Merry War on Christmas! [Steyn]

Christmas in America is a season of time-honored traditions — the sacred performance of the annual ACLU lawsuit over the presence of an insufficiently secular “holiday” tree; the ritual provocations of the atheist displays licensed by pitifully appeasing municipalities to sit between the menorah and the giant Frosty the Snowman; the familiar strains of every hack columnist’s “war on Christmas” column rolling off the keyboard as easily as Richard Clayderman playing “Winter Wonderland” . . . (snip)

One sympathizes, up to a point. As America degenerates from a land of laws to a land of legalisms, much of life is devoted to forestalling litigation. What’s less understandable is the faintheartedness of explicitly Christian institutions. Last year I chanced to see the e-mail exchanges between college administrators over the choice of that season’s Christmas card. I will spare their blushes, and identify the academy only as a Catholic college in New England. The thread began by asking the distribution list for “thoughts” on the proposed design. No baby, no manger, no star over Bethlehem, but a line drawing of a dove with a sprig of olive in its beak. Underneath the image was the following:

What is Christmas?
It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future.
It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal,
and that every path may lead to peace.
Agnes M. Pharo

The new aristocracy of educational leaders is secular and will kiss the ring of worldly power as symbolic of no other power than that, there own. (flattery upon flattery) It’s “my liege this, my liege that.” And all this coming from bourgeois children growing up with Disney and the great American Dream. So what happened? What happened to church and country? Too bourgeois, not liberal enough. And not romantic enough because in a country of great wealth and affluence romance is and should be everything. All aristocrats were romantics (so we’re told). Valorous deeds, sloths and dragons to fight, women to court, etc. This is the antidote for dopes who would succumb to the mind numbing drudgery of the system, to the 9-5, to life in the capitalist world. The new aristocracy is too good for capitalism and deserve better than the limited, self-conflicted impulses (natural vs conventional) of bourgeois life. The bourgeois man is a nobody, or rather a serf or peasant. The new aristocracy already have established the Chain of Being coming down from their titular head: the UN. Yes, the secret signs of the new masonic handshake or the ring from the right school or politically correct attitudes, that is how you’ll know them and how they know themselves. Very romantic, unChristian and exciting.

"When American municipalities are proudly displaying the execution of skeleton Santas and giant Satans on public property, it may just be a heartening exercise of the First Amendment, it may be a trivial example of the narcissism of moral frivolity. Or it could be a sign that eventually societies become too stupid to survive. The fellows building the post-Western world figure they know which it is." - Mark Steyn

That's the gist of it.

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