And once we cut the deficit by doing nothing and everyone has pulled themselves together after this collective panic attack, we can all sit down and have a rational discussion about long term health care costs and fixing that little shortfall in Social Security.

Isn’t that cute? She thinks we can still have one of those. She thinks there’s enough left of our brains after 20 years of Fox that we still remember what rational discussion is.

Of course, it’s possible she’s being sarcastic. I hadn’t thought of that.

It was a book I was supposed to read in high school and didn’t, not that I was avoiding it, I just never got around to it what with all the Superman comics and Kierkegaard essays and all that were piled up around me demanding attention. Besides, how could a book with a famously dull hero be anything but, well, dull? OK OK. I was young.

In fact Babbitt – the book that convinced the Nobel Committee to make Lewis the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – is anything but dull. It is wry and funny and, more than anything else, prescient. As early as the 20′s before they even got Roaring, Lewis saw quite clearly what we were doing to ourselves and where it would ultimately and inevitably lead. His eye was merciless, and to read him now, a hundred years later and in a time when all he predicted has come so horribly true, is to feel a profound dislocation, for though the speech and appearance of his characters are radically different from today’s comparable players, nothing much else has changed. Their attitudes, beliefs and demands remain now what they were then.

Mostly. There are a few minor if significant differences. For instance, it was considered “moral” in Lewis’ day for employers to hate their employees “for their own good”, pretending that low pay, dangerous working conditions, and zero benefits were simply ways of making sure the employees were self-reliant and humble so they’d get to heaven faster. Nowadays employers often say the same sorts of things but rarely bother with the “moral” pretense. They save that for making sure the healthcare they offer employees ( assuming they do) doesn’t include birth control or abortion coverage. Now they simply insist that low-pay, low safety, and zero respect are what GOD ordained for the lowly worker, and they’re just going along with it because GOD told them to. Babbitt and his confreres were, in 1920, congratulating themselves for havingn passed beyond that ancient, 19th century sort of voodoo to a more “modern” and “moral” realization. In that sense at least it would seem the early 20 century was somewhat advanced over the early – and regressive – 21st.

The novel first made the country aware of its own passion for conformity and corruption as well as spectacularly illuminating the price we would have to pay for that passion. Since then conformity has been a bugaboo and now even rigidly conformist ideologues like Sarah Palin and Charles Krauthammer have to pretend that they are daring and original “maverick” thinkers who are not NOT NOT NOT “following the crowd”, nosiree, even though they never but never say anything that hasn’t been said by every conservative since Lincoln’s assassination. Yet even this is foreseen by Lewis. In fact the book’s structure is built around it.

Babbitt has been heavily criticized for being nearly plotless, and even Mark Schorer, Lewis’ biographer, accuses Lewis’ structure of being “slack” and goes on to identify 3 subsidiary plots while entirely missing the main one. Schorer calls the novel “a highly conscious, indeed systematic, series of set pieces” and then breaks them down for you – Religion, Recreation, Social Stratifications, Family Relations, etc – claiming that “[t]he ordering of these pieces is almost…aimless” and that “[t]hey could be ordered in almost any other arrangement…because there is no real plot”.

While it’s true enough that Lewis has managed the already admirable feat of capturing an entire world on paper, whole and complete, the idea that he didn’t bother with an plot is false, and if you miss it you’ve missed the whole point of the book. (Which apparently a lot of folks did, which may be why Lewis’ projections didn’t have the effect of halting our forward march over the cliffs of dollar worship. Hard to believe we would have continued down that ruinous path if we had clearly understood where it was leading.) I think perhaps Schorer and others missed it because they were looking for something that isn’t there - the kind of plot where one event leads to other events in a recognizable and connected sequence.

But that isn’t what Lewis wrote. Babbitt‘s plot is based on a much older model, the model of a spiritual rather than physical journey, say, Pilgrim’s Progress. As he encounters each section of his society, his life,  Babbitt grows more uneasy. The vague emptiness which is a small, still voice early on becomes increasingly louder as the book advances: our encounter with Domestic Matters leads to an examination of Marriage which leads to Relaxation as a way of dealing with the disappointment and emptiness of a “convenient” relationship entered into because it was ”the thing to do”, and the failure of leisure to fill the gap leads to Babbitt trying to bury himself in work and chasing success. That doesn’t work either, of course, and we follow George as he slowly begins spinning out of control, searching desperately for something to hang onto: Prohibition hooch, fast times, a girlfriend who “understands” him, a “rebellion” where he half-heartedly defends the rights of workers to a decent wage or at least to not be reviled and suffers the agony of being ostracized by his old friends and neighbors for his “liberal attitude”.

