Is my carcass in the bag?
I think your neck will come off before your head. (This may require explanation.)
“Merry Christmas. And Happy Chanukkah to all our Jewish friends.”
One of the local TV stations used to say, this time of year, “Merry Christmas. And Happy Chanukkah to all our Jewish friends.”
Gods, I hated that. It’s the very epitome of unconscious marginalization. I mean, more than half the people to whom I expressed disgust just didn’t get it. “It’s nice,” they’d say, “It’s inclusive.” Not so much. The implicit statement is: There’s an Us and a Them. Merry Christmas to Us. Happy Chanukah to Those Others.
When they changed the message, maybe ten years ago, I felt vindicated. It proved I wasn’t a whacko who was offended for no good reason; someone else saw the problem and made the change.
I have lots of non-Christian friends. Most of them are Pagans who were raised some version of Christian or Christian/agnostic (i.e. raised by nominally Christian parents but without religious education) or Christian/atheist. Some are Hindus raised in India, or Jews raised in Israel. Allow me to assure you that if you are one of these people; someone raised in your culture’s dominant faith, you just don’t get it.
I remember being one of exactly two Jewish kids in my middle school (in a town that is now very heavily Jewish, by the way). Every year it’s, Do I sing Silent Night in the choir, or do I single myself out by not singing or by objecting, or do I make a non-statement statement by merely pretending to sing? (Me, I’m a single myself out kinda gal, and my mom was really supportive about speaking to the school about their Christian agenda). When the class project is making Christmas trees, you have to raise your hand if you want to make a menorah instead (so that everyone knows who the Jews are, of course). Or maybe you have to raise your hand and ask if you can please make something else instead.
So you grow up knowing I am not one of these people. I am not part of this culture. I don’t fit in. Which, okay, who wants to fit in? Kids do. And tired adults do. Do you know how exhausting it can be to constantly have to explain, No, that’s not me/us, don’t assume I’m part of your frickin mainstream?
The Radical Right that is promoting their ridiculous War on Christmas doesn’t believe there is a real war. They don’t believe they are being oppressed. But they know there’s lots of political capital in having an angry base. They know they have to keep the Right angry, and it’s hard to convince people they’re angry when they run the country, control the media and the meme, and own all the businesses. So they created a war on gays and gay marriage. But the thing is, despite swings up and down, they’re losing that war, and they’re losing a bit of their base by fighting it. So they needed a new war, They needed one where the base wouldn’t erode. And who will walk away from a War to Save Christmas? I mean!
It’s easy to convince people that they’re oppressed if you hammer the point hard enough. My experience is that Left-leaning, free-thinking people who were raised as part of a majority are pretty clueless as to what it means to be made to stand in the cultural corner. And that’s the Left! So it’s not at all hard to whip up the Right.
See, it’s nice that the culture is more inclusive. We talk all the time about how it’s right and just and so on, but it’s also just nice. Nice to go into a store and have them say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and think they’re saying it to me, instead of thinking, “They don’t mean me” or “They’re leaving me out again” and getting exhausted. Again.
John Gibson and Jerry Falwell probably don’t mean to make little kids feel left out. They probably don’t mean to embarrass kids by singling them out as different in school, just because they’re Jewish or Hindu. They just want their little war to drum up the base. But that’s what they’ll do. They’re not just teaching “the Right” to be angry about Christmas. They’re teaching parents. And those parents will teach their kids, and those kids will go to school and fight their frickin War by belittling other kids. That’s what bigotry is.
Snow Outside and Icy Fingers Inside
We on the Northeast woke up icy cold this morning.
I have a super-duper double-setback thermostat. You know what this means if you have one. You set the heat to become liveable a few minutes before your alarm goes off, so that when it’s time to get up you don’t say “Frack this, it’s too cold” and stay in bed. Then it goes back to frigid just before it’s time to leave the house so you don’t say “Frack this, it’s cozy here in the house, I’m staying home.”
It does this on your weekday schedule, and then it has a different weekend schedule which involves waking up later and staying in the house longer.
Except Thanksgiving is a Thursday. I don’t live in the Bill Gates House o’ Computerized Fun, so my thermostat doesn’t know it’s a holiday today. Thursday is a work day, it thinks. That means cozy warm at six a.m., and then, 8:30 rolls around and WHAMMO I’m Freezing Girl (my super power? I turn blue. I wear a fetching fleece cape wrapped around me and I shiver inside it).
“Good For”
How come when something good is made better, that’s good for it (horse manure is good for the garden)? And when something bad is diminished, that’s also good for it (castor oil is good for scar tissue)?
Site Stuff
Okay, as I said last night in a burst of unbridled enthusiasm, the James Bond site is up, albeit in rudimentary form. The purpose of that site is to allow fans of James Bond to find my book without wading through baffling Wicca stuff with no actual Walther PPK in sight.
I’ve also adjust the home page, In Print, and In Progress pages of DeborahLipp.com to direct people to the right site. (Actually, all I did with In Progress was remove the Bond book, ’cause I can’t see having a book that is both In Print and In Progress, and the Bond book is available for pre-order, but only in the UK. And I wrote to my publisher about that oddity. But I digress.)
Also, I’m working on fixing the blog up nice & spiffy. The designer of my new theme is being terribly helpful about some of my questions and a couple of bugs, and some day soon it’ll be all spiff all the time.
