An Atheist Christmas

Ah, Christmas time. The carols and the trees and Santa and the Kentucky Fried Chicken and the belly dancers. The holly and the booze and the Christmas cakes and strippers. What does Christmas mean to you? That depends on where you happen to be.

In Japan, Christmas has more in common with St. Valentine's Day, with cakes instead of candy. There's still Santa and trees and rampant consumerism, but it's more about love of another than love of humanity. The television media runs stories about "romantic miracles" and restaurants and hotels clean up on what is basically national date night. It also marks the beginning of year-end celebrations, which is basically a month-long drunk.

Kentucky Fried Chicken has convinced everyone that the traditional western Christmas dinner is -- big surprise -- KFC and you actually have to order your Genuine Christmas Chicken Dinner beforehand. They make a killing. By the way, I'm entirely serious about this. It's true.

But real Christmas weirdness comes to us from Turkey. I wrote about this a couple years ago and it sounds awesome. Turkish Daily News reported at the time that "Turkey has for decades been having the weirdest New Year's Eve celebrations on earth. Symbols of Christmas are infused into 'crazy parties' of heavy drinking, gambling, belly dancing and even strip shows." In Turkey, they wrap Christmas and New Years Eve up together and kill two birds with one stone. Kids get gifts from Santa Claus, then everyone goes out, gets hammered, and watches belly dancers. This is a holiday I can get behind and support.





What's interesting here is that neither of these countries have a lot of Christians -- Turkey is 99% Muslim and in Japan, only 0.5% of people are Christian. In these places, Christmas is a secular holiday with Christian roots -- and those roots are pretty much ignored. The same thing has happened with many holidays in the US. Halloween and St. Valentine's day aren't spent in prayer. St. Patrick's day is about Ireland, drinking, and green clothes -- not the commemoration of a Saint.

Maybe this is what the "War on Christmas" crowd are worried about. That Christmas would be more about the Grinch and Rudolph than about Jesus and wise men. But our modern observation of Christmas only dates back to Victorian England, helped along by Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol -- a book that doesn't have much to do with Jesus either. Think back to other traditional Christmas favorites -- The Nutcracker's actually a nightmarish story about some sort of freakish rat-monster. No Jesus there.

So the "secularization" of Christmas is hardly anything new. And, as much as the "War on Christmas" types freak out, they can't really change history -- they'd like to, but they can't. They aren't worried about anyone getting rid of Christmas at all. In fact, they aren't extremely worried about the secularization of the holiday. What they're worried about is the continued secularization of America and the decline of Christian influence. By 2030, there will be no majority religion in the United States. While I doubt Christmas is going anywhere, I'd be willing to bet that it'll start looking more like the secular holiday it's become in Japan or Turkey. America will start looking more secular as well.

In fact, there's been kind of a media narrative starting that people are turning to religion for comfort in the economic downturn. Except, they're not. A recent Gallup poll found that people aren't suddenly finding religion.

Despite some news reports to the contrary, a review of almost 300,000 interviews conducted by Gallup so far in 2008 shows no evidence that church attendance in America has been increasing late this year as a result of bad economic times. In September, October, November, and so far in December, about 42% of Americans reported that they attended church weekly or almost every week, exactly the same as the percentage who reported attending earlier in the year.

A recent story in the New York Times, written by Paul Vitello, was headlined "Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches," and reported that evangelical churches in particular had enjoyed a "burst of new interest" since September, but also that "a recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too." Producers for NBC's "Today" show picked up this New York Times story, and it became the basis for a similarly themed feature broadcast on that show on Dec. 16.

Yet, when someone actually bothered to check this story, Gallup found that "there has been no sign of any increase this fall."

Less than half of Americans attend church regularly and that's not changing. The media meme of a super-religious electorate is a myth. In fact, despite the media's hyping of the power of "values voters" and the importance of religion in political life, a separate Gallup poll found that most respondents don't see America that way.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults today perceive that the influence of religion in American life is waning, while just 27% believe it is rising. This represents a sharp decline in the image of religion compared with only three years ago, when 50% thought its influence was on an upswing, and marks one of the weakest readings on the influence of religion in Gallup's five-decade history of asking the question.

In census numbers, the fastest growing religious group in the United States is No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic, nearly doubling in size from 1990-2001, from 8% to 14%.

Still, as a member of this group myself, I celebrate Christmas. I've got the tree and the lights and the gifts and the whole shebang. But my attitude toward Christmas is more like those Japanese and Turkish revelers. I do it because it's fun, not because it's religious; just as I do with Halloween and St. Valentine's Day.

The "War on Christmas" types will tell you that people like me are out to destroy Christmas. I'm not. But I'd argue that my Christmas has more in common with traditional yuletide celebrations than theirs. I celebrate Dickens' Christmas -- peace on Earth, help the less fortunate, that sort of thing. It's ironic that the "War on Christmas" types are right wingers who aren't big fans of all that peace and love and helping the poor stuff. Those who think they're "defending" the holiday aren't actually very Christmasy, in my book. Bill O'Reilly has much more in common with Ebenezer Scrooge than with Bob Cratchit.

Christmas isn't going anywhere, but it won't remain unchanged forever. History does not stop because we wish it would. As America becomes less Christian, Christmas will continue to become more secular. For myself, I'm all for it.