None of this helps because he’s feeling a real disconnection between his life and his soul, a disconnection he has only the faintest of ideas how to correct, and he’s getting no help at all from the people around him, each of whom is floating in the same emptiness and denying it strenuously. In fact, it is the kind of disconnection we more modern moderns would equate with teenage angst, the typical disconnect of youth, and at the same time of middle age. “Mid-life crisis” we might call it today, but on Babbitt Lewis allows it to look as childish and churlish as it actually is.

To read Babbitt now is to be made aware of just how immature and childish the chase after wealth is. And our latter-day Babbitts are shown to be little more than overgrown, spoiled brats demanding their own way because they lack the resources to be flexible and the will to be generous.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is in the early stages of a presidential campaign, spoke in an interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network about his history of adultery and divorces. And as Gingrich told it, he sought God’s forgiveness – and as for the events themselves, they were driven by how hard he was working and his great passion for America.

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” said Gingrich.

Oh.

2) Did you know that an NPR exec was just fired for calling racist Tea Partiers racist?

So James O’Keefe has another scalp.

Apparently, Glenn Beck can call the president of the United States a racist on national television and keep his job, but if you’re an NPR executive who says the same thing privately about a bunch of nameless Teabaggers — you’ve gotta go.

And the real kicker is, what Ron Schiller said is 100% true.

Such is the state of our “news media”. Beck can get away with calling Obama a racist precisely because it isn’t true. Schiller had to be fired precisely because his accusations were accurate – the Tea Party is indeed racist and has proved it on a number of occasions.

Is there any room left in New Zealand?

3) Did you know that even Glenn Beck’s audience is tired of him?

 Since last August, when he summoned more than 100,000 followers to the Washington mall for the “Restoring Honor” rally, Mr. Beck has lost over a third of his audience on Fox — a greater percentage drop than other hosts at Fox. True, he fell from the great heights of the health care debate in January 2010, but there has been worrisome erosion — more than one million viewers — especially in the younger demographic.

(emphasis added)

Hate and paranoia sell, I guess, but only temporarily. Car wrecks are fascinating, too, but eventually one moves on. You know?

When people who have no respect for law are teaching law, you know you’re fucked.

2. A certifiable psychopath with homicidal paranoid delusions has a national tv show. (Via Norwegianity)

And yes, he’s stupid, too.

This would be the time, if ever there was one, to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, but before we can do that to any purpose we need to clear away some of the dead wood by exploding a couple of the myths that have built up around it since the holiday became popular in the late 19th century. Chief among these is the legend that Christmas is Christian, or even religious.

Myth #1: That Christmas used to be a religious holiday but has been turned into a consumer carnival

It may seem obvious that Christmas is a Christian holiday. The very name of the day suggests a celebration of Christ, and certainly many have bemoaned the fact that Xmas seems to have lost its religious meaning under a barrage of commercialism. Back in the 1950′s the satirist Stan Freberg released a classic record called “$Green Christmas$” which savagely criticized what Christmas had become even then; its chief sound effect was the ringing of a cash register. Behind all the criticism was then – and is now – a belief that Christmas had once meant something it no longer means, that what was originally the celebration of a religious figure has been twisted into a callous, materialist frenzy of buying stuff.

The truth is somewhat different.

In America, we are reminded, the idea of a Christmas celebration didn’t really take hold until commercial interests recognized its potential and began to sell it like corn flakes.

The growth of Santa as the predominant icon of Christmas in much of the world grew out of the efforts of retail wizards such as John Wanamaker and Rowland Hussey Macy, founders of the modern department store. Much like the early church fathers, Wanamaker and Macy systematically laid claim to a Christmas of their own making in the 19th century.By this point, said Russell W. Belk, a sociologist and anthropologist at York University in Toronto, Christmas had already been through several incarnations — Christians in the United States had initially resisted Christmas because it was seen as tied to the Catholic calendar, but waves of European immigrants brought traditions of Christmas celebrations with them. Still, the idea of giving gifts to relatives was not the norm, especially among English immigrants, where Christmas gifts were primarily seen as acts of benevolence toward servants and slaves.

