archives. The following appeared on December 14, 2014.
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How I miss Christopher Hitchens.
Introductory excerpts from Hitchens' timeless essay are reprinted below, so be sure to follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece, first noted here at NAC in 2008. I reread this every year on or before Christmas Eve. In 2013, there was added gravity, which also deserves another look.
In 2013, as Christmas approached, I'd just finished reading Ray Mouton's novel, In God's House. In 1984, Ray was the lawyer chosen by the state of Louisiana's Catholic Church hierarchy to defend the first priest ever to be charged in secular court with child molestation. Looking back on the perspective of the present day, we obviously know what became of all this, and that Ray's appointment with destiny was the first tiny peek inside a truly massive scandal. I wasn't expecting to be moved to such an extent by Ray's book, but I was -- and remain.
Carrying these thoughts into my annual date with Hitchens, I find the atheist's cynicism to be vastly enhanced.
… My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.
As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events ...
We watched two seasonal films on Christmas Eve, first The Dead (1987), then Scrooge, the musical with the late Albert Finney (1970). They're considerably different in terms of intent, but there is much to be said for both. It’s hard to imagine either being produced today.
The Dead is a faithful and thought-provoking rendering of James Joyce's enduring short story, and it was director John Huston's final work.
Finney is a colossus in Scrooge, appearing in almost every scene; the songs won't be familiar to contemporary listeners, but they're effective. Scrooge has been Diana's go-to for a long time, and she has converted me. The Dead probably won't be a film I watch every year, but I'll return to it, and reading the original novella is a must for me in the coming weeks.
All in all, it was a quiet Christmas Eve at home with my soulmate and our cats; in a world filled with idiotic clamor, the evening was a respite and I'm thankful for it.
Addendum:
The song "I Hate People" from Scrooge speaks to me impressively, perhaps because it reminds me of our local political chat, as directed to the vicinity of NA's ruling elites.
Scavengers and sycophants and flatterers and fools Pharisees and parasites and hypocrites and ghouls Calculating swindlers, prevaricating frauds Perpetrating evil as they roam the earth in hordes Feeding on their fellow men Reaping rich rewards Contaminating everything they see Corrupting honest me like me Humbug! Poppycock! Balderdash! Bah! I hate people! I hate people!
ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2019 Remix).
R.I.P. Miss Nadia (2002-2018)
This column contains bits and pieces published previously in varying forms at various places. Each year, it functions as the blog's unified, omnibus Christmas utterance -- or, if you will, a primal scream. It happens each holiday season.
During an otherwise random conversation about the uncanny tendency of local Democrats to experience tumescence whenever Jeff Gahan spits on the downtrodden, eventually someone looks at me with palpable dismay.
“Roger, you’re such a Grinch.”
My response never varies.
“Thank you very much.”
The roots of my longstanding Yuletide antipathy might be traced to Freudian conceits, Jungian counter-thrusts, references to childhood toilet training habits or the sheer pervasiveness of psychological repression stemming from residency in a nakedly fascistic state like Indiana, but in truth, it’s far simpler.
It goes back to that original, defining moment in every American boy’s life – not when it becomes clear that he’ll die some day without the saving grace of being able to hit a curveball, but the sudden, gut-wrenching discovery that in spite of the shameless propaganda fed to us by adults, who’d assured us that excruciating behavioral self-regulation would be rewarded by a gaudily costumed fat man parking his tricked-out sleigh on the roof and descending the chimney, that nope, in the end, it was nothing more than a shameless ruse.
Then it hits you: Santa Claus doesn’t really exist.
At all.
Our house didn’t even have a chimney, and you’d think this would have made me suspicious, but I was oblivious. When the shameful day of infamy arrived and my school mate chided me -- “c’mon, don’t tell me you still believe in Santa?” -- I did much more than merely shake Santa’s grip, cold turkey, right there on the spot.
I irrevocably disavowed the whole contrived Christmas spectacle, because even at such a tender age, I could see the dominoes falling as the previously sacrosanct Santa myth vaporized in plain sight, because if the grownups could mislead us about Santa, where would it end?
They might also be fibbing about those other edicts demanding compliance and conformity, from the civic foundational edifices of religion, patriotism and obedience, all the way to the commandment forbidding jaywalking.
The worst of it was sitting alone in my room, cross-legged on the cold tile floor, and experiencing the devastating frustration of knowing that I was far too young to properly drink my way through the rampant disappointment.
Santa’s unused cookies and milk were the best I could do, and then, as now, I udderly DETEST milk.
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In 1991, at the age of 31, I spent Christmas in the city of Košice -- today located in sovereign Slovakia, which then comprised the easternmost lands of Czechoslovakia. It was the mid-point of a six-month stint teaching conversational English to doctors and nurses at the city’s main hospital, an experience made possible by the Cold War’s end.
In 2016, Santa brought the gadget to digitize those
Košice slides from 1991-92. It's ongoing, into 2020.
Upon returning stateside in 1992, there was a brief break, and then I went back into the food and drink business, where I’ve been for the most part ever since.
Grinch or not, the approach of the holiday season in Košice proved fascinating. With no Thanksgiving to serve as mile marker, few signs were evident that Christmas was coming until the eve of St. Nicholas Day (December 6), when children scrubbed and polished their shoes, placing them on windowsills to be filled with candy and chocolate. Presumably, bad children would receive a bundle of twigs bound together for swatting their butts … as it should be.
