Brutally Honest Rant - 11/28/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Unacceptable Truths – The REAL Reason For The Season
Audio Transcripts
11/28/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Well we are OFFICIALLY in the “Holiday Season”. Note that I said HOLIDAY, not “CHRISTMAS”, because the whole HOLIDAY SEASON officially starts on Thanksgiving and it doesn’t end until New Year’s Day. But I’ll get back to that in a minute…

Anyway, since December is right around the corner, I just want to remind my Brutally Honest listeners that we are just a couple of weeks away from the annual end-of-year break. This is where I pretty much shut down the soundboard and take a much-needed break from all of the columns and rants that I do for the rest of the time.

I should point out, of course, that this is the ONLY time of the year that I really take off from doing all of this stuff! You see all of these TV and talk radio commentators taking pretty much every third week off for vacations so they can go write their books or fly off to some exotic location that you and I could never afford to even look at, much less try to visit. But not me! Oh, no, not yours truly! I’m still here. I’m still ranting away even after all of these other overpaid and overhyped yahoos are out partying it up. So this is really the only time I have to relax a bit.

So when will the end-of-year thing happen? Sooner than you would think. You guys need to keep checking the Brutally Honest blog site for that announcement. Now, hopefully at some point before then I should have another announcement for 2008 that will REALLY change how you hear my rants. But more on that when the time comes.

Okay, back to the HOLIDAY season!

There is a reason why I continually remind people that we are talking about the HOLIDAY season and not just Christmas… and it has to do with the self-appointed, self-righteous dickheads who constantly berate people for saying the word HOLIDAY instead of Christmas.

You have Focus on the Family keeping track of all of the retailers who do not give the so-called “acceptable” HOLIDAY reference. You have the Liberty Council, formerly run by the dead-and-rotting-in-hell Jerry Falwell, giving out so-called “friend” and “foe” labels for retailers. And of course we have the con artists at World Net Daily hawking their own “Christmas Defense Kits”.

And let’s not forget that the so-called “War on Christmas” has become the annual crusade of the neo-con commentators on Fox News. And while John Gibson and that waste of oxygen Bill O’Reilly have not yet started in on their favorite money-making crusade, the rest of the bunch have already cranked out their Taliban-style antics and have been going strong since… can you believe it… HALLOWEEN!

Now what bugs me on this matter is that they’re picking fights with businesses for not adhering to THEIR standards for the HOLIDAY season! THEY HAVE become the Taliban in that matter! THEY have taken it upon themselves to judge how much good will and cheer others should display… and HOW it should be displayed.

And that brings us to the first of TWO “Unacceptable Truths” when it comes to the HOLIDAY season.

The first unacceptable truth is this: as much as the Christians REFUSE to accept it, and as much as they scream and cry and throw temper tantrums about it, they really NEED the secular elements!

Here you have this celebration, this one time in the whole year that actually TRANSCENDS boundaries, borders, and even differences in faith! I’ve seen Jewish people celebrate this season. I’ve seen Wiccans celebrate this season. I’ve even seen Muslims celebrate this season! Obviously not the devout extremists, but certainly the ones with an open mind.

Now you can’t DO that if it remains a solidly Christian RELIGIOUS celebration. You can’t tell all of those groups that they’re welcome to celebrate, but only IF they remember that they’re supporting CHRISTIANITY if they do it! In fact, if you take out all of the SECULAR aspects of the season, you actually kill many of the things that make it so festive to begin with.

You take out the decorated trees and the wreaths and the mistletoe… those are actually PAGAN symbol. Martin Luthor didn’t invent them. Talking snowmen and flying reindeer? Plagiarized from the Germanic tales of the Norse god Odin travelling on his flying horse and tweaked here and there.

By the way, one of the tales of the real Saint Nicholas was supposedly the basis of the English story of Sweeney Todd. Not exactly the kind of warm and festive story that you would associate with the season. In fact, you know that verse about “scary ghost stories” and “tales of the glories of Christmases long-long-ago”? Not exactly a child-friendly aspect of the season… nor one that was really designed for Christianity.

Now, do you know what happens when you take away all of the non-Christian elements from the season? You get a whole bunch of boring church services. Just the way that the Puritans forced things to be in the Massachusetts Colony for a brief while when they actually outlawed Christmas for not being Christian. That would certainly not be the kind of celebration that could cause a 1-day break in World War I. Nor would it be one that would pass the Separation of Church and State that waylaid other religious celebrations from federal observances. Anyone remember why EASTER isn’t a federal holiday?

In short, while the Christian Taliban may HATE the secular aspects of the HOLIDAY season, and while they throw temper tantrums when stores use the word HOLIDAY instead of CHRISTMAS, in truth THEY NEED those secular aspects in this season! THEY NEED it to be more than just about Christmas! And more than that, THEY NEED it to be more than just a Christian celebration!

