Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Happy holidays, assholes. You have no one to blame but yourselves.
HEY YOU HAVE A POINT THERE! A Christmas point. I never thought about it like that before.

I usually try to stay out of Wal-Mart around the holidays anyway, for survival-related reasons, because those mofos will trample your ass flat when the store discounts LCD teevees by 40% and they find you anywhere near a shopping ingress.

The people of the bowels, may the peace and blessings of Cthulhu be upon them, never get around to any prayerful consideration of the consumer plight. Unless it's to pray more people get trampled.

The other concerns work. It should be a day of rest, with pay.

The day of rest with pay is what you might call an "economic force multiplier."

You give people one day off but you bully them into shopping, visiting relatives, buying large quantities of food, etc. etc.

It's been Christmas around here since the beginning of November, when the shops ceased playing scary Halloween sounds and started playing Christmas carols, running over Thanksgiving as if it didn't exist.

I wonder what the "terror" narrative this year will look like. They've tried crotch bombing. Maybe some would be terrorist will try sticking a bomb up his asshole the way prisoners do with their shanks.

The holiday itself isn't the problem. The context is. Too bad marketing departments have those big budgets, because there's a whole lot of room for mischief in flipping the twelve days back on their medieval heads, and bringing back the Unrule, or the Misrule.

The Puritans actually had the good sense to ban Christmas.

They (rightly) considered it to be the King's holiday, a time for high church Anglicanism and drunkenness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_in_Puritan_New_England

During Anglican Governor Sir Edmund Andros tenure (December 20, 1686 – April 18, 1689), for example, the royal government closed Boston shops on Christmas Day and drove the schoolmaster out of town for a forced holiday. Following Andros' overthrow, however, the Puritan view reasserted itself and shops remained open for business as usual on Christmas with goods such as hay and wood being brought into Boston as on any other work day.

I realize that Puritans have their asshole qualities but sign me up on the side of John Winthrop on this issue.

There's nothing I hate more than forced "fun."

Bill O'Reilly and Pat Buchanan would both look great being led away in chains by a few of Cromwell's troopers.

The Puritans also hated it for its subversiveness. The British Puritan Parliament didn't ban it because it was associated with the king. They banned Christmas because it was barely Christian, and historically so. They instituted a fast and other burgher headed drudgeries.

Who sides with Puritans (and their capitalist inheritors) against Misrule, saturnalia, carnival?

Not I.

jack crow
happenin' guy !!!!

struck wild
y the fun stick he is

Owen, if I were as petty as you I'd shoot myself in the face.

I think Ricky put it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19kiCmyz9sc

When it comes to whiny victimhood, the Professional Blacks and Poverty Pimps have got nothin' on their nemeses, the Aggrieved White Christians.

"Happy holidays, assholes"

And a Peaceful Solstice celebration to you too!

http://www.circlesanctuary.org/pholidays/SolsticePlanningGuide.html

Ricky shows some real cultural sensitivity there; none of that marketing-driven, nervous goodwill, phony bonhomie, pseudo-blessing crap. He's got good sideburns too.

Who sides with Puritans (and their capitalist inheritors) against Misrule, saturnalia, carnival?

Capitalism is not what it used to be.

The Puritans were defending early capitalism against feudalism, the idea that if you gave the slaves a drunken bash on Christmas they'd obey for the rest of the year.

I doubt they banned Christmas in Virginia the way they did in New England.

Back in the 17th Century capitalism was about accumulation, not consumption, the whole Max Weber Protestant work ethic.

But around the time Dickens started writing about Christmas, the industrial revolution was in high gear. Capitalism was becoming more about spending, less about saving.

Now spending and consumption is almost mandatory. That's why Fox and various right wing politicians want to bully us into celebrating Christmas.

I say it's humbug (Christmas) and it's shown by the fact that the most fervent defenders of Christmas are the ones to say "are there no prisons. Are they workhouses."

Down with Christmas!!!