In Communist times, the regime attempted to persuade the populace that a chap named Grandfather Frost brought these goodies, presumably on behalf of the benevolent leadership. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, back came Christmas trees and caroling in the streets, and while these were familiar to me, decorations didn't even begin to appear until the first part of December. I remarked to my uncomprehending students that they should contrive a holiday like Halloween to mark the true beginning of the shopping season.
Shopping season? It was quite ephemeral. Surely it’s different in 2018, but in 1991, only a few understated window displays were to be seen in shops, and high pressure, guilt-laced sales tactics were nowhere to be found.
However, one necessary seasonal item became ubiquitous during the week preceding Christmas. This was delicious carp, raised and fattened in farm ponds, not river bottoms, and brought to market in street-side barrels and oversized plastic tubs. Some buyers brought their own buckets to take the living fish home for a few days of further bathtub cleansing. Others had their purchase killed, weighed and wrapped on the spot.
Carp is the traditional Slovak meal for Christmas, accompanied by an array of special side dishes, and perhaps some steaming sauerkraut soup. There always was plenty of bottled lager, but the Christmas Eve toast in 1991 was chased with homemade peach brandy from a student’s village nearby: “To peace, health and a good harvest.”
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Two or three lifetimes later, there was a second chance to be in Europe for Christmas. In 2009, we stayed in a rental apartment in Bamberg, Germany, a mere stone's throw from the Fässla and Spezial breweries. With the requisite open-air Christmas market, mulled wine and naturalistic decorations, Franconia’s version of the Yuletide season was obvious without being garish.
The Grinch in me was shaken, if as yet unbowed.
On Christmas morning, we strolled through the Altstadt’s deserted streets and climbed Altenburg hill to the medieval castle, affording a sweeping view of the valley and Bamberg's dizzying number of church spires. Most businesses were closed, but pleasingly, some food and drink purveyors were open in a city blessedly free of the archaic blue laws still existing in purportedly secular Indiana, which up until 2015 prevented alcohol from being served on Dec. 25 – a purely Christian holiday.
Clouds rolled overhead, and it was a bracing and exhilarating walk. Descending the commanding heights back to our riverside starting point, we passed the city museum in the old town hall astride the Regnitz and saw that the doors were open. Inside was a fine collection of 18th-century porcelain from Meissen, and one of 38 nativity scenes on display in and around Bamberg during the holiday season.
A reconnaissance of Ludwigstrasse's expanse revealed that Bamberg's Chinese restaurant owners are not as ambitious as metro Louisville's, with all three closed for the day. However, at the train station, the bakery and small grocery both were open, and I bought a handful of half-liter Schlenkerla Märzen lagers to accompany the evening's home cooked vegetable soup.
With no close friends in Bamberg, we kept ourselves company, having procured groceries and libations in advance. With bottles of Fässla in support, Christmas evening selections on the telly revealed a diverse Euro holiday tableau.
There was a Basque celebration from Bilbao, with crazy costumes, quasi-operatic tunes and the inexplicable, prehistoric language spoken by the world's first cod fishermen. The whole time, I kept expecting a Muse concert to break out.
We watched a performance in Salzburg of Mozart's The Magic Flute; snippets of a schlocky Bavarian idyll, rather like the Osmonds meeting Lawrence Welk, but in lederhösen and dirndls; and then a Berlin performance by Max Raab and the Hotel Palast Orchestra, a stagy society presence reminiscent of Joel Grey’s role in Cabaret.
Finally came City Lights, the not-so-silent masterpiece by Charlie Chaplin, without dialogue but featuring a musical soundtrack as a concession to new 1931 technology. The Little Tramp falls for a blind flower girl ... and meets a drunken millionaire along the way.
On the 26th, Café Abseits beckoned again, with a fine draft list of regional, seasonal Bockbier. Later, at Spezial, delightful Ochsenbrust in horseradish sauce with a dumpling was accompanied by several of the brewpub’s quintessential smoked lagers.
No, I don’t “do” Christmas ... although on occasion, vague and ambiguous exceptions are allowed.
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More recently, we've enjoyed the good fortune to be in Munich and Bamberg (2018), and Zagreb, Ljubljana, Lake Bled and Trieste (2019) during their annual Christmas market season.
Whether it's thousands of Bavarians thronging the streets of Munich, or a few dozen Slovenes congregating around the market stalls in Bled, one can't help being impressed by the sense of community on display -- and I'll leave it at that.
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Through it all, music soothes the heretical breast, just so long as it isn't the pervasive and disgusting same-old-suspect soundtrack heard playing in every public place, beginning the day after Harvest Homecoming and lasting through January.
Each year I make a special effort to listen to a recording of "Ring Christmas Bells." As always, it reminds me of our high school choral director, Michael Neely, who warned us that later in our lives, we'd come to regret taking our singing voices for granted. We scoffed, and of course, he was absolutely right.
Three decades of beer and tobacco have rendered my singing voice moot, and now I’m little more than an interpreter of songs, with the atonal wailings occurring well out of human earshot. Our cats suffer the most.
Imperfect pitch aside, the only Christmas songs I can even tolerate are the ones we sang in choir, and the only other performance I truly enjoy is "Fairytale Of New York" by The Pogues, with a guest appearance by the late, lovely Kirsty McColl.
To repeat, I don't "do" Christmas ... but in spite of myself, the holiday occasionally provides a few pleasant memories -- even if, quoting Chico Marx, some things never change, and “There ain’t no sanity claus.”
Especially in New Gahania.
Recently these lumps of coal are being personally wrapped by the snowman, Gauleiter Duggins, to be thrown through the windows of public housing residents who've inadvertently found themselves residing in the path of our mayoral dullard's petty ambitions.
