Dear Reader (but not the ghostwriter who I will one day claim wrote all of the offensive things in the Goldberg File that I will eventually disassociate myself from and walk off the set if any TV interviewers dare ask me about it),
By Great Odin’s Raven, Have a Merry Christmas!
In my column today, I briefly discuss how Hollywood’s effort to make Santa a more “inclusive” figure – inclusive means “not Christian,” if you couldn’t tell – requires making him more explicitly pagan.
Like many of you, I am “forced” to watch a lot of Christmas family programming around this time of year. My daughter loves all of the Christmas cartoons and movies, from the really awful claymation to the really awful CGI stuff, with all the good cartoons and movies in between.
One franchise that’s been on constantly is the Santa Clause series starring Tim Allen. The premises and storylines are way too complicated and irrelevant to discuss here. Heck, I don’t even know which of the movies set me off, there are so many of them. It might have been The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause or maybe it was The Santa Claws: A New Beginning, a straight-to-video feature where Tim Allen turns into a werewolf.
Anyway, in one of them, there’s a big speech at the end where Santa goes on about how we can’t lose the meaning of Christmas. Of course, the actual meaning of Christmas is utterly absent from the film. In Disney’s telling, Santa is some kind of pagan demigod who answers to Mother Nature, relies on the help of such friends as the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman, and competes against Jack Frost for control of the toy-giving franchise.
If the storyline is inspired from the Christian Bible, it’s the worst adaptation since they made Bonfire of the Vanities into a movie.
Ein Volk, Ein Santa!
Oh, one last thing. Isn’t it interesting that the effort to paganize Christmas was trailblazed by the Nazis? Hitler despised Christianity, not least because Jesus was a Jew and Christianity a “Jewish religion.” He preferred the “much freer” paganism of ancient times. The Nazis tried to turn Santa into either the Norse god Odin or “solstice man,” a hippie-like figure who apparently looked a lot like Shaggy from Scooby Doo with a bag of schwag for good little Aryan boys and girls. Hey, that’s not so crazy when you remember they tried to replace Jesus with Hitler.
Here’s a propaganda official in 1937: “We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem. It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion.”
You can read more about all that here.
My point in bringing it up isn’t to say the war-on-Christmas forces are Nazis. It’s not even to hawk my book (the cover of which, by the way, comes with some awfully yuletide-y colors). The Nazis tried to paganize Santa in an effort to make him a German creature of exclusion. The effort to paganize Santa today is close to the opposite – to make him a universal figure of inclusion. That’s an important difference in motivation.
The continuity, it seems to me, is the totalitarian mindset that seeks to purge the social landscape of competing sources of authority – Christmas must be for everybody or nobody. The thing is, if you make something for everybody, you essentially make it for nobody. (As Dash says in The Incredibles, if everybody’s special, then nobody is, or as Arnold Toynbee said, “To extend a privilege to everyone is tantamount to withdrawing it from everyone.”) If Christmas becomes a holiday for Jews, Muslims, and atheists, it can’t really be a holiday for Christians, or at least not the same one Christians celebrate. And once you allow the state to determine what’s permissible for a religion, you’ve set down a disturbing path. This would be a good place to start talking about Herbert Marcuse’s theory of “repressive tolerance” (“No, no it wouldn’t” – The Couch).
But instead, let’s talk about ESPN Ocho.
Why Aren’t They Doing This?
You know, I hear a lot about how conservatives don’t offer solutions to life’s problems. So I thought this would be good time to launch a new semi-regular tradition in the G-File (and by semi-regular, I mean whenever it suits me or perhaps never again). It’s called “Why Aren’t They Doing This?” and it will feature fantastic ideas – perhaps million-dollar ideas – I am too lazy to fully think through, never mind attempt to implement. However, if I discover that a Goldberg File reader takes one of these ideas and gets rich off of it, I reserve the right to come to your mansion and take any three items I desire. Don’t worry, this isn’t a Rumpelstiltskin kind of thing, I won’t take your kid or your wife or anything like that. But I may take that really expensive massage chair and that solid-gold bust of Bea Arthur.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen the movie Dodge Ball (no, not the sappy Merchant Ivory version), then you are missing out on some really solid B to B+ movie making. One of my favorite gags in the film is the fake ESPN channel: ESPN 8, “The Ocho.” Its motto is, “If it’s almost a sport, we’ve got it here!” You can watch a commercial for it here [BROKEN LINK].