***

Business magnates who had once protested that holidays such as Christmas were a drain on the economy spotted the business potential of Christmas and encouraged the idea of gift-giving among family. Where Christmas gifts had once been primarily about charity, advertisers and marketers encouraged the notion that Christmas was primarily a family celebration and stressed the importance of reciprocal gift exchanges for friends and relatives. By the 20th century, American marketing geniuses led by Coca-Cola had seized on the advertising potential of Santa Claus. Although Santa’s ancestors in Europe and Asia had various religious connotations, the modern Santa is an American invention, with growing appeal in Europe and around the world.

“Coca-Cola to some extent owns Christmas,” said Belk. In the 1930s, he added, “they had a painter commissioned to do one painting of Santa Claus every year . . . it seems likely that the red color of Santa’s outfits came from Coca-Cola’s paintings.”

It doesn’t actually. “Santa Claus” is from the Dutch for Saint Nicholas – Sinterklaas – and the color red was always associated with the Greek St Nicholas who is the source of the icon. (More about him later.) Coke’s artists merely appropriated an image already made famous by Thomas Nast in the 1870′s and 80′s, an action that is fairly symbolic of how the holiday actually developed.

Myth #2: That Christmas is primarily a Christian holiday

The trappings of Christmas are almost entirely pagan in origin. Christmas trees, the lights on both trees and homes, wreaths, caroling, Santa Claus, the exchange of gifts – all of it was born in pagan solstice festivals beginning, as far as we can tell, long before Christ’s time. In the context of the solstice, it all makes perfect sense. In a Christian context, they simply don’t belong. What does Christ, a product of the Judean desert, have to do with pine trees, after all? Nothing.

• Christmas trees – Probably born in Germany or the Nordic countries, the ritual symbolism of the solstice evergreen was just that: it was ever green. Unlike the deciduous trees that dominated the forests of northern Europe whose leaves died and fell away as winter began, fir trees remained green all year round. They were the perfect representation in pagan societies for the persistence of life and the fertility of the earth on which those societies depended. Druids (the real ones, not the pale, bogus artifices we know today) worshipped trees, evergreens in particular, because they believed they were the earthly incarnations of spirits and/or gods. Evergreens were believed either to be or to be the homes of spirits who controlled the sun and had the power to bring it back and renew the earth for another year. The custom of bringing a tree inside, almost certainly German, probably began as a form of pagan tree-worship.
• Lights – As the days shortened and the sun threatened to disappear, the long nights became a source of real fear, not just because folk believed it might vanish but because they believed that evil spirits lurked in the dark, and the longer the nights were, the more chance there was that these monsters would wreak havoc on their villages. The solution, of course, was a Festival of Light held, naturally, on the one day of the year that had the least of it. There were torch parades and candles were kept burning all night. When the trees came inside, so did the candles, and by the Victorian era the candles had become attached to the branches of the tree.
• Wreaths – Common to many cultures, wreaths were either worn, as in Rome, or displayed as signs of either special favor or protection from evil. Long before trees were brought into the house, wreaths were attached to doorposts, connecting the magic of the evergreen to individual homes.
• Caroling – Noise has long been believed by many peoples to scare away evil spirits. In China they beat drums and gongs, in Europe they sang. The origin of this particular custom (called “wassailing” in Britain) is lost to history but it isn’t unreasonable to assume that it was a natural addition to all the other anti-evil charms employed by our ancestors. So is dancing, of course, so it isn’t surprising that the two were combined. In fact, the original meaning of the word was “circle dance” and was most likely an integral part of the midwinter ritual. We don’t do the dancing part much any more, and it’s too bad.
• Santa Claus – Unlike the rest of our Christmas traditions, Santa Claus does have some slight connection to Christianity. Born to wealthy and devout Christian parents in Patara, then a province of Greece, St Nicholas is supposed to have taken the words of Christ to heart and given away the whole of his large inheritance to relieve the suffering of the poor and the sick. Though he was never ordained, his reputation for piety was such that he was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. Persecuted and imprisoned by the Emperor Diocletian, he returned to Myra after his release and died there on December 6, 343. For many years after that, the anniversary of his death was celebrated as “St Nicholas Day”.Co-incidence? Sort of. The fact that he died in December only a few days before Saturnalia (the Roman midwinter festival) connected him quite naturally to what became Christmas when the Catholic Church appropriated midwinter festivals for a celebration of the birth of Christ. After centuries of trying unsuccessfully to stamp out these primarily pagan rituals, the geniuses in the Church came up with a brilliant idea: if they couldn’t be stopped, they could certainly be swallowed up – assimilated by the Church and given a Catholic context. This was to prove a valuable and almost universally successful tactic in the centuries to come.St Nicholas Day melded rather naturally into the solstice festivals and it wasn’t long before St Nick and Christmas were inseparable. In many parts of Europe, Dec 6 is still celebrated as both.It should be noted that the St Nick we know is neither Greek nor terribly Christian. He’s Dutch. Sort of….
• The giving of gifts, stockings over the fireplace, and coming down the chimney– Both of these customs arose not in Europe but – are you ready for this? – here. In America. In New York, in fact.
  