That's why I won't be ending this year's holiday column on a pleasant note, for peak Scrooge is alive and well and inhabiting Jeff Gahan's well-fed and highly financed body.
For the sake of our city most vulnerable residents, let's hope the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come makes an appearance at Dear Leader's bunker -- although it won't do much good if Mike Hall comes out to greet him.
Probably I read James Joyce's Dubliners during college or shortly thereafter. It is a compelling collection of short stories completed by Joyce during his pre-WWI residency in Trieste, and published in 1914.
For me Dubliners is a must-read, and I plan to make it a re-read during the coming weeks. Also, a re-watch; somewhere in a box secreted in our house's dusty nooks you'll find a video cassette of The Dead, John Huston's final film. The Dead is a long story, perhaps a novella, and Huston's adaptation is a short film, although no less compelling for its brevity.
The Economist's pseudonymous columnist plainly gets it, and so should we all: "The festive season has summoned every weeping ghost." So it will remain for me, always.
James Joyce’s captivating tale is one of love, loss and loneliness
ALMOST EVERYONE who watches television in Ireland will have seen a Christmas commercial for Guinness—first aired in 2004—in which snowflakes drop softly over a variety of Irish landscapes. Although the writer got no credit from the advertising agency, this panorama of longing and nostalgia draws on James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. Joyce’s tale concludes (freakishly, in purely meteorological terms) with snowfall “general all over Ireland”. His snow unites past and present, memory and desire, as it blankets “all the living and the dead”.
“The Dead” is among the finest short stories in the English language. Astonishingly, it came from the pen of an impoverished and insecure 25-year-old language teacher in Trieste. In that Italian city, ruled then like the Dublin he had left by a haughty imperial power (Austro-Hungary rather than Great Britain), the self-exiled Joyce lived and wrote. He sought for years to find a reliable publisher for the collection eventually released, in 1914, as “Dubliners”. Written in 1907, “The Dead” displays all the virtuosity of an author who can already do anything he wants in conventional fiction. Like Pablo Picasso, his near-contemporary, Joyce would soon break all the rules of the art he had so precociously mastered.
For more than a century, readers have loved “The Dead” for its bittersweet melancholy and its mingled threads of festivity and mourning. It inspired John Huston’s film of 1987, the great actor-director’s poignant swansong ...
As for Huston's adaptation, this from film critic Pauline Kael:
"Huston directed the movie, at eighty, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator; most of the time, he had to watch the actors on a video monitor outside the set and use a microphone to speak to the crew. Yet he went into dramatic areas that he'd never gone into before - funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range. Huston never before blended his actors so intuitively, so musically."
Give or take a few beers, we completed the 10,000 mile loop back to Louisville at 9:45 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The sheer awesomeness of Bavaria still was throbbing in the rear-view mirror.
It was a bittersweet homecoming, as we already knew the amazing Miss Nadia had used up her ninth life during our absence. Nadia's passing was unexpected, if not surprising at the age of 16. There'll be more to say about this, but not quite yet, apart from expressing eternal thanks to the Bluegill family for care-giving in our absence.
The year 2018 was Diana's first visit to Munich. Our days were spent wandering Christmas markets and pausing frequently for principled refreshments. It's hard to imagine better "together" time.
I hadn't been to Munich in 14 years, and found myself reflecting about the way things were in 1985, and my initial experience with hoisting steins in the city's amazing traditional beer palaces (and equally enjoyable tiny nooks). There have been a zillion changes during 33 years, and yet the combo of cool lager and steaming pork remains wonderfully timeless.
Now it's Christmas Day, and it would be futile to attempt to deal with the jumble of emotions crowding my noggin. I may have to chip away at them over the coming days, knowing all the while that the year to come probably is going to be even more exhausting than the one about to pass.
But there are a few billion people out there who have it worse off than us, and I try never to forget it -- whether a holiday or any other day when we roll out of bed and seek yet again to finesse the rough edges of the existential dilemma.
The following thoughts are a variation of ones previously posted.
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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, theocrats like 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.
Maybe, but only up to a point. In 2015, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi contributed a thoughtful essay linking consumer Christmas to the stoking of irrational fears: This Christmas, Tune It All Out.
As for the rest of that shopaholic, mall-rushing craziness that can make this holiday so stressful, it turns out that it's optional. Switch off the wi-fi for a few days, turn off the TV, and it's amazing how much more reasonable the world instantly seems.
Supernaturally, just know that you can count me out. Perhaps religion remains the preferred opiate because too much of the profit from consumerism remains in the hands of the 1 per cent.
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In fact, I do have a favorite Christmas story.
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 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 Louisville 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 perverse creativity alone.
In short, exactly my kind of Christmas, but please, feel perfectly free to enjoy yours.
Christmas Day means Vietnam Kitchen, which will be open from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We'll be there.
In the absence of farm-raised Slovak carp, it'll have to do. To refresh your memory about this hallowed yuletide practice, go here: Carp in a bathtub.
Strap on some ice skates and sip some Glühwein on your next layover.
Nobody does Christmas quite like Germany, and as it turns out, nobody does holiday airport shopping quite like Germany either. On November 17, Munich Airport opened its 44-stall Christmas market amid nearly 500 (real) pine trees in the covered space between its airport terminals, meaning travelers facing a long layover can now do more than just flip through the latest Der Spiegel in Germany's version of Hudson News.
It's not just local handicrafts and seasonal treats like Glühwein, sweet roasted almonds, bratwurst, and Rahmfleckerl, a flatbread-like dish with cream, bacon, and chopped chives. The centerpiece of the market is a 50-foot tall Christmas tree decorated with 5,000 lights and 3,000 bulbs—but the main attraction is a big (especially for an airport) skating rink with free entry; visitors can rent skates for a "small" fee ...
