CSotD: Our traditions: Mobility, paganism and mammon
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Garry Trudeau has extended his sabbatical into next month but, while the six-day strips are reruns, he's still producing Sunday Doonesburys.
Today's is intriguing because, as a one-off, it's a wry commentary on modern families and helicopter parenting, but it also has strong potential to herald a shift, if Mike and Kim really do move from the Pacific Northwest in order to better hover over Alex and her family.
Modern American culture requires mobility, and the whole issue of families and proximity is fraught. When the huddled masses came here, they had to accept the likely consequence that they would never see home and family again.
The same was true for those who loaded up wagons to head West, though, as railroads grew, the permanence and totality of the separation waned. In "The Virginian," the eponymous cowpuncher is even brought back to Vermont to meet the school teacher's family before they marry, and, while the novel is fiction, it's based on Wister's experience on the plains.
We live in a society with a strong base in mobility, and one of the cultural divides is between those who will leave for a better situation and those who will tough it out rather than abandon their roots. I have friends who commute 60 miles each way in order to remain among family, while I'll throw it all in a U-Haul to get away from an annoying boss.
"Your mileage may vary" indeed.
But mobility comes with a price, and I remember being not a lot older than Alex and Toggle and seeing more than one case of parents retiring and moving to be closer to their adult children.
Which works out well as long as Mike and Kim's lifespans happen to match up with Alex and Toggle's job satisfaction. But it's a lot more sunny and optimistic to imagine greener pastures and be counting the years until the kids get out of high school than, y'know, to be counting …
Toggle's mom also seems to live nearby, but, first of all, she was already there, so she didn't drive a tent peg through anybody's foot. And, second, she's got so many bad health habits that …
Okay, let's change the topic, shall we?
War? Huh! Good gods y'all!
Oh, we've had the war on Halloween for decades, Zack Hill.
The more militant cults of Protestantism have railed against Halloween as pagan Satanism, and, while you can criticise their belief in demons as superstitious, a certain acceptance of other-worldly phenomena is implicit in belonging to a church at all, so we're only, once more, haggling over where the line is to be drawn.
My take is this:
1. The pagan aspects of Easter fit nicely with a highly justifiable Christian celebration, given that the Resurrection of Christ is the focal point of Christianity and it clearly happened at the Passover, which occurs in the Spring. It's proper to preach against colored eggs and omnipresent bunnies, but the holiday itself is, well, sacrosanct.
2. Christmas is a little touchier. The birth of Jesus is not central and three of the four canonical gospels don't even mention it. Moreover, if we accept the story as told in Luke, it didn't happen in Winter. Still, central or not, it's worth celebrating the presence of God on Earth and if it happens to conveniently absorb a pagan festival that people were going to celebrate anyway, wotthehell indeed.
But, while a lot of comics are now complaining about Christmas decorations and gifts items already appearing in stores, I have a different annual milestone to bang my head over: I got my first "I say Merry Christmas because it's a god damned Christian holiday you bastards!" message on my Facebook feed two days ago.
It wasn't quite phrased that way, but the hostility and defensiveness were similar. Yes, what a shame that Christians have no voice at all in this nation.
So here goes my annual exercise in futility and in preaching to the choir:
It's ignorant to claim "Merry Christmas" as a Christian tradition, particularly if you trace America's Christian roots to Plymouth Rock. While the Pilgrims and Puritans were not the same people, they shared a deep hatred of Christmas and considered it both Papist idolatry and paganism to boot. And boot it they did, not simply by ignoring the purported holiday but by actually banning it.
To which I would add that if you can't express the hope that someone else will also enjoy the holidays of their religion or ethnicity, you really are simply Christian Taliban.
3. Howsoever, getting back to Zack and the foam pumpkin, I see no way that All Souls Day and All Saints Day are not blatant attempts — and Papist attempts at that — to baptize a pagan festival.
And if I believed that Satan was (A) real and (B) standing around just waiting for some kid to put on a mask and collect some candy so he could snatch his soul, well, then I'd protest, too.
By the way, that last link is scarier than anything you're gonna see on Halloween.
In other news:
Dilbert notes the values system under which we operate.
As I reported in the wrap-up to my unscientific poll, while improved spam filters did apparently sort the readers from the Elbonians and drive down my reported numbers about a year ago, indications are that you are really out there, in dependable if modest numbers.
And while I remain adamantly opposed to having exploitive, dishonest commercial crap appear on the site, there are ways to pay for all this wonderful content without becoming part of the problem.
At some point, then, you will very likely note a banner appear here from Project Wonderful, an ad program which seems mostly to direct people from one webcomic to another. That's not only better than directing them to places where they will be robbed, but is even somewhat within the mission of this blog.
Incidentally, I've noticed lately that ads have gone from claiming that their second-language program is easier than taking a college course to suggesting that speaking a second language will get you laid.
Which makes me wonder how many lessons you have to sign up for if you just want to get to second base? (Feel free to use your own language skills to restore the original wisecrack.)
Anyway, when you start seeing that banner, please bear in mind that the only "endorsement" in it is that I'm endorsing my need to get a little more income flowing, while continuing to endorse the idea that you don't have to sell out completely.
Just a little sometimes.
I've also worked on Christmas.
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