politics

The War on Christmas

Dina Honour15 Comments

#Breaking: As part of Operation Kringle, President Trump today ordered the deployment of the newly renamed 1st North Pole Battalion to an undisclosed mid-west location to monitor and protect the Koch Tree Farm, the nation’s largest supplier of Spruce and Fir trees.

President Trump today, speaking from a dais festooned with holly and ivy, declared the latest deployment the first step in the War on Christmas.

“Today, we will make America Merry Again!,” the president declared. “No one celebrates Christmas as bigly as The United States of America, no one, ok? It’s tremendous. So much Christmas-ing. You’re going to be sick of Christmas-ing there’ll be so much of it.”

The President was flanked by his advisors, all donned in gay apparel. One notable exception was vice-president Pence who was seeking conversion therapy from apparel he donned “too gay”.

“After eight years under the imposter Kwanza president, with his anti-American diversity and his sad policies, I’m here to tell you that Americans can once again have a holly jolly Christmas without fear of prostitution! What’s that?” he asked, “Oh, without fear of persecution!”

The President’s remarks were praised by his Attorney General, Jeffrey Sessions (who, despite  strong resemblance, insists there is no family relation to the Keebler Elf).

“They,” the president continued, “they want to come into our country and take Christmas away from us! With their dirty “Happy Holidays” and their foreign “Season’s Greetings”. It’s everywhere you look,” the president shouted into the microphone. “It’s all over the cards. You go into a Wal-Mart, and what do you hear from the people working there?” he asked, “Happy Holidays,” the President appeared to mock the words, screwing his face and raising his hands, reminiscent of his mocking of a disabled reporter during the election campaign.

“No one, you hear me, no one is going to force you to say ‘Happy Holidays’ anymore!” the president shouted. At one point Trump, pausing in his speech, pointed to a speaker hanging in the corner. “You hear that, folks? If we can bring Christmas to Africa,” referring to the 1984 song Do they Know it’s Christmas playing, “we can bring Christmas back to the United States!”

AP Reuters later reported that the audience was stacked with paid supporters of the President.

At one point, appearing to go off-script Trump asked, “You know what you never hear?You never hear I’m Dreaming of a White Hanukkah, do you? Or It’s Beginning to look a lot like Kwanza. You never hear Rocking around the Menorah. You don’t hear any of those things, but them? Those people? Liberals and Pochahontas and devil-worshippers? They want to come in with their political correctness and make you sing songs about Three Kings Day. They want your kids to know that some people celebrate other holidays. Fake holidays! Not in this country! No. December is for Christmas. The rest? Fake holidays! Sad!”

The President went on, “I’m going to build a great, big, beautiful wall around Christmas. And newly elected Senator Moore over here from Alabama? Well, we’re putting him in charge of rounding up yon virgins. Mother and child.” The Presdient chuckled. “Look, between you and me,” the president said, winking at Moore, “the mother’s just there for show, right? He’s really just after the yon virgins. Hey Roy, did you know that ‘yon’ means ‘young’? I didn’t know that til my son-in-law told me. Very smart. Smartest kid in the room.”

Asked by pool reporters about the absence of mistletoe above the podium, the President replied, ‘Who needs mistletoe? When you’re a star, you can do whatever you want. You can grab ‘ by the pussy!” the president said, to laughter.

BBC News later reported that the raucous laughter was from a pre-recorded laugh track.

CNN reporter Jake Tapper asked the President if he saw any hypocrisy in celebrating the story of Joseph and Mary, Jewish refugees seeking shelter, while promoting his travel ban, which targets visitors from majority Muslim nations, including refugees seeking shelter. Trump decried the biblical story as fake news.

Later, when asked if the President viewed Jesus as a white-skinned, blue- eyed blonde, despite anthropological and historical evidence, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “This was all covered during the campaign. The President has made his opinions of Jesus known. He prefers to believe in the alternative bible. It is the President’s position that all other biblical scholars are liars.”

Trump ended his press conference with a bold promise.

“I pledge the full power and might of our great military to fight this war on the yuletide season. We shall go on to the end of the year. We shall fight them in the shopping malls, we shall fight them on the coffee cups, we shall fight them in the schools and in big-box retailers, we shall fight in the media; we shall never surrender, and we shall win. Bigly.”

During Huckabee-Sander’s Q&A session afterward, a Fox News reporter asked how the President was planning to celebrate the holiday.

“Alone in Mar-a-lago, counting his coins,” Huckabee Sanders said. “But in the spirit of Christmas, he shall choose one white boy-child to send a turkey to because in the US, white boy children are routinely oppressed and discriminated against. The President has pledged to bring turkey back to the forgotten Americans.”