... The market, in its 20th year, isn't the only notable thing about Munich Airport: It was ranked Europe’s first five-star airport by Skytrax in 2017, the best airport in Europe for the eleventh time in 13 years, and the sixth-best airport worldwide in the World Airport Awards 2018, with the second-best terminal in the world. In addition to its seasonal Winterlicher Zauberlandschaft (that's Winter Wonderland, to you), the airport also has Europe's largest roofed-in beer garden, a dedicated kids' center, and an alpine-themed restaurant where you can dine in a gondola from a real ski lift.
As we return home, a closing overview of Christmas in Germany, courtesy of Deutsche Welle.
Stock your pantry and keep your fire extinguisher handy. Here are 10 things you should know ahead of Christmas in Germany.
10. It's not over until the ... children sing
Christmas begins with Advent in late November and the holiday itself lasts three whole days, so it's only fitting that Christmas gradually come to a close in Germany. Officially, it's not over until Epiphany, or Three Kings' Day, on January 6. Typically, children dress like the Three Wise Men who visited Jesus in the manger, according to the Bible, and go door to door singing traditional songs.
ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2018 Remix).
A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
This column contains bits and pieces published previously in varying forms at various places. Each year, it functions as the blog's unified, omnibus Christmas utterance -- or, if you will, a primal scream. It happens each holiday season.
During an otherwise random conversation about the uncanny tendency of local Democrats to experience tumescence whenever Jeff Gahan spits on the downtrodden, eventually someone looks at me with palpable dismay.
“Roger, you’re such a Grinch.”
My response never varies.
“Thank you very much.”
The roots of my longstanding Yuletide antipathy might be traced to Freudian conceits, Jungian counter-thrusts, references to childhood toilet training habits or the sheer pervasiveness of psychological repression stemming from residency in a nakedly fascistic state like Indiana, but in truth, it’s far simpler.
It goes back to that original, defining moment in every American boy’s life – not when it becomes clear that he’ll die some day without the saving grace of being able to hit a curveball, but the sudden, gut-wrenching discovery that in spite of the shameless propaganda fed to us by adults, who’d assured us that excruciating behavioral self-regulation would be rewarded by a gaudily costumed fat man parking his tricked-out sleigh on the roof and descending the chimney, that nope, in the end, it was nothing more than a shameless ruse.
Then it hits you: Santa Claus doesn’t really exist.
At all.
Our house didn’t even have a chimney, and you’d think this would have made me suspicious, but I was oblivious. When the shameful day of infamy arrived and my school mate chided me -- “c’mon, don’t tell me you still believe in Santa?” -- I did much more than merely shake Santa’s grip, cold turkey, right there on the spot.
I irrevocably disavowed the whole contrived Christmas spectacle, because even at such a tender age, I could see the dominoes falling as the previously sacrosanct Santa myth vaporized in plain sight, because if the grownups could mislead us about Santa, where would it end?
They might also be fibbing about those other edicts demanding compliance and conformity, from the civic foundational edifices of religion, patriotism and obedience, to the commandment forbidding jaywalking.
The worst of it was sitting alone in my room, cross-legged on the cold tile floor, and experiencing the devastating frustration of knowing that I was far too young to properly drink my way through the rampant disappointment.
Santa’s unused cookies and milk were the best I could do, and then, as now, I udderly DETEST milk.
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In 1991, at the age of 31, I spent Christmas in the city of Košice -- today located in sovereign Slovakia, which then comprised the easternmost lands of Czechoslovakia. It was the mid-point of a six-month stint teaching conversational English to doctors and nurses at the city’s main hospital, an experience made possible by the Cold War’s end.
In 2016, Santa brought the gadget to digitalize those
Košice slides from 1991-92. It's ongoing, into 2019.
Upon returning stateside in 1992, there was a brief break, and then I went back into the food and drink business, where I’ve been for the most part ever since.
Grinch or not, the approach of the holiday season in Košice proved fascinating. With no Thanksgiving to serve as mile marker, few signs were evident that Christmas was coming until the eve of St. Nicholas Day (December 6), when children scrubbed and polished their shoes, placing them on windowsills to be filled with candy and chocolate. Presumably, bad children would receive a bundle of twigs bound together for swatting their butts … as it should be.
In Communist times, the regime attempted to persuade the populace that a chap named Grandfather Frost brought these goodies, presumably on behalf of the benevolent leadership. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, back came Christmas trees and caroling in the streets, and while these were familiar to me, decorations didn't even begin to appear until the first part of December. I remarked to my uncomprehending students that they should contrive a holiday like Halloween to mark the true beginning of the shopping season.
Shopping season? It was quite ephemeral. Surely it’s different in 2018, but in 1991, only a few understated window displays were to be seen in shops, and high pressure, guilt-laced sales tactics were nowhere to be found.
However, one necessary seasonal item became ubiquitous during the week preceding Christmas. This was delicious carp, raised and fattened in farm ponds, not river bottoms, and brought to market in street-side barrels and oversized plastic tubs. Some buyers brought their own buckets to take the living fish home for a few days of further bathtub cleansing. Others had their purchase killed, weighed and wrapped on the spot.
Carp is the traditional Slovak meal for Christmas, accompanied by an array of special side dishes, and perhaps some steaming sauerkraut soup. There always was plenty of bottled lager, but the Christmas Eve toast in 1991 was chased with homemade peach brandy from a student’s village nearby: “To peace, health and a good harvest.”