Now bring on the chicken and belly dancers.

-Wisco

Bush the Appeaser

There's a middle eastern nation threatening an invasion of Iraq, which it is currently shelling, and is pursuing nuclear technology, despite the fact that no one in the region thinks that's a very good idea. Nope, not Iran.

Turkey.

Our NATO ally in the middle east is turning out to be a lot less than helpful lately. According to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, "The Turkish military has stepped up attacks against what it says are Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, bases in northern Iraq. The shelling comes just ahead of a vote in the Turkish parliament on a bill authorizing a ground invasion against Kurdish fighters in Iraq. The military has reportedly amassed 60,000 troops along its border with Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Turkey to refrain from any major military operation, but Washington's influence over Turkey appears to be waning."

It's tempting to think that this is about the recent congressional resolution recognizing the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide. It's not. Or at least, if it does have anything to do with it, it's only marginally. Turkey's stance on this incident is bizarre -- it never happened. That not even Turkey believes this is beside the point. They have a sort of Bush-like attitude toward the Armenian genocide -- the more you say something, the truer it becomes.

Turkey tried to buy good PR in the US before the vote in the House of Representatives. Asia Times (via The Center for Media and Democracy) reported that Turkey was "spending more than US $300,000 a month on sophisticated public relations specialists and former Washington lawmakers to help defeat the measure [declaring the genocide]" and that "The Turkish Embassy is paying $100,000 a month to lobbying firm DLA Piper, which is associated with former Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, and $105,000 to the Livingston Group (connected to former Republican lawmaker Robert L. Livingston), and it recently paid public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard $114,000 ... a month." All to rewrite history.

Turkey is so touchy about the subject that turks face a three-year jail term for even saying the words "Armenian" and "genocide" in the same sentence. And the Bush administration has been so protective of Turkey's historical delusion that the US Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, was fired for referring to Turkey's crime as a genocide.

This would be weird enough, but the current Turkish state is not the Turkish state that committed the crime. That would've been the Ottomans -- who are gone. The Turkish government is entirely innocent of the crime it denies ever happened.

The biggest part of the denial is that the Ottoman leader at the time, Ataturk, is a national hero who brought Turkey into modernity. If you want a historical parallel, look to the Meiji Restoration in Japan. It's hard to take heroes down a notch, since historical heroes become folk heroes -- think how long it took for Americans to come to grips with the idea that Gen. Custer was an incompetent, racist dick. You're going to wind up getting some pushback when you try to set the record straight.

But the more pertinent reason for the denial is that there's a modern parallel -- Turkey has engaged in a long-term campaign of ethnic cleansing. "[Turkey] is the same country which, for decades (practically since the foundation of the republic in 1923), has subjected its Kurds to the most ignominious oppression and that recently carried out one of the dirtiest wars ever waged against a national liberation movement," wrote Sinan Esim for Monthly Review in 1999. "Turkey also resorted to one of the most massive operations of ethnic cleansing since the Second World War."

Turkey doesn't want to talk about past racist purges, because it'll bring up current racist purges. It would be very unfortunate if the country that committed the first genocide of the 20th century would be known as the country who never stopped ethnic cleansing since. So, not only is Turkey not committing war crimes, but Turkey has never committed war crimes. Turkey's freakin' Disneyland.

Bush's appeasement of Turkish demands for historical revisionism is short-sighted. He's merely putting off the inevitable. Turkey looks at northern Iraq and sees, not without cause, a new Kurdish state rising on it's border. The reason that northern Iraq is the most stable part of Iraq is because of the PKK and it's military strength. The PKK had a standing army before the invasion and the relative peace of the Kurdish region is due almost entirely to the Kurds. Turkey sees an enemy minority becoming a stable neighboring state and it makes them very nervous. The guilty have reason for paranoia.

Which makes Turkey's nuclear program pretty scary. Like Iran, Turkey claims it's program is for peaceful purposes, but Turkey has proven itself less than trustworthy over the years -- it's hard to see the shelling of Iraq as anything other than a betrayal.

Yet Bush is intent on appeasing Turkey, since we move troops and material through that country to Iraq. Without Turkey, we'd be forced to use Iraq's one seaport -- Iraq is otherwise landlocked -- and through tiny Kuwait. These would be less than ideal. So Bush is happy to play footsie with the ethnic cleansing Turks, while pointing his finger at Iran and telling them to watch it.

None of this is lost on people in the region, by the way. They know that the US isn't working in favor of justice, but of expediency and US interests. Everyone knows what the Turks do to the Kurds and everyone sees Bush's actions -- or inaction -- on that front for what it is. Bush is siding with monsters against allies, in order to keep his idiotic war going.

What is Bush going to do when the Turks invade Kurdistan? I'm guessing he'll frown, say something like "This is unacceptable," and that's the last you'll hear from him on the subject. His dad betrayed the Kurds and there's no reason to believe the son won't. It wouldn't surprise me any if Bush were willing to sacrifice the one region that's anything approaching a success story by appeasing Turkish claims.

Bush would turn a blind eye to a historical genocide -- not to mention a very possible near-future one and further regional instability and war -- in order to keep his damned war going until he's safely out of office. That's beyond calculating and self-serving, that's just plain evil.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Iraq; Kurds; genocide; Armenian; propaganda; Bush sides with monsters in Turkey