“Would that be the same turkey he pardoned at Thanksgiving? the reporter followed up with Sanders.

“No comment,” the press secretary said before she walked off the stage.

When asked later for comments, critics of the President pointed to 68,540 studies showing that retail sales during the holiday season were up, and that, in actuality, there were zero actual instances of Christmas being banned, of Christians being denied the opportunity to wish anyone a Merry Christmas.

“No one is stopping anyone from celebrating Christmas,” said one critic who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.  “There are no Secret Nativity Police as is being reported in Breitbart,” she said. “There are no Tannenbaum Terrorists as Fox News is saying. In fact, the entire thing is made up. It started with a Starbucks cup. Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I need to respond the President’s tweet that an army of Maccabees are marching on the White House armed with menorahs.” She paused.

“It’s not true, by the way. Oh, and Happy Holidays. Screw the President.”

 

Advertisements

Vive la Révolution

Dina Honour3 Comments

No one expects a revolution.

Oh sure, uprisings are almost always the result of powder kegs of inequity and frustration built up over time, but no one can accurately predict the stray match which lights up the night. Who would have predicted a dearth of French cake or a shipload of too-taxed tea would be straws that broke the camel’s back?

Or a Hollywood mogul.

Glance around girls and boys, we are in the midst of a revolution, though it’s not the one promised or predicted. It’s not the one coveted by ethno-nationalists or the one hoped for by far-left socialists.

Don’t be fooled. The cascade of sexual assault allegations which are coming down as thick and fast as Niagara Falls? It is nothing short of a revolution. It is a seismic shift in the conscious thought of a nation, or at least, a good chunk of a nation. To move, seemingly overnight, from dismissing the concerns of women to not only believing them, but holding the men responsible….well, responsible?

That is a tectonic shift of attitude. That is a revolution.

Sexual harassment is nothing new. Women have been coming forward with allegations of contact ranging from inappropriate to rape for decades. They were kind of/sort of/maybe/sometimes believed. Yet even when we, as a society did believe them, the power structure remained intact. Nondisclosure agreements and arbitration, out of court settlements and gag orders, or just garden variety misogynistic I think women make shit up for the hell of it. Maybe there was a slap on the wrist or a reprimand, a closed-door meeting with HR. But more often than not, not only have women’s concerns, allegations, and evidence been largely sidelined, covered up, and ignored, but the men accused have faced zero consequence.

In fact, not only have they never faced any real consequence, they’re often rewarded.

Casey Affleck settled two sexual harassment suits. He was awarded an Oscar. Chris Brown beat the shit out of Rhianna. He sells out concert venues. Roman Polanski raped a 13 y/o girl. He’s the recipient of several lifetime achievement awards. Woody Allen. Mel Gibson. Charlie Sheen. That’s just Hollywood. That’s before we get to publishing, finance, tech, academia.

Congress.

Like the roving hands of a serial groper, sexual harassment is everywhere. And powerful men who have had their hand in the cookie jar of women’s bodies, psyches, and pockets? They’ve been allowed to slide, chocolate chip crumbs all over their face.

Yet now, suddenly, there are consequences. Real ones. Not just financial settlements, but actual consequences. Powerful men who have abused their power and victimized women are being outed, fired, shunned, dropped.

Fox News’s Roger Ailes was a chink in the damn. Harvey Weinstein blew a whole in it.

And here we are, drenched in the downfall.

Women have long become accustomed to not having their stories believed, to having their motives doubted, their pasts dragged through the public. To suddenly have people believe them is both shocking and confusing. It is a welcome change, a long overdue and needed change, but one which drags with it in its wake a host of questions and uncertainty.

Perhaps there are women who were expecting it. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t. And like those street urchins standing below a tri-colored flag at the end of Les Mis, I don’t quite know what to make of it all.

It’s glorious and affirming, but also scary as hell.

****

Human beings are complex and flawed. Both men and women. Add the dimensions of sex and power to that and our relationships become even more complex.

And here we are, standing in suddenly abandoned enemy territory, a flag ready to plant. New map lines must be drawn. What is acceptable, what is not? There will be gray areas that are fought over as fiercely as Kashmir. Does a photo depicting a violating act = a violating act itself?   Does a forced kiss = grooming a fourteen year old? Is there a hierarchy of shitty male behavior? And more importantly, the realization that we, as women, must turn inward and contemplate our own questionable feelings and shitty behavior.

What we need is time to figure it all out.

In a revolution, time is a luxury you don’t have.

****

In any major cultural shift, there is a period of panic and disorientation. There are snap judgments and on-the-ground decisions, some of which will turn out to be wrong. When you start dredging the depths, you’ve got to wade through a lot of muck and sludge. You’re going to take a bit of it with you, no matter how hard you try to scrape it off.