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Two or three lifetimes later, there was a second chance to be in Europe for Christmas. In 2009, we stayed in a rental apartment in Bamberg, Germany, a mere stone's throw from the Fässla and Spezial breweries. With the requisite open-air Christmas market, mulled wine and naturalistic decorations, Franconia’s version of the Yuletide season was obvious without being garish.
The Grinch in me was shaken, if as yet unbowed.
On Christmas morning, we strolled through the Altstadt’s deserted streets and climbed Altenburg hill to the medieval castle, affording a sweeping view of the valley and Bamberg's dizzying number of church spires. Most businesses were closed, but pleasingly, some food and drink purveyors were open in a city blessedly free of the archaic blue laws still existing in purportedly secular Indiana, which up until 2015 prevented alcohol from being served on Dec. 25 – a purely Christian holiday.
Clouds rolled overhead, and it was a bracing and exhilarating walk. Descending the commanding heights back to our riverside starting point, we passed the city museum in the old town hall astride the Regnitz and saw that the doors were open. Inside was a fine collection of 18th-century porcelain from Meissen, and one of 38 nativity scenes on display in and around Bamberg during the holiday season.
A reconnaissance of Ludwigstrasse's expanse revealed that Bamberg's Chinese restaurant owners are not as ambitious as metro Louisville's, with all three closed for the day. However, at the train station, the bakery and small grocery both were open, and I bought a handful of half-liter Schlenkerla Märzen lagers to accompany the evening's home cooked vegetable soup.
With no close friends in Bamberg, we kept ourselves company, having procured groceries and libations in advance. With bottles of Fässla in support, Christmas evening selections on the telly revealed a diverse Euro holiday tableau.
There was a Basque celebration from Bilbao, with crazy costumes, quasi-operatic tunes and the inexplicable, prehistoric language spoken by the world's first cod fishermen. The whole time, I kept expecting a Muse concert to break out.
We watched a performance in Salzburg of Mozart's The Magic Flute; snippets of a schlocky Bavarian idyll, rather like the Osmonds meeting Lawrence Welk, but in lederhösen and dirndls; and then a Berlin performance by Max Raab and the Hotel Palast Orchestra, a stagy society presence reminiscent of Joel Grey’s role in Cabaret.
Finally came City Lights, the not-so-silent masterpiece by Charlie Chaplin, without dialogue but featuring a musical soundtrack as a concession to new 1931 technology. The Little Tramp falls for a blind flower girl ... and meets a drunken millionaire along the way.
On the 26th, Café Abseits beckoned again, with a fine draft list of regional, seasonal Bockbier. Later, at Spezial, delightful Ochsenbrust in horseradish sauce with a dumpling was accompanied by several of the brewpub’s quintessential smoked lagers.
No, I don’t “do” Christmas ... although on occasion, vague and ambiguous exceptions are allowed.
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Through it all, music soothes the heretical breast, just so long as it isn't the pervasive and disgusting same-old-suspect soundtrack heard playing in every public place, beginning the day after Harvest Homecoming and lasting through January.
Each year I make a special effort to listen to a recording of "Ring Christmas Bells." As always, it reminds me of our high school choral director, Michael Neely, who warned us that later in our lives, we'd come to regret taking our singing voices for granted. We scoffed, and of course, he was absolutely right.
Three decades of beer and tobacco have rendered my singing voice moot, and now I’m little more than an interpreter of songs, with the atonal wailings occurring well out of human earshot. Our cats suffer the most.
Imperfect pitch aside, the only Christmas songs I can even tolerate are the ones we sang in choir, and the only other one I truly enjoy is "Fairytale Of New York" by The Pogues, with a guest appearance by the late, lovely Kirsty McColl.
To repeat, I don't "do" Christmas ... but in spite of myself, the holiday occasionally provides a few pleasant memories -- even if, quoting Chico Marx, some things never change, and “There ain’t no sanity claus.”
Especially in New Gahania.
This year the lumps of coal are being personally wrapped by the snowman, Gauleiter Duggins, to be thrown through the windows of public housing residents who've inadvertently found themselves residing in the path of our mayoral dullard's petty ambitions.
That's why I won't be ending this year's holiday column on a pleasant note, for peak Scrooge is alive and well and inhabiting Jeff Gahan's well-fed and highly financed body.
For the sake of our city most vulnerable residents, let's hope the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come makes an appearance at Dear Leader's bunker -- although it won't do much good if Mike Hall comes out to greet him.
By the way, in informal British English "poxy" means you do not like something, or do not think it is big or important. Last week I was having a blast on social media, which for me is variably poxy.
This probably will be an unpopular viewpoint, but I believe the vast majority of Christmas music is offensive. As such, I support a ban on offensive Christmas music. We must act with haste, because it will be Labor Day again before we know it.
Not everyone got the point, and that's okay. I may be a tremendous Grinch, and resent being compelled to listen to the music of others because it invariably interferes with my own internal soundtrack, but there remains a capacity to enjoy certain elements of Christmas within dual contexts of brevity and sanity. Christmas deluges on Halloween show signs of neither.
Two weeks? That's about right. I was hoping Trump might decree it.
Every poxy advert on television features nuclear families and hilarity about socks. I don’t live like this. I never have – so who are we trying to fool? Ourselves?
Loneliness is an epidemic. It makes us ill, physically and mentally. It makes us age prematurely. It causes huge harm to the mental health of young people who often feel lonely at a time when they should be making the best of everything. And then there is Christmas, which is surely the biggest “trigger” for anyone whose life is not bloody well perfect. And, yes, I do take it personally: every poxy advert features nuclear families and hilarity about socks or something. I don’t live like this. I never have. Most of my friends don’t live like this (thank God). There are divided loyalties, exes, divorces, estranged relatives. There are the people who are bereaved. There are rows and disappointments because no one who is not some kind of fembot can live up to all these expectations.
