“My Favorite War
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: December 10, 2010”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/opinion/11collins.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212
“Well, here’s some good news for a change. The Holiday Parade of Lights in Tulsa, Okla., has been saved!
I know you’ve been worried.
The Tulsa City Council has voted to allow the parade to go forward Saturday night, despite protests against the disappearance of the word “Christmas” from its name.
It’s not entirely clear that the council actually could have stopped it, or even whether the parade ever officially had Christmas in its name. But Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is outraged.
Inhofe was away from home last December, stuck in Washington trying to kill off health care reform. Now he’s back, and he’s noted a dwindling in the parade’s religious angle. “I just don’t like what’s going on in America today, all over the country, with the aversion some people seem to have toward Christ,” he said in one of his many interviews explaining that he will no longer ride his horse in any holiday event that isn’t named for Christmas. “
I’ve been waiting for the battle to engage this year. We’re 11 days into December and the only shots I have heard came from a badly misinformed Vietnam era veteran in the ophthalmology waiting area last Tuesday. He is utterly convinced that there is an internal plot to abolish Christianity in the U.S., beginning with the Roman Catholic church.
He didn’t offer a source for his alarming news. But if I had to gamble on sources, I’d bet that he heard or saw it on Fox News, from Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, or from some teavangelist source that offered only incitation. I’m reasonably certain that he didn’t read it as he was in a VA waiting area with nothing in his hands that remotely resembled a book or magazine.
This trust in un-named sources that specialize in delivering rumors, lies, and blatant mis-information is unsettling. The GOP/teavangelist voter base has seemingly lost all need for truth in the news, in education, or from political candidates. They’ll willingly accept any propaganda as true if it carries the right logo and/or contains the right buzzwords.
One of my favorite movies is “Paint Your Wagon.” The plot revolves around the people who follow gold strikes in the western mountains of the U.S. In the absence of a legal system, mining claim law is used to settle those disputes not settled immediately by more physical means. The gold strike spawns a camp that becomes “No Name City.”
We seem to find ourselves today in our own particular form of “No Name City,” the rapidly developing “No Truth City.” The camp followers are all too willing to accept lack of verification from the current crop of demagogues and their GOP/teavangelist – paid for propaganda.
There are still some of us willing to demand the truth and to expend the effort to seek it out. We’re becoming fewer and fewer and the ill-informed, mis-informed, and indifferent voters are becoming the majority. Our nation is founded upon the premise that the majority is not allowed to oppress the minority. Somewhere along the way that premise has become forgotten. We’ve grown a sub-population that finds no problem at all in forcing their beliefs upon the minority. We’ve allowed the GOP/teavangelists, and to a lesser extent the Democrats, to ignore truth in their efforts to control No Name City.
In the movie, No Name City is destroyed by the greed and indifference of its residents. We see the bright facades of a mining camp returned to the mud and muck that is the source of wealth in such camps. In today’s U.S., we are at risk of seeing No Truth City collapse under the weight of lies heaped upon it by the demagogues and corrupt politicians. I’ll leave the images of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood singing as images. The truth is, they were not blessed with great singing voices. There’s no need to try to make it sound otherwise.
Back to the war in Oklahoma. We find another demagogue doing his best to stir up conflict where none exists. It matters not what the parade is called. There is nothing of religion, nothing of Christianity in a parade intended to kick-start the winter holiday shopping season. There’s no need for the parade to even do that. We’ve been treated to Christmas music since Thanksgiving in nearly every store we enter. We’ve been barraged with Christmas related ads on television equally as long. We can barely lift weekend newspapers for the weight of unwanted and un-necessary advertising flyers. It’s surprising any trees remain standing, considering the amount of wasted paper discarded daily. No one is going to forget that the parade in question is about Christmas except for Senator Inhofe. The good senator is clearly devoid of both Christmas and Christian spirit He has been making every effort to deprive the citizens of this nation of any system of health care that is better than that found in third world banana republics. I recall nothing in the Christian bible that suggests that the poor be refused compassion and care. Clearly, Senator Inhofe must have been reading the super secret C-Street GOP version of the Gospels. That must be the one that has the secret plans to stir up the voter base by declaring a war on Christmas/Christianity that has never existed.
Anyone interested in a war on GOP legislators?
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