Now, my question is: Why can’t ESPN actually do this? Don’t tell me it’s too expensive to come out with another sports channel. There are stretches of my cable guide where I feel like I’ll never get out again, there are so many sports channels. It’s like you get your own sports channel if you sign up three friends for Bally’s Total Fitness. And those are just the sports channels. Have you looked at your cable guide recently? I am amazed that all of these channels I’ve never heard ofcan make payroll. These are just some of the networks on my cable system I found after 30 seconds of scanning: WFN, MAVTV, CARS.TV, VERSUS, ID, and MSNBC. Have you even heard of any of these things?
So I ask you: Why aren’t they making a television network devoted exclusively to the bizarre dregs of the sports world? I understand that ESPN would hate to move its World’s Strongest Man coverage to a different channel. But there’s still competitive eating, goat-head polo, parkour in Akron, Saigon Russian Roulette (“Ditty Mow! Ditty Mow!” — The Couch), and Black Friday at Filene’s.
I’m not a huge sports guy (spare me your feigned shock). But I would watch that stuff.
Various and Sundry
First of all, as Winston Churchill said: “Puppies!“
Second, thanks to all of you who sent “buck-up-camper” e-mails last week. It’s greatly appreciated. I read them all and apologize to anyone I didn’t respond to. There’s an unfair dynamic to reader e-mail. Sometimes the most thoughtful and longest e-mails are the ones I’m most likely to read but least likely to respond to, precisely because it’s so hard to do so in a thorough manner. Sometimes I just freeze up and say to myself, this is too hard, I’ll come back to it later. And then I never do. Also, if I spent 15 minutes responding to each deeply meaningful e-mail I got, I would have to spend several hours every day doing it, and I just can’t spare the time. It sucks and makes me feel guilty, but that’s the truth of it. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to hunt a real human being in a country without an extradition treaty. But that’s not important right now. Another resolution is to figure out how to set aside more time to reply to reader e-mail.
Third, since we spent some time on Jews and Christians today, I thought you might find this piece on Jewish Christians interesting.
Fourth, by the Power of Grayskull! If you get this reference, you should click this and say you’re under 21.
Fifth, a few weeks back, I ate an entire jar of cocktail onions like they were peanuts, and then I ate a jar of peanuts like they were peanuts. I also teased that I had a big announcement coming up. I’m not sure it’s that big ([inappropriate double-entendre joke redacted]). But it looks like I will be launching a regular podcast later in 2012 — on an experimental basis. The suits involved want to see if I would be a good radio host. I just want to see if I like it. Either way, the plan is to do something like an audio version of the G-File, only with a lot more nudity. You’re probably the wrong people to ask about this, but I’d love your feedback about the whole idea.
Sixth: More good news! I’m officially no longer a “visiting fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute. I am simply a “fellow,” which I gather means they want me to stick around longer. I guess I better dismantle all of the explosive charges I set in anticipation of being let go. I’d hate to implode the whole building by accident now.
Seventh: Is the integer that comes after sixth!
Eighth: I’ll be on Special Report tonight. By the way, thanks to all of you folks on Twitter and e-mail who (politely!) nudge Fox to have me on more. It makes a difference.
Ninth: In last week’s G-File, I implied that Daniel Bell was a former Communist. He wasn’t. My apologies.
Tenth: (“You’re just filibustering now” – The Couch) How men pee in public restrooms.
Eleventh: Happy Christmas and Merry Chanukah!