I had intended to take the day off from the rigors of column composition, but with such a beautiful spring day outside in the aftermath of flash floods and tornadoes on December 23 -- Festivus, no less -- why not huddle indoors a bit longer on Christmas Eve, and plagiarize a previous effort?
After all, there is a legitimately important news item to report.
First, there is you. As a regular reader, 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 a regular reader. Upon 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 merely an Orwellian coincidence.
There is no dissent in the Hermetic Dixiecratic Disney Republic(an) of New Albany, where the referendum of support for Mayor Jeff Gahan Presents the Doggie Doo Doo Fun Park and Canine Water Slide passed muster with 98.6% tally in favor, but disclaimers aside, I am informed that tomorrow 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 Great and Wonderful Tidings.
In 2014, I wrote these words:
"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."
See what I did there? That's right: The law finally changed in 2015.
Just a bit related to the topic at hand.
It's about time, isn't it? Maybe the Freedom from Religion Foundation intervened. After all, the prohibition of alcohol sales on Christmas Day was a blatant imposition of selective religious blue law on what should be secular tippling.
Indiana may be a basket case, but at least this one's finally right.
The Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission (ATC) announced today you can buy alcohol on Christmas.
Although many businesses are closed on Christmas, restaurants, bars, liquor stores and grocery stores that are open will be allowed to sell alcohol to you.
I'm told that Kansai Japanese Steakhouse in Clarksville will be open on Christmas Day, is cognizant of the change (many probably aren't), and will be serving adult beverages. Surely Horseshoe Casino will be, as well. Anyone else? Let me know, and I'll spread the word on social media.
(Let's assume that by now, two years down the road, everyone knows the drill.)
---
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.
Maybe, but only up to a point. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has contributed a thoughtful essay linking consumer Christmas to the stoking of irrational fears: This Christmas, Tune It All Out.
As for the rest of that shopaholic, mall-rushing craziness that can make this holiday so stressful, it turns out that it's optional. Switch off the wi-fi for a few days, turn off the TV, and it's amazing how much more reasonable the world instantly seems.
In the main, just know that you can count me out. Perhaps religion remains the preferred opiate because too much of the profit from consumerism remains in the hands of the 1 per cent.
---
In fact, I do have a favorite Christmas story.
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 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 Louisville 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 perverse creativity alone.
In short, exactly my kind of Christmas, but please, feel perfectly free to enjoy yours. Usually we spend Christmas Day eating egg rolls, Singapore rice noodles and Happy Family, but in 2015 comes another banner headline: Vietnam Kitchen is open on Christmas Day. Again in 2017, VK is open on Christmas Day from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and we'll be there.
The very best Christmases are the ones that come and go with nary a trace, but this tiding truly is special. Clay pot catfish and beer?
In the absence of Slovak carp, it'll have to do.
(Addendum: My friend Peter Dedina evidently is visiting his hometown of Košice, Slovakia, and posted this photo of yuletide carp.)
ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2017 Remix).
A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
This column contains bits and pieces published previously in varying forms at various places. Each year, it functions as the blog's unified, omnibus Christmas utterance -- or, if you will, a primal scream. It happens each holiday season.
During an otherwise random conversation about sombrero-wearin' taco walkers, the uncanny tendency of local Democrats to experience tumescence whenever Jeff Gahan spits on the downtrodden, Dan Coffey's most recent "last ever" bribe, or even mere lumps of coal, eventually someone looks at me with palpable dismay.
“Roger, you’re such a Grinch.”
My response never varies.
“Thank you very much.”
The roots of my longstanding Yuletide antipathy might be traced to Freudian conceits, Jungian counter-thrusts, references to childhood toilet training habits or the sheer pervasiveness of psychological repression stemming from residency in a nakedly fascistic state like Indiana, but in truth, it’s far simpler.
It goes back to that original, defining moment in every American boy’s life – not when it becomes clear that he’ll die some day without the saving grace of being able to hit a curveball, but the sudden, gut-wrenching discovery that in spite of the shameless propaganda fed to us by adults, who’d assured us that excruciating behavioral self-regulation would be rewarded by a gaudily costumed fat man parking his tricked-out sleigh on the roof and descending the chimney, that nope, in the end, it was nothing more than a shameless ruse.
Then it hits you: Santa Claus doesn’t really exist.
At all.
Our house didn’t even have a chimney, and you’d think this would have made me suspicious, but I was oblivious. When the shameful day of infamy arrived and my school mate chided me -- “c’mon, don’t tell me you still believe in Santa?” -- I did much more than merely shake Santa’s grip, cold turkey, right there on the spot.
I irrevocably disavowed the whole contrived Christmas spectacle, because even at such a tender age, I could see the dominoes falling as the previously sacrosanct Santa myth vaporized in plain sight, because if the grownups could mislead us about Santa, where would it end?
They might also be fibbing about those other edicts demanding compliance and conformity, from the civic foundational edifices of religion, patriotism and obedience, to the commandment forbidding jaywalking.
The worst of it was sitting alone in my room, cross-legged on the cold tile floor, and experiencing the devastating frustration of knowing that I was far too young to properly drink my way through the rampant disappointment.
Santa’s unused cookies and milk were the best I could do, and then, as now, I udderly DETEST milk.