Revolutions are a messy business. People are going to get hurt. There will be fallout. Once the dust has settled, a lot of soul-searching will be required. It will take a massive amount of long, hard work to remold the status quo.

And this is where we must be smart. We must take our time and redraw the map of acceptability and accountability. And that requires women to look at their own behavior, their own process, their own complex relationship with sex and power. Because if history has taught us anything, it is this: if you drag out a guillotine and start demanding heads, you run the danger of having that guillotine sharpened and readied for your own.

These are terrifying and exhilarating times. The potential seeds for great change are being laid. All that remains to be seen is which way the wind blows. Away from us, toward that arc of justice…or back in our face, dirt and all.

 

 

America, Where Are You?

Dina Honour2 Comments

America is supposed to be better than this.

Where is the country, young, scrappy, and hungry, that stood up to a mad king and against all odds, won its independence? The country which has a statue at one of its busiest ports challenging the world to give us its tired and poor, its huddled masses yearning to be free? Where is the country of my great-grandparents, which took those immigrant lives and pushed them through a sieve of red white and blue until they bled apple pie? Where is the country which hails itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom, as bright as Liberty’s torch shining over New York harbor?

We are supposed to be better than this.

Where is the hunger to fix the problems pulling the country apart at the seams? Where is the drive to do better, to take care of our own whether they’re in Puerto Rico or Houston or Las Vegas? Or Iowa, Mississippi or Maine. Where is the innovative thinking we need to overcome problems like gun violence and systemic racism? Where is the scrappiness to face those challenges, the conviction to overcome them?

At what point will this great American experiment be deemed a failure? At what point will the absolute right of the individual citizen be responsible for the downfall of a nation?

I say this as an American who loves my country: I think we are very close to that point. I think we have championed the right of the individual over the rights of the whole for too long, and we are paying the price. Or rather the people in Las Vegas are paying the price, and the citizens of Puerto Rico, the families who bury their black sons and daughters are paying the price. Children who shoot themselves with unsecured guns, women who are killed by abusive partners, transgender citizens who are murdered by fellow citizens. People without healthcare. Citizens in the wealthiest nation in the world going hungry, going without.

We are all paying the price because we are all worse off.

Maybe some of us take nicer vacations or have more square footage. Maybe some have a nice chunk of retirement change. But this idea that our rights as individuals, to speech or guns or bigotry in the name of religious freedom comes before our unity as a whole, as a nation?

That idea is going to kill us as sure as a stake through the country’s heart.

We now accept mass shootings as a way of  life, especially those carried out by white male terrorists. We find neat little ways of compartmentalizing the actions of those men by giving them titles like ‘lone wolf’. By humanizing them in the narrative with occupations and family stories. And so it’s easier to think it’s yet again a one-off thing. There was nothing to stop it, it won’t happen again.

Until it does.

And does.

And does.

And does.

Mass shootings are now as American as baseball and McDonald’s. We expect them. We’re unsurprised by them. We pray and we send thoughts and push aside the fact that it is not going to go away right out of our minds.

Where is the problem solving? Where’s the courage to fix this? Where are the goddamn bootstraps I hear so much about? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, but give me young, scrappy and hungry too.

In the aftermath which will follow Las Vegas, the same tired, old arguments will be trotted out. But the real tragedy, beyond the lives of the fifty-eight people lost is this:

Too many Americans have become immune. Inoculated against the bloodshed. Caring too much about the imagined individual restrictions than about the life of a nation. We’ve finally managed the neat, little trick of turning so far inward that we’ve ceased to see outward.

 

We have our own mad king now, who likes gold thrones just as much as George III. But Las Vegas did not happen because of the Trump administration. NFL protests are not happening because of it. I am not laying blame for any of this at the feet of the Trump administration.

Nor do I think the administration is capable of doing a damn thing about staunching the blood either.

So we will continue our descent. Our empathy will continue to atrophy. Our belief in the individual over all else, even the life of our neighbor, our lover, our child. Until there is nothing left but an island full of individuals who come up with ever new Hunger Games style ways of killing one another because ….somehow, someone somewhere will convince those remaining Americans it’s within their rights to do so.

Or we can channel those early founding fathers and stand up.

America, don’t throw away your shot.

 

What’s the Point of Having Rights if You’re Not Going to Use Them?

Dina Honour7 Comments

“Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired!”
-Donald Trump

Last year Colin Kaepernick, an American football player, refused to stand during the American national anthem. Several other high-profile athletes such as US soccer star Megan Rapinnoe followed suit. The backlash was quick.

A year later, it hasn’t abated.