So knock off the horsecrap and embrace the all-encompassing time called the HOLIDAY SEASON! The more you neo-con puritans BITCH about it, the more you remind people that you’re just a bomb and a gun away from being no different than the Taliban over in Afghanistan! And without the bomb and gun, you’re no different from the mullahs in Saudi Arabia that let girls die in burning buildings because they’re not wearing headscarves.

Now… strangely enough… that actually leads me to the SECOND “unacceptable truth” about this time of the year. Because I was originally asking myself why the hell these neo-con puritans are even putting us through all this crap that led me to this realization.

You see, I was wondering why we have all of this holiday DRAMA that goes on every year. EVERY YEAR we have people who are in a full-blown panic mode over various elements of the Holiday Season. Decorating the neighborhood, hosting parties, buying just the RIGHT gifts, getting cards out, travelling... they want it all to be JUST RIGHT.

Every year we hear just how chaotic travelling will be. Every year we hear how much more in debt we will be just buying presents, never mind decorations and cards and parties. Every year we hear about the infamous “IT” gift that people would travel around the world and even strangle their mothers to get.

We trivialize this drama! We actually make movies out of them! “Home Alone”, “Christmas with the Kranks”, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, and “Jingle All The Way” quickly come to mind.

And yet, even when we see OUR own faults magnified and reenacted on the big screen, we don’t learn from them! We just laugh along with everyone else and then go right on doing them. We’ll cram ourselves into the stores and drive ourselves further and further into debt to get the “IT” gift. We’ll blow our savings on that “perfect” celebration with friends and family, bringing them from all corners of the globe just for the holiday. We’ll light up the street with a Holiday extravaganza that could be seen from Chinese spy satellites.

And we’ll think nothing of it. We’ll chug down aspirin and antacids and Jack Daniels while painting on those plastic smiles of ours as we go through our own private hell just to pull all of this off.

And every year, I keep on asking myself WHY the hell do we do it? Because we’ll do all of this INTENTIONALLY! We’ll complain about the airlines but we’ll continue to fly. We’ll complain about the stores and the parking and the traffic, but we won’t change our schedules. We’ll complain about the “IT” gift, but we’ll still go crazy looking for it. We’ll complain about the high costs of getting gifts, but we’ll still mortgage our futures to get them. We’ll complain about the high cost and bureaucratic hassles of travel, but we’ll still do it each and every year.

Why do we do it?

Well I’ll tell you why… and it is one of our key “unacceptable truths”. As much as we claim that we are doing this all for our family and for the children and for the neighborhood… we’re actually doing this all FOR OURSELVES!

Let’s get brutally honest here… A LOT of the yuletide drama and chaos and crisis points in our lives are INTENTIONALLY created! Some of them are even SELF-INFLICTED!

We NEED the drama! We NEED it to give our lives a sense of accomplishment! And this is the one time of the year where we can do it and go to extremes and get away with it!

Think about it. How many times can you consciously jack up your electricity bill, spend like crazy, go through all sorts of inhuman waiting in traffic, be an absolute and unrepentant a-hole while shopping, and either herd together all sorts of friends and family members from all corners of the globe or else travel like maniacs from all corners of the globe TO those people, and not be either institutionalized or seen as a major Machiavellian villain? I can only think of ONE time in the year when you can do that!

And all for what? A smile. A joy-filled look from your children? The real reward is internal. The real reward is self-gratification.

WE NEED these moments of chaos and holiday drama to remind ourselves that we are still able to get some things done! Sure we can’t balance the checkbook, and we can’t make ends meet, but, hey, at least I can hunt down that “IT” gift for my kids! My job is crap and I may even get laid off in the next few months, but at least I can organize a big holiday party. My family is about a keg away from being guests on the Jerry Springer Show, but at least I can get them all together and not have them kill each other just long enough for them to enjoy a meal.

And I’m not knocking it, per se… but I do want to keep it all in perspective here, because the REAL REASON of the “season” has more to do with ourselves than with keeping up with some socio-religious celebrations. We do all of these crazy things in the name of others, but in fact, they really are for our own self-worth. We want to believe that we can still do something.

(Computer – something festive)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

By the way, that reasoning also applies to those neo-con puritans who appoint themselves as the Holiday Police. They too are guilty of fabricating their own self-inflicted holiday crisis, and all for their own self-gratification. Because they know that even IF they get ridiculed at every corner, they can still pat themselves on the back and say to themselves “look at what WE did!”

They call it a “culture war”… but in truth, it’s nothing more than a yuletide circle-jerk… done for the benefit of a bunch of pretentious jerks to maintain some unrealistic vision of the season that not even Curier and Ives would want to illustrate.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
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