---
In 1991, at the age of 31, I spent Christmas in the city of Košice -- today located in sovereign Slovakia, which then comprised the easternmost lands of Czechoslovakia. It was the mid-point of a six-month stint teaching conversational English to doctors and nurses at the city’s main hospital, an experience made possible by the Cold War’s end.
In 2016, Santa brought the gadget to digitalize those
Košice slides from 1991-92. It's a goal for 2018.
Upon returning stateside in 1992, there was a brief break, and then I went back into the food and drink business, where I’ve been, left, and bizarrely remain, ever since (until someone pays me to leave, that is). Remind me to check my stocking for a money order, will you?
Grinch or not, the approach of the holiday season in Košice proved fascinating. With no Thanksgiving to serve as mile marker, few signs were evident that that Christmas was coming until the eve of St. Nicholas Day (December 6), when children scrubbed and polished their shoes, placing them on windowsills to be filled with candy and chocolate. Presumably, bad children would receive a bundle of twigs bound together for swatting their butts … as it should be.
In Communist times, the regime attempted to persuade the populace that a chap named Grandfather Frost brought these goodies, presumably on behalf of the benevolent leadership. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, back came Christmas trees and caroling in the streets, and while these were familiar to me, decorations didn't even begin to appear until the first part of December. I remarked to my uncomprehending students that they should contrive a holiday like Halloween to mark the true beginning of the shopping season.
Shopping season? It was quite ephemeral. Surely it’s different in 2017, but in 1991, only a few understated window displays were to be seen in shops, and high pressure, guilt-laced sales tactics were nowhere to be found.
However, one necessary seasonal item became ubiquitous during the week preceding Christmas. This was delicious carp, raised and fattened in farm ponds, not river bottoms, and brought to market in street-side barrels and oversized plastic tubs. Some buyers brought their own buckets to take the living fish home for a few days of further bathtub cleansing. Others had their purchase killed, weighed and wrapped on the spot.
Carp is the traditional Slovak meal for Christmas, accompanied by an array of special side dishes, and perhaps some steaming sauerkraut soup. There always was plenty of bottled lager, but the Christmas Eve toast in 1991 was chased with homemade peach brandy from a student’s village nearby: “To peace, health and a good harvest.”
---
Two or three lifetimes later, there was a second chance to be in Europe for Christmas. I hope it doesn’t prove to be the last.
In 2009, we stayed in a rental apartment in Bamberg, Germany, a mere stone's throw from the Fässla and Spezial breweries. With the requisite open-air Christmas market, mulled wine and naturalistic decorations, Franconia’s version of the Yuletide season was obvious without being garish.
The Grinch in me was shaken, if as yet unbowed.
On Christmas morning, we strolled through the Altstadt’s deserted streets and climbed Altenburg hill to the medieval castle, affording a sweeping view of the valley and Bamberg's dizzying number of church spires. Most businesses were closed, but pleasingly, some food and drink purveyors were open in a city blessedly free of the archaic blue laws still existing in purportedly secular Indiana, which until 2015 prevented alcohol from being served on Dec. 25 – a purely Christian holiday.
Clouds rolled overhead, and it was a bracing and exhilarating walk. Descending the commanding heights back to our riverside starting point, we passed the city museum in the old town hall astride the Regnitz and saw that the doors were open. Inside was a fine collection of 18th-century porcelain from Meissen, and one of 38 nativity scenes on display in and around Bamberg during the holiday season.
A reconnaissance of Ludwigstrasse's expanse revealed that Bamberg's Chinese restaurant owners are not as ambitious as metro Louisville's, with all three closed for the day. However, at the train station, the bakery and small grocery both were open, and I bought a handful of half-liter Schlenkerla Märzen lagers to accompany the evening's home cooked vegetable soup.
With no close friends in Bamberg, we kept ourselves company, having procured groceries and libations in advance. With bottles of Fässla in support, Christmas evening selections on the telly revealed a diverse Euro holiday tableau.
There was a Basque celebration from Bilbao, with crazy costumes, quasi-operatic tunes and the inexplicable, prehistoric language spoken by the world's first cod fishermen. The whole time, I kept expecting a Muse concert to break out.
We watched a performance in Salzburg of Mozart's The Magic Flute; snippets of a schlocky Bavarian idyll, rather like the Osmonds meeting Lawrence Welk, but in lederhösen and dirndls; and then a Berlin performance by Max Raab and the Hotel Palast Orchestra, a stagy society presence reminiscent of Joel Grey’s role in Cabaret.
Finally came City Lights, the not-so-silent masterpiece by Charlie Chaplin, without dialogue but featuring a musical soundtrack as a concession to new 1931 technology. The Little Tramp falls for a blind flower girl ... and meets a drunken millionaire along the way.
On the 26th, Café Abseits beckoned again, with a fine draft list of regional, seasonal Bockbier. Later, at Spezial, delightful Ochsenbrust in horseradish sauce with a dumpling was accompanied by several of the brewpub’s quintessential smoked lagers.
No, I don’t “do” Christmas.
On occasion, vague and ambiguous exceptions are allowed.
---
Through it all, music soothes the heretical breast, just so long as it isn't the pervasive and disgusting same-old-suspect soundtrack heard playing in every public place, beginning the day after Harvest Homecoming and lasting through January.
Each year I make a special effort to listen to a recording of "Ring Christmas Bells." As always, it reminds me of our high school choral director, Michael Neely, who warned us that later in our lives, we'd come to regret taking our singing voices for granted. We scoffed, and of course, he was absolutely right.
Three decades of beer and tobacco have rendered my singing voice moot, and now I’m little more than an interpreter of songs, with the atonal wailings occurring well out of human earshot. Our three cats suffer the most.