  After the American Revolution, New Yorkers remembered with pride the colony’s nearly-forgotten Dutch roots. John Pintard, influential patriot and antiquarian, who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that year he published the satirical fiction, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with numerous references to a jolly St. Nicholas character. This was not a saintly bishop, rather an elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe. These delightful flights of imagination are the origin of the New Amsterdam St. Nicholas legends: that the first Dutch emigrant ship had a figurehead of St. Nicholas; that St. Nicholas Day was observed in the colony; that the first church was dedicated to him; and that St. Nicholas comes down chimneys to bring gifts. Irving’s work was regarded as the “first notable work of imagination in the New World.”The New York Historical Society held its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner on December 6, 1810. John Pintard commissioned artist Alexander Anderson to create the first American image of Nicholas for the occasion. Nicholas was shown in a gift-giving role with children’s treats in stockings hanging at a fireplace. The accompanying poem ends, “Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend! To serve you ever was my end, If you will, now, me something give, I’ll serve you ever while I live.”

  So Washington Irving invented the Santa Claus we know more or less out of whole cloth, relying on legends (as he often did) and embellishing until the original story was barely recognizable. Irving entirely ignored the religious connotation of the title “saint” and any overt connection to religion, let alone to Christ. His St Nick was already 95% secular, a cultural symbol closer to solstice celebrations than Christian ones.
  
  The total secularization of St Nicholas, morphing him into the Santa Claus we know, was accomplished by only two men: Clement Moore (probably) and Thomas Nast. Moore is generally credited with writing A Visit from St Nicholas(“‘Twas the night before Christmas/and all through the house….” – you know it) for his children in 1822. It forever identified St Nick with the roly-poly, “jolly old elf” of Irving’s story and pretty much divorced him from any possible religious significance. Fifty years later, what Moore had done with words, Nast did with pictures. His cartoons of Santa Claus formed our visual image of the old guy once and for all. Following Irving and Moore, Nast’s Santa is no more a religious figure than, say, Uncle Sam.

Of all the traditions we associate with Christmas, only three are overtly religious: the Nativity Scene, the angel on top of the tree, and going to church. Many Christian churches have the former and most Christians do the latter on Christmas even if they never go the rest of the year. By my count, that makes Christmas roughly 87% secular whether Bill O’Reilly likes it or not.

But there’s Christine O’Donnell bragging about once being a witch and having picnics on a satanic altar, so here comes Glenn Reynolds, A-1, top o’ the heap RW blogger, bigger than Powerline and Mad Michelle combined, to tell us – and all his soon-to-be-ex-fundamentalist friends, I suspect – that witchcraft ain’t so bad. I mean, whatever evil lurks in those covens, being “a witch is better than [being] a Marxist. Which is undoubtedly true.” (Via Ray Edroso)

Apparently, backing up an embarrassingly incompetent and hopelessly insane TeaBag whacko is more important in the the RW World than any sort of religious belief one might hold. One wonders what the Values crowd is going to think about Glenn’s wholesale embrace of black magic.