| Wednesday, December 8, 2004 |
23:12 - The holiday that dare not speak its name
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I'm thinking of starting a running auto-incrementing tally. You know, kind of like the one Mike has in his sidebar. But mine would be for the number of times I hear the word "Christmas" all December long.
I know that on my way to the store and back this evening, I heard something like six consecutive news items and ads on KCBS, all of which either centered prominently on some major business (Macy's, in this case) adopting an official position of never again mentioning the C-word in its decorations, or involving convoluted and massaged dialogue that had clearly had the naughty word excised in early drafts: "Be sure to add that special person to your... shopping list this holiday season!"
Happy voices, happy thoughts, smiles all around. Plastered across the faces all throughout the recording studio. Because if you let the beaming veneer slip you get beat up with a rubber hose.
Why do I get the feeling that a lot fewer people were "offended" by things they saw on the street or heard on the radio back when they didn't have to work so hard to be offended as they do now? I think the last time anyone actually intended to offend anybody in a print advertisement or commercial decoration was in about 1846. Now we've got whole departments at huge corporations dedicated to nothing but vetting every word the company emits to make sure it can't possibly offend anyone, and yet there's always something someone can construe in some scandalous way that gets it onto the front pages and sends the stock price tanking. Working in said department must be one of the most unsatisfying, most psychologically draining jobs in the world: it's like walking on springtime ice, where if you accidentally slip and break through, the townspeople gather to jeer and spit on you as you flail in the frigid water.
This is the world I dreamed of when I was in high school. So why oh why does it suck?
I couldn't have been wrong, could I?
UPDATE: I suppose it should go without saying that I'm getting mighty sick of that "Christmahanukwanzakah" ad by Virgin Mobilantic Wirelessgalactic or whatever. It's trying to be funny, I know, but it just ends up being just as patronizing as the stuff it's trying to parody.
UPDATE: Don't miss this article on Chanukah and why it's obtuse and a little bit demeaning to defer to it in the way we do with our All Cultures Have Their Own Christmas season.
UPDATE: Heh. Now this is more like it. (Thanks to Keith H.)
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Brian Tiemann