"capitalist inheritors"

Has any social science Great Figure been more over-rated than Max Weber, crude inverter of Marx? Capitalism go it's toehold in the Italian city states where the Borgias were throwing orgies with Popes. Spain's pirates would cut your arm or head off for the smallest speck of pyrite. The British overclass, having grown rich via enclosing land, started building themselves houses that make McMansions look like Gandhi's tent. Industry, in Weber' sense, exploded after the Puritans were a receding memory, and had absolutely nothing to do with the Protestant Ethic, which is a strong candidate for the phoniest, most misleading, invalid concept in social science history. (A very stiff competition, that.)

Xmas is a pagan holiday the Xtians appropriated as a smart marketing move, just as Puritan fascism was threatening to lose its last pinch.

Xmas is a great boon to capitalism, however.

Personally, I find the balance of good and bad to be just about equal, and very far down the list of political priorities. Could anything be more hopeless than trying to attack Xmas? It has no hope of working, and makes the left look like Puritans to boot. Sounds disastrous to me. Bacchanalia are part of what makes life worth living, which is most of the reason even Xtians like Xmas.

MJS, meanwhile, has the fake offense-takers nailed! Happy Holidays to all!

>>may their stockings choke them

I like Riverdaughter's solution. She says that when infected by mad cow disease, you have to get rid of the whole herd.
http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/monday-does-anyone-in-the-democratic-party-know-how-to-play-this-game/

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

Could anything be more hopeless than trying to attack Xmas? It has no hope of working, and makes the left look like Puritans to boot. Sounds disastrous to me. Bacchanalia are part of what makes life worth living, which is most of the reason even Xtians like Xmas.

A lot of working class people feel pressured to spend money on Christmas. It's an incredibly stressful time of the year for the poor.

For kids it's more about competition to see who gets the newest, hippest X Box than it is about Bacchanalia.

So it does have its vulnerabilities.

And didn't Max Weber perfectly outline the progress of Ebenezer Scrooge?

He begins A Christmas Carol as an early British capitalist, concerned with accumulation of capital, and ends it as a late British capitalist, turning to charity to unload his surplus product.

And think about Tiny Tim. He needed to be a part of a genuine, single payer health care system, not depend on the charity of his father's (nudge nudge confirmed bachelor) employer.

People in my neck of the woods were already saying "Happy Holidays" to one another with minimal pain about thirty or forty years ago. I wonder what the precise point in time was when it apparently became such a huge strain on a few particularly loud-mouthed Christians to just keep saying it? What pushed them over the edge, the poor babies?

[shrug]

Christians want to "take back Christmas."

Progs want to "take back America."

The seeds of 2011's, uh, holiday column are probably in there somewhere, waiting to be sown. :/

Aside from a general hatred of the annual holiday smarmathon, I suffer from contortions of my psychic bowels whenever I hear Xmas music. I think even Jesus would agree it makes you want to reach for your Thompson.

I got a blood test today and they had the usual treacly Xmas noise-generators going, and I was about to say to the lab tech that it must be hell having to listen to that crap all day when I noticed it was coming from his laptop hooked up to some speakers.

Yes, Virginia, there are sonic sadists out there who voluntarily listen to Xmas music and happily inflict this torture on their fellow smurfs.

Collective punishment through seasonal elevator music...

Jesus would understand.

santa is the gig of xmas

baby jesus ???
that inert swaddled lump ???

only looks like an under cooked
unburied suckling porker

luau jesus

eat him all but once year

instead of token chips once a week

a sacred convenience

like the super pill

Dawson seems to be under the impression that one needs Weber to connect Puritanism with its inheritors. Inheritors. Not direct descendants.

I prefer HM Wood. She makes a good case. Better than the one which assumes an ill defined proto-capitalism wherever the rich had additional loot.

JC, your reading skills are on display once again. I'm saying one doesn't need Max Weber for anything. The man explained nothing. His effort to say capitalism is the result of a religio-cultural peculiarity was and is an utter failure. If the academy and its overseers weren't so thirsty for Marx bashers, Weber's name would have been unknown by 1940.

Weber was a mega-racist, to boot, saying only "the Occident" was rational.

I didn't refer to Weber or mention him, clown. You conjured him up.