The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But Nancy Pelosi (D-North Pole) just blurted out that her socialized medicine proposal is her “Christmas Present to the American people.”
Obviously it’s time to bring in the ACLU to put an end to the medieval religious fantasies of the faith-based Christianist reactionaries currently running Congress. Perhaps having committed such an egregious thoughtcrime against the people of San Francisco and Berkley, Pelosi will do the deed herself.
Incidentally, does this mean that those who don’t celebrate Christmas can opt out without going to jail or receiving a lump of coal — sustainably mined for use clean coal facilities of course — in their stockings?
At Big Hollywood, S.T. Karnick notes that, as he calls it, Robert Zemeckis’s “motion-capture-animation version of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol” had a disappointing opening weekend. It came in first at the box office, but at 31 million dollars in ticket sales, about $14 million short of analysts’ expectations. And that’s put Jim Carrey, the film’s star, in a rather humbug (sorry) mood:
Jim Carrey’s noisiness appears to be wearing quite thin, and a film that features him as not only the protagonist but also three other characters sounds like far too much of a no longer good thing. Carrey would do well to follow the path of the equally obnoxious Robin Williams and move on to more serious film roles, even if it kills his career. Yes, I’m well aware that Carrey’s occasional serious performances have been pretty awful, but he’s dead either way, and it would be best to die with honor instead of ignominy.
Carrey is following in Williams’s footsteps in one way, however: the making of idiotic political pronouncements. Talking with the Chicago Tribune to promote A Christmas Carol a few days before the film’s release, Carrey released the following burst of political flatulence:
“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed.. . .
Making certain that many people reading the interview will resolutely avoid seeing the film, Carrey describes the protagonist as follows:
“Scrooge is the ultimate example of self-loathing,” Carrey says, noting that, after playing the title character in Ron Howard’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” he was merely “going to the source” in fleshing out Scrooge.
“Beware the unloved, I always say,” Carrey continues. “They’re the ones that end up being the mean guys. It comes from that deep, spiritual acid reflux within them. With Scrooge it infects his whole being.”
Whereas Dickens presented a reasonably nuanced view of the issues the story brings up, and did so with an appropriate narrative tone, Carrey makes the latest film version sound like a ham-fisted socialist diatribe, hardly a strategy for drawing middle American families in great numbers.
Zemeckis, for his part, avoided making any big political claims about the film. That’s the wise course, and given the already annoying qualities suggested by the commercials and trailers for the film, the last thing his version of A Christmas Carol needs is for its star to blunder around the media with claims that this energetic fantasy is any kind of brief for socialism.
Carrey rails against “personal greed and ambition” and “capitalism without regulation” — but few have been blessed more by its benefits. Or as Jim Treacher quips, “Guess who hates capitalism now? The first guy to make $20 million for saying words & making faces in front of a camera.”
Kathy Shaidle suggests that perhaps “long-time Earth Day advocate Ira Einhorn took the whole “recycling” thing a little too far when he ‘composted’ his girlfriend’s remains in a trunk in his closet…”
“One of the self-identified ‘founders’ of Earth Day, Bay Area activist John McConnell, has written that in 1969 he proposed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a new holiday to be called Earth Day on the first day of spring, the Equinox, around March 21. But, he writes, in 1970 local anti-Vietnam War and Environmental Teach-in activists ‘who were planning a one-time event for April 22, also decided to call their event Earth Day.’
(Amusingly, the Soviets marked Lenin’s 100th birthday with – a massive tree planting in Siberia. The trees spell out a congratulatory message to the late dictator when seen from above. How “green” of them! Alas, the Soviets normally weren’t so environmentally savvy; their factories typically expelled exponentially more pollution than those in the West, but few Leftists like to dwell on that “inconvenient truth. )
That very first Earth Day in Philadelphia, Ira Einhorn — local leftwing activist and self-promoting gadfly, a would-be Abbie Hoffman — served as the event’s Master of Ceremonies.
