December 25, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
I Saw Jackie Mason Kissing Santa Claus
By FRANK RICH
THE good news today is that the great 2005 war on Christmas, the
conflagration that launched a thousand op-ed pieces and nearly as many
battles on Fox News, is now officially over. And yes, Virginia - Christmas
won!
Secularists, Jews, mainline Protestants and all the other grinches failed
utterly to take Kriss Kringle down. Except at those megachurches that
canceled services today rather than impede their flocks' giving and gorging,
Christmas is alive and well everywhere in America. Last night NBC even
rolled the dice and broadcast "It's a Wonderful Life" in prime time. With
courage reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's defiance of Stalin, the
network steadfastly refused to redub the final scene's cries of "Merry
Christmas!" with the godless "Happy holidays!"
As Michelle Goldberg wrote last month in her definitive debunking for Salon,
there was in fact no war on Christmas, but rather "a burgeoning myth of a
war on Christmas." Most of the grievances cited by Christmas's whiniest
protectors - red and green banned from residents' wardrobes in Michigan,
"Silent Night" censored in Wisconsin - were either anomalous idiocies or
suburban legends. The calls for boycotts against chain stores with heathen
holiday trees lost their zing when it turned out that even George and Laura
Bush's Christmas card had called for a happy "holiday season."
But like every other chapter of irrational hysteria in America's cultural
history, from the burning of "witches" in colonial Salem to the panic
induced by Orson Welles's radio broadcast of the fictional "War of the
Worlds" on the eve of World War II, the fake war on Christmas was not
without its hidden meanings. Or not so hidden. If you worked at Fox News,
wouldn't you want to change the subject from the war in Iraq to a war in
which victory is a slam-dunk?
Rabble-rousing paranoia about a supposed assault on Christmas also has a
strong anti-Semitic and far-right pedigree. In Salon, Ms. Goldberg noted
that fulmination about supposed Jewish opposition to Christmas dates to
Henry Ford's infamous "The International Jew" of 1921. That chord is sounded
in the very first anecdote in the book by the Fox News anchor John Gibson,
"The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian
Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought": a devastated father discovers that his
4-year-old son has brought home preschool artwork showing a Hanukkah menorah
and Kwanzaa candles, rather than a Christmas tree. But Mr. Gibson goes on to
add ecumenically that "not just Jewish people" are out to kill Christmas. As
he elucidated on Christian radio, all non-Christians are "following the
wrong religion," though he reassures us that they will be tolerated "as long
as they're civil and behave."
Even so, much of this manufactured war was more banal than malicious. Like
Christmas itself, an anti-Christmas scare is an ideal means for moving
merchandise. The first Fox News segment warning darkly of a war on Christmas
occurred on Oct. 20 - coincidentally the very day that Mr. Gibson's book hit
the nation's bookstores. Many of the five dozen ensuing Fox segments
contained lavish plugs for the book or for the Christmas baubles hawked by
Bill O'Reilly on his Web site - no yuletide loofahs, alas. (His wares were
initially listed as "holiday" gifts until a Web exposé forced a frantic
rebranding.) Even Fox News's obligatory show Jew - Jackie Mason, ostensibly
representing an organization called Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation -
seized the mercantile opportunity, using the "war on Christmas" to plug a
stand-up booking on Long Island.
But to fully parse the war-on-Christmas myth, it helps to examine it in the
larger context of what "The Daily Show" would call This Year in God. Though
religion has always been a fulcrum of culture wars in America, its debased
role in that debate has fallen to new lows of lunacy since Election Day
2004. That's when a single vague exit poll found that 22 percent of
Americans considered undefined "moral values" in casting their ballots. Ever
since, politicians of both parties, Fox News anchors and any other huckster
eager to sell goods, an agenda or an image have increased the decibel level
of their pandering to "people of faith."
An ersatz war on Christmas fits all too snugly into a year that began with
the religious right's (unsuccessful) efforts to destroy the box office and
Oscar prospects of Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" and "save" Terri
Schiavo and that ended with a federal judge banishing intelligent design
from high school biology classes. In his sweeping 139-page opinion, that
judge, John Jones III, put his finger on the hypocrisy of many of those most
ostentatiously defending faith from its alleged assailants in America.
