Christmas Thoughts: 2013 Edition

“Father Christmas, give us some money
Don’t mess around with those silly toys
We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over
We want your bread, so don’t make us annoyed
Give all the toys… to the little rich boys”
“Father Christmas.” The Kinks. 1977

While Father Christmas by The Kinks remains one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs (“give my daddy a job cause he needs one, he’s got lots of mouths to feed”), the working-class angst expressed in the song is nearly matched by the superlative Christmas-themed album from Joey Ramone (1951-2001), Christmas Spirit… In My House. Released a year after Joey’s untimely death, four of the rockin Christmassy cuts on the album express romantic troubles and woes, but it is the fifth song, a punk reworking of a song made famous by Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, What A Wonderful World, (1901-1971), that always brings tears to my eyes.

On Donner! On Blitzen! On Djibouti!
Twas the Night before Christmas, the composition in verse by American poet, Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) told of children snuggled in bed “while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.” Moore wrote of Santa “with the sleigh full of toys” drawn by his eight reindeer; “On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blixen!” Let us add another reindeer to that list of names… the camo-clad Djibouti. The Night before Christmas 2013, news reports told of U.S. Marines being deployed to Djibouti, Sudan, in preparation for intervention in the civil war between Sudan and oil-rich South Sudan. Never heard of South Sudan before? Don’t worry, another great American writer, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913), once penned “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

President Obama has said the U.S. must intervene in the Sudanese civil war in order to “support the security of U.S. citizens, personnel, and property, including our Embassy, in South Sudan,” but the likelihood of military intervention has more to do with South Sudan’s natural resources like uranium, diamonds, gold, and yes… oil. Prior to the current crisis foreign oil companies in South Sudan were pumping 250,000 barrels of oil a day (source: London Financial Times, Dec. 23, 2013), but the civil war has threatened oil production. U.S. moves can also be seen as an attempt to block Chinese influence in Africa. The second largest supplier of African oil to China is Sudan (source: Council on Foreign Relations), and China has enjoyed a 40 percent stake in Sudan’s oil industry (source: Analysis Intelligence). One has to wonder, where will the next Christmas war take place?

Placards seen carried by those involved with the now non-existent US anti-war movement once read, “Who would Jesus bomb?” Indeed.

Forget Djibouti the Reindeer, give Santa a Fighter Jet Escort!
It has come to this writer’s attention that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is providing Santa Claus (codename, Big Red 1) with a virtual Fighter Jet escort. And thank goodness, it is a dangerous world out there.

What is it about Christmas, anyway?
December 29, 1890 – the massacre of some 300 Sioux/Lakota women and children by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation; December 18, 1972 -the “Christmas Bombing” of North Vietnam by the Nixon administration; December 20, 1989 -the “Christmas Invasion” of Panama by the George H.W. Bush administration. Now the “Christmas Sudan Intervention”?

This year President Obama launched a Christmas day drone strike in Pakistan, killing four unidentified people; the attack was the very first Christmas Day drone strike. I suppose one must add the 2013 Christmas Day bombings in Baghdad, where al-Qaida killed at least 37 Christians celebrating the birth of Christ. Yeah, sure glad we “liberated” Iraq from the forces of evil.

It’s A Wonderful Life nothing but commie propaganda.
And think about this the next time you pull out your copy of It’s a Wonderful Life to watch with family and friends on Christmas Eve. Nominated for five Academy Awards and proclaimed by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest American films ever made, the truth about Director Frank Capra’s 1947 It’s A Wonderful Life, has finally been revealed. Starring James Stewart and Donna Reed, the film tells the story of a down-and-out fictional character named James Bailey (played by Stewart), who nearly commits suicide at Christmastime, save for the divine intervention of a guardian angel named Clarence. Recently released files obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that the FBI believed Capra’s film was a “carrier of political propaganda” that was the result of scriptwriters who “were very close to known Communists.” In the words of the FBI, those writers, Frances Goodrick and Albert Hackett, “practically lived with known Communists.”

Quoting informants in Hollywood, the FBI stated that It’s A Wonderful Life “represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.” Moreover, the film “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

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Ghosts of Christmas Past:

Green Chri$tma$ (2011)
O Blessed Christmas! (2009)
Christmas in Fallujah (2007)
O Tannenbaum! O Tannenbaum! (2004)