Also I’ve added more links because I aim to be entertaining. I highly recommend you check out I Blame the Patriarchy; she is Coke-spew funny.
Fight the War on Yule
There’s a war on. Whenever someone says “Happy Holidays” to you instead of “Glad Yule,” threaten to sue. If someone displays a Nativity and the Lord is not properly Horned, file a complaint. When Santa is connected to Christmas rather than Yule, protest vigorously.
Rally about, folks! The War on Yule must not succeed!
[The preceding was brought to you by the Department of Righteous Sarcasm. If your sense of humor has not been upgraded recently, your page may not have displayed correctly.]
Sequined Crop Tops are a Tool of the Patriarchy (and other things I learned at Sears)
Over on Shakespeare’s Sister we were having this conversation about girls clothing, and Sis said the point I was making could be a whole other post, so here’s a post.
The original topic was about how Certain Forces In Our Culture™ try to confine girls by accusing them of slutitude whenever they wear anything revealing. But Geez Louise, is it really better to force them into slutitude?
If you haven’t been in a girls’ clothing department recently, I encourage you to be shocked and appalled. The [male] clothing manufacturers are genuinely getting mileage dressing girls as sluts, marketing sluttiness as a commodity. Not just sluttiness, also frilliness, ridiculously-girliness, and the like.
There is no simplicity to be had in most girls’ departments, no jeans without curlicues and flowers and sequins, no t-shirts without some sort of I Am A Slut slogan plastered across it.
One time I was in some store (I think Sears) looking for clothes for my son. And there was this cool line of girl’s clothes with a label like “Just Me,” marketed specifically to an unfrilly girl. How I know this is that the staff had shelved it in the boys’ department. They saw NO pink flowers and assumed it was for boys.
Kids R Us, Sears, Kohl’s, it doesn’t matter; even toddler’s sizes look like stripper wear.
Another time recently, I was buying my son new tap shoes, and I was asking the dancewear store manager about appropriate boy’s dance clothing. She started to say there were unisex clothes on the girl’s rack, and then changed her mind; the shorts now are too short, the shirts ride too high, the asses have sayings across them.
Let’s get real, here. We’re not overcoming the patriarchy by dressing our daughters as sluts. We’re submitting to the latest twist in the patriarchy. We’re buying them the clothes and the Britney Spears albums, so that they think they’re little rock stars oh how cute, but we don’t teach them that some people will think they’re not little rock stars, they’re little sluts, and they won’t understand why the same culture that sold them these clothes is now treating them in a particular and unpleasant way. It’s like Joan Cusack in Working Girl not being able to figure out that her look confines her.
Is it better for boys? Hell no! We struggle to find dancewear because my son doesn’t want to dress like a football or basketball player; he’s a dancer and he doesn’t dig sports. There’s little non-Nike to be had in boy’s wear. Being a male dancer is such a no-no that he’s trapped, sartorially speaking. It’s either girls’ slut clothes or boys’ jock clothes; there’s really nothing to buy for male dancers. Doesn’t that just say everything about how clothing sets us up to be the gender stereotype the culture demands we be?
Clothing stores are much more polarized than they were twenty years ago. As the old fogeys say, when I was a kid, it was different. Of course, I was a kid in the seventies, and “hippie” was a unisex look. I was successfully able to deny my sexuality well past the age when I was actually having sex. And that was comfortable for me.
Nowadays, there’s simply no such thing as unisex clothing. Girls have to stand in the slut corner, boys have to stand in the jock corner, and woe be unto you if you don’t want to be a stereotype.
I don’t know for a fact if the slut corner is worse or better for girls than the virgin corner. It’s a fucking corner; I’d like kids to have a whole room, or better yet, the great outdoors.
Technical Difficulties
On my home computer, every now and then, Microsoft Office starts installing itself. It’s not exactly random. It happens every time I visit certain sites, or do certain things. I will have to start keeping a better record of which things. One thing that causes it is visiting the Snopes “What’s New” page. Not the home page, just “What’s New.”
Things in the bowels of my ‘puter start grinding, the Preparing to Install pop-up appears and demands I put in the proper CD, and gets huffy with me when I don’t, and the pop-up comes back exactly 3 times after I click Cancel (what I tell you three times is true) and then gives up.
What could possibly be causing this?
:::insert baffled facial expression here:::
He’s still the Boss to me
I meant to post about this.
You need to know I am totally a Jersey Girl. Yes, I now live in New York. Yes, I was born in Philadelphia. Yes, I have lived in Massachusetts and California. But I am the Jersey Girl about whom Tom Waits was moved to write, and Bruce was moved to cover that song, and yes he is a God in my home state.
I was once visiting a friend in Florida, this was in the ’80s (in January of ’86 in fact, the week the Challenger crashed, but I digress) and I was listening to a rock radio station having one of those call-in votes. You know, they put up two artists as a contest, and you vote for your fave. It was Tom Petty, with Southern Accents his latest release, versus Cheap Trick, slogging their way through one of their comebacks.
So I was listening to the radio, and lo & behold, Cheap Trick won. The horror! The outrage! This was Florida fertheluvagawd. And I said to my friend that in New Jersey, Bruce would win in a head-to-head against God Himself.
And that’s as it should be.