Imperfect pitch aside, the only Christmas songs I can even tolerate are the ones we sang in choir, and the only other one I enjoy is "Fairytale Of New York" by The Pogues, with a guest appearance by the late, lovely Kirsty McColl.
To repeat, I don't "do" Christmas ... but in spite of myself, the holiday occasionally provides a few pleasant memories -- even if, quoting Chico Marx, some things never change, and “There ain’t no sanity claus.”
Especially in New Gahania.
This year the lumps of coal are being personally wrapped by the snowman, Gauleiter Duggins, to be thrown through the windows of public housing residents who've inadvertently found themselves residing in the path of our mayoral dullard's petty ambitions.
That's why I won't be ending this year's holiday column on a pleasant note, for peak Scrooge is alive and well and inhabiting Jeff Gahan's well-fed and highly financed body.
For the sake of our city most vulnerable residents, let's hope the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come makes an appearance on Eastridge Drive -- although it won't do much good if Mike Hall comes out to greet him.
Father Desmond O’Donnell says the words Christmas and Easter have lost all sacred meaning
An Irish Catholic priest has called for Christians to stop using the word Christmas because it has been hijacked by “Santa and reindeer”.
Father Desmond O’Donnell said Christians of any denomination need to accept Christmas now has no sacred meaning.
O’Donnell’s comments follow calls from a rightwing pressure group for a boycott of Greggs bakery in the UK after the company replaced baby Jesus with a sausage roll in a nativity scene.
“We’ve lost Christmas, just like we lost Easter, and should abandon the word completely,” O’Donnell told the Belfast Telegraph.
“We need to let it go, it’s already been hijacked and we just need to recognise and accept that.”
They're not kidding about the sausage roll. I'm an atheist, but this one's just weird.
A new advent calendar has been released by Greggs that has left people asking if it’s appropriate to replace Jesus with a sausage roll.
Of all things!
Throughout the calendar there are festive pictures such as sweet pastries hanging from a Christmas tree and a scene from the nativity.
The son of God is nowhere to be seen in the manger, instead there is a sausage roll surrounded by three wise men who we hope are called sausage, beans and cheese melt.
We're not Jewish, but our culinary tradition is the same -- although Vietnam Kitchen has become our first choice, with Great Wall as a backup.
You get only the topic sentence and conclusion. Click through and read the rest of a worthwhile piece. Then eat something, already. Thanks to RG for the link.
This time of year, let’s be honest: The most Jewish-American tradition isn’t even celebrating those eight crazy candle-and latke-filled nights. It’s hitting the local Chinese restaurant on Christmas, of course ...
... In the end, eating Chinese for Christmas is undoubtedly as Jewish-American as it gets. In the words of Noah Bernamoff: “Thousands upon thousands of Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas, so it’s become a de facto tradition. We shouldn’t pretend that it’s not a tradition and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s not Jewish. We’re a distinct people gathering distinctly with each other to eat this food every year at the same time. If that’s not tradition, then I don’t fucking know what tradition means.”
I don't know what comes next. For now, it's family.
It will do us all good, I think, to take a weekend off from the cares of a world that seems to be coming apart from its mind outwards. It will do us all good, I think, to take this particular holiday slowly as it comes around. Even the pagans needed some excuse to rejoice in the darkest time of the year, which is why Christians copped the notion in the first place, and this has been a year with more than its share of dark times, god knows. And there's no telling what's coming down out of the deep woods come the next turning of the calendar. But very likely it's something we've never seen before, or at least that's the way I'm betting.
I've highlighted one passage.
So, as long as we're all in this alien country in which all the landmarks are familiar, but not entirely so, and changed in some vague way at their foundations, it won't hurt us to sit down and catch our breath and realize that, in the end, we are all that we have, and to find, if not joy in that, at least some comfort. Coats against the cold, as the late Guy Clark would have said. I don't know what's coming next. (Truly, at this point, I don't even want to guess.)But there will be places to stand against it, if needs be. Those are the places in which we still can have faith in hope, and where we can see through the storm the golden light of one candle in one window. That should be enough for now.
Picking these places to stand will be the essence of your resistance. Think about them carefully. Although the e-universe exists to rush our thoughts, this is the time to step aside and consider choices carefully. My own resistance will be here, where I live.
But Charlie is right. Give it a rest this weekend. Ignore Trump's idiotic tweets and the death throes of Democrats in "opposition." Take care of business at home. Whether by blood, circumstance or choice, family is a fundamental building block. Indulge it.
I miss Hitch. Last considered here in December of 2014, Hitchens' anti-Christmas masterpiece sustains me during these weeks of ideological overkill.
---
How I miss Christopher Hitchens.
Introductory excerpts from Hitchens' timeless essay are reprinted below, so be sure to follow the link to read the whole, glorious piece, first noted here at NAC in 2008. I reread this every year on or before Christmas Eve. In 2013, there was added gravity, which also deserves another look.
In 2013, as Christmas approached, I'd just finished reading Ray Mouton's novel, In God's House. In 1984, Ray was the lawyer chosen by the state of Louisiana's Catholic Church hierarchy to defend the first priest ever to be charged in secular court with child molestation. Looking back on the perspective of the present day, we obviously know what became of all this, and that Ray's appointment with destiny was the first tiny peek inside a truly massive scandal. I wasn't expecting to be moved to such an extent by Ray's book, but I was -- and remain.
Carrying these thoughts into my annual date with Hitchens, I find the atheist's cynicism to be vastly enhanced.
… My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same. The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.
As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring. Time that is supposed to be devoted to education is devoted instead to the celebration of mythical events ...
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