Today, Earth Day has been embraced by governments and corporations. Amazon.com is offering Earth Day specials; school kids are compelled to celebrate it instead of Christmas.
But founding organizer Ira Einhorn’s name is strangely absent from all the official Earth Day literature these days. It’s no wonder: the one-time up and coming counterculture superstar later killed his girlfriend and fled abroad to escape justice.
And at least as of 12:09 AM on the west coast, I can reprint verbatim my Easter post from last year. And something tells me I won’t need to add an update later in the day correcting it:
(At least Dogpile’s artists spent 15 minutes to dress up its mascot for the day. And as Mark Steyn notes, sadly, some aspects of the season are becoming a bit too much for traditional churches)
Wendy Sullivan attended hearings on free speech (and the lack thereof) in Canada yesterday with Mark Steyn and Kathy Shaidle, and came away with an excellent strategy–equally applicable in the States as it is in the Great White North:
Steyn and Kathy Shaidle made two excellent suggestions that could be applied to any kind of politically based culture war:
* Say “Merry Christmas” in your workplace instead of “Happy Holidays”
* Fight tyrannous regulation by breaking small rules – the reverse of the broken windows theory
If enough people break a small and oppressive regulation, something will have to be done at the government level. Think Tea Tax and Boston Harbor. Right now the inmates are running the asylum that is America (and Canada, as referenced by Steyn). It’s time for us to revolt. If our phonecalls and pleas to representatives are falling on deaf ears, then we have to do something to make them take notice. No, not bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City. But how about the equivelent of what Mr. Steyn and Ms. Shaidle do every day? They ridicule the rules, post over-the-top and “offensive” articles, and make people laugh at the absurdity of silencing thought and opinion.
The United States Government is stealing not only your money but that of your future generations. Find a small way to break that cycle. Keep America as free as possible.
And here’s one small way to break that cycle, courtesy of Michelle Malkin and blogger Dave G.
Related: And speaking of the actual Broken Windows Theory, it’s holding up quite “elegantly” well these days.
Update: Welcome Freepers! Please look around the rest of the blog–while the design is new, there are seven years of posts; so there’s likely to be a few things here you might enjoy.
Posting will no doubt be sparse on Christmas day (not that I was a posting machine yesterday, of course; though welcome and a happy holiday to Instapundit readers). In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:
I interviewed Blade Runner production designer Syd Mead back in April of 2001 for Nuts & Volts Magazine (amazingly, the article is still online, here), and happily, I’m still on his email list. When Detroit gets its act together, this is what I want to pull up to a Christmas party in:
In the meantime, Boing Boing has a pretty cool interview with Mead online at YouTube.
Headline via the Derb; it perfectly fits this example of what hopefully is a one-off leftwinger’s meltdown, and not a trend, transforming Thanksgiving into yet another holiday that Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Man, when Orson Welles said that a film studio was the biggest electric train set a boy could own, he never saw this!
(Via Megan McCardle and the Blogfather, who have some thoughts on Christmas shopping. That’s the next holiday the left gets the vapors over, once they’ve recovered from Thanksgiving.)
Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds featured an intriguing quote from James Bennett of UPI:
Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.
Sorry to be a day late and a (almost) URL short on this, but I found the full essay was surprisingly challenging to track down. Happily though, the Freepers have a reprint, and it’s well worth your time. Though I disagree with Bennett’s conclusion that we’re celebrating the wrong Italian, as Columbus Day is–sadly and idiotically–yet another traditional holiday under enough attack already.
“Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year.”
So from that perspective, we should give Google bonus points today for the creative–and, gosh darn it, down right adorable–way they stuck the shiv into yetanother traditional holiday.
(At least Dogpile’s artists spent 15 minutes to dress up its mascot for the day. And as Mark Steyn notes, sadly, some aspects of the season are becoming a bit too much for traditional churches)
Rob Port writes that retail sales were up 3.6 percent, or 2.4 if you discount fuel sales:
(though it seems to me that those should be included; the economic health of our gas stations is every bit as important as the economic health of our retail stores).
* * *
The New York Times is calling these retail numbers