Looking past the fact that blind allegiance to a nationalistic symbol is about the most Un-American thing I can think of, that forced standing, saluting, singing, and pledging are exactly the sort of things that Americans abhor in other places, because you know…freedom….the bigger point is this:

The whole point of having certain inalienable rights as defined in the Constitution is to USE them. If we’re not going to use them, why spend so much time, energy, blood, and lives defending them?

People are getting their Kaeper-knickers in a twist about utilizing rights. Are rights merely meant to sit on a shelf somewhere, kept shiny but never used? Because if so they will atrophy. They’ll wither until they are of no use to anyone. Until they die.

Service men and women have fought and died to protect the rights Americans hold dear. Those rights are whispered into the ears of American children at night. We grow up on them. We eat them at greasy spoon diners and wash them down with Bud Light. They are our bread and butter, our meat and potatoes, and apple pie for dessert.

Rights.

Not a flag. Not an anthem. Not a pledge.

Protests, such as that of Colin Kaepernick and fellow athletes do not dishonor those sacrifices. In fact, I can’t think of anything that honors them more. Citizens using the very things so many gave their life to protect.

Rights.

It may leave a bad taste in your mouth, but I guarantee that bitterness still tastes sweeter than what Kaepernick and his fellow athletes are protesting: daily witnessing the fact that your life doesn’t count for as much as it does if you’re white.

Of course this is not about utilizing rights. This is about certain groups using their rights. When tiki-torch carrying white supremacists march en masse we hotly debate ‘rights’. When toddlers are routinely shot dead by unsecured guns, we wring our hands over ‘rights’. When statues glorifying slavery-supporting generals are questioned, we hem and haw over ‘rights’.

But when black Americans protest? Suddenly it’s not about rights. It’s about dishonoring. It’s about disrespect. It’s about refusal to bend the knee (oh, the irony).

They may as well be calling black NFL players ‘boy’.

America! Land of the free and home of the brave! Yet the landscape of my country is very different depending on who you are. And who you are has a lot to do with the color of your skin, your biological sex, and who you love.

As a white educated woman, I lead a different life than a woman of color of the same educational background. My life is very different life from that of a white male, a hispanic homosexual, a transgender female, or a white woman living below the poverty line.

I know it’s hard to see that. It’s easy to assume that everyone else out there has the same experiences –not only the day-to-day ones, but the overreaching ones as well, the ones that link together to make up the concrete foundation of your experience. That we all have access to the same raw materials. That those bootstraps Americans love to fetishize are available in one size fits all.

But that is simply not true.

Colin Kaepernick and Michael Bennet and other black NFL players protest because their America is not the same as mine. Megan Rapinoe knelt because her America is not the same as mine. Their opportunities are not the same. Their access, their power. Forget pulling yourselves up by the bootstraps. What happens when you’re not even given access to the materials to even fashion them?

Yet when they use non-violent means of protest to call attention to these very different experiences, they are criticized, told to be quiet, threatened, and called unpatriotic.

I ask you, what choice have we left for those whose experience of the United States is not the same as yours, or mine? What choice have we left for those who keep trying to pull up the damn bootstraps only to find the ones we gave them are shoddy, damaged, or non-existent?

What choice?

What are people supposed to do? If you find protests so unpalatable, so offensive, then what course do you recommend? Because nothing else has worked. Nothing.

Racism, sexism, homophobia–they are all documented issues. Yet we continue to shuffle them under the rug and stuff them in the closet. We deny, deny, deny. We shift the blame and blame the victim. And then–and then!–when people use their rights to call attention to these problems, we tell them to find another way to do it because it’s “offensive”.

For real?

260 years ago, the idea of taxation without representation was enough to go to war.

We celebrate that uprising each year with fireworks and backyard barbecues. We celebrate those protests, many of them violent, which led to the birth of a nation. But when a non-violent protest asks us to look at the messy afterbirth of that same nation?

We can’t handle the truth.

We hide behind a flag, an anthem, a pledge.

The United States of America is not post-racism. There is literally no legitimate recourse if you are a person of color.

You’re beat down, then told you’re not. You’re told to use the right channels, but those channels are blocked. You’re told it’s all in your head, it’s not as bad as you think, it doesn’t exist. And when you stand over the dead bodies as evidence, you’re told it must have been your own fault.

How are you supposed to affect change if there are people who won’t even admit change is necessary?

 

Somewhere out there there’s a child sitting and watching these athletes saying, ‘I’m not crazy, I’m not alone and here is someone willing to stand up for me.”

And that is how it begins. A teabag thrown into a harbor doesn’t make too much of an impact. A ship full of tea does.

But it all has to start somewhere.

What’s the point of having rights if we’re not going to use them?

What kind of message does it send when we value a symbol over a life?

And what does it say when we have a leader who refers to someone using their inalienable right as a son-of-a-bitch?