Referring to the fundamentalists on the Dover, Pa., school board, he wrote
that it was "ironic" that those who "so staunchly and proudly touted their
religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their
tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design policy."
That passage fits much of the dishonesty and cynicism perpetrated in the
name of religion in America over the past 12 months.
This was the year that two C.E.O.'s charged with wholesale corporate fraud,
Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom and Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth, both made a
show of public prayer to ward off legal culpability. In Mr. Scrushy's case,
the strategy worked. Faced with the prospect of life in prison and the
forfeiture of $279 million, he quit his suburban Birmingham, Ala., church to
join a largely blue-collar African-American congregation more in keeping
with his potential jury pool, secured his own ordination as a
nondenominational minister, and bought local TV time for a prayer show
featuring himself, his third wife and various members of the clergy. The
jury acquitted him on all 36 felony counts.
"God is good," he proclaimed after his victory news conference. To which one
can only add: amen.
A no less unctuous spectacle was provided this year by Bill Frist, the
Senate's majority leader and self-infatuated doctor-in-residence. Mr. Frist
played God on national television by giving a quack diagnosis of Ms.
Schiavo's condition based on a videotape, and then endorsed a so-called
Justice Sunday megachurch rally demonizing "activist" judges - including, no
doubt, any who may yet pass on the legality of his brilliantly timed stock
sales. Though the senator's farcical behavior is worthy of Molière, he is
hardly unique among his peers with presidential aspirations. Chastened by a
perceived "moral values" deficit that might haunt her in 2008, Hillary
Clinton now wears her history as "a praying person" on her sleeve. In June
John Kerry told a gathering that he "went back and read the New Testament
the other day" - which presumably will prevent him from erroneously citing
Job as his favorite New Testament text, as Howard Dean did in 2004.
Liberals have a lot to learn about the God racket, however. The right is
masterly at exploiting religion and religious (or quasi-religious) leaders
for its own fun and profit. Just look at how a few phone calls from Karl
Rove flimflammed Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family into serving as a
useful idiot in support of the Harriet Miers nomination long after most
other conservative leaders had bailed out.
THE more we learned about the scandals enveloping Tom DeLay and his favorite
lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, this year, the more we learned of how Mr. Abramoff,
the founder of a now defunct Washington yeshiva and two defunct kosher
restaurants, manipulated a trinity of Billy Sundays to do his bidding: the
Christian Coalition's former executive director, Ralph Reed, the Traditional
Values Coalition's Rev. Louis Sheldon (dubbed "Lucky Louie" by Mr. Abramoff)
and Dr. Dobson. Though all three are vocal opponents of gambling, they were
each recruited for stealth campaigns for the lobbyist's casino and lottery
clients. The campaigns were disguised as "anti-gambling" crusades (often
because they were in opposition to casinos competing with Abramoff clients),
and these pious gentlemen, Lucky Louie included, have denied any knowledge
that they were trafficking in the wages of sin. If they're actually telling
the truth, they are even bigger dupes than Mr. Abramoff took them for.
To those who fear the worst from a born-again president whose base is
typified by these holy rollers and the Christmas demagogues of Fox News, a
fundamentalist theocracy seems as imminent in America as it does in the
"democracy" we've been building in Iraq. Only last week did Ted Haggard, an
evangelical preacher much favored by the White House, fan those fears by
insisting to a Jewish television interviewer, Barbara Walters, that anyone
who worshiped a different God from Jesus Christ would "unfortunately" be
consigned to hell.
But it's also possible that 2005 may turn out to be the year the God card
was so wildly overplayed in politics and commerce alike that it began to
lose its clout with Americans who are overdosing on the strict speech and
belief codes of Christian political correctness. That the judge who ruled so
decisively in Pennsylvania's revival of the Scopes trial is a Republican
appointed by President Bush is almost enough to make the bah-humbug crowd believe in Santa Claus.
