If one thing has angered me off recently, it’s been the ‘War on Christmas’, called so by the de facto leader of the Confederacy of Dunces, Bill O’Reilly, and his conservative cohorts at Fox News.
First off, who in the hell is waging a war? What conspiracy theory fuels this illusionary war that tailors to your below-average, right-leaning audience? Because unless I missed something, most people including the one’s in power in this country celebrate Christmas, and most people spend money on items they can’t afford to line the pockets of the big businesses you protect.
Secondly, who cares about semantics? Not everyone celebrates Christmas nor does everyone that does ‘celebrate it’ care about its religious aspects. I certainly don’t care about Santa’s birthday, but I am happy to put up a tree and receive presents as a part of a cultural tradition. And other religions have significant holidays around December & January too — Jewish & Islamic, and let us not forget Festivus. So Happy Holidays is appropriate — it’s inclusive, while Christmas is decidedly exclusive for Christians.
If there is always one unintentionally entertaining figure in stirring up such controversy, it’s Bill O’Reilly. He has had an ongoing segment on the War of Christmas and has established a black list of stores to avoid because they say happy holidays instead of mentioning Christmas. In a recent segment, O’Reilly said every business owner should thank Jesus for being born, because as we know, the success of exploitative capitalism would never have occurred if Jesus couldn’t keep the poor in line. I’m pretty positive if Christmas did not exist, some other celebration would be created to fill the void (and we’ve done our best to create others — Valentine’s day, birthdays, mother & fathers day). The irony here is that O’Reilly viewers are more uneducated and poorer than your typical television viewer, while O’Reilly himself is rich and educated, yet exceedingly ignorant.
The fact is that in America it’s not merry Christmas, happy kwanza, or even happy holidays. It’s happy shopping and materialism, because we do not celebrate the religious aspects of the holiday, but our greed, our lust, and our credit lines in a prosperous nation. The sooner we realize our traditions are based on frivolous consumerism, the sooner we can escape being trapped into base arguments involving the merit of holiday slogans.
Nice post dude. I agree with everything, our country is just depressing to look at now, just reading the news make me shameful at all the stupid scandals ripping off and shit. I saw something today it was like the president of boy scouts was caught with all these little boy pornographic material like 500 pics of kids younger than 12 at times. What the fuck man so disheartening.
Yah, America is slightly sickening all around
[...] PS. Numerous studies have shown that Fox News viewers, especially Mr. O’Reilly’s, are among the most ignorant. [...]