Here’s an interesting video for this Independence Day:
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Unlike certain former governors I could name, I can name my favorite Founding Father: Thomas Jefferson. Not only do I have a favorite, I have gotten into debates with friends about why he was the best of the Founders.
But not only do I have a favorite, I also have a second favorite: James Madison. And while I have written about Jefferson many times, Madison deserves some praise.
Madison was the son of a tobacco plantation owner in the colony of Virginia. As the eldest son of a wealthy landowner, he had been tutored in the classics, mathematics, geography, and so on. In college he continued his interest in the classics, also studying Hebrew, philosophy, and law.
It was during this time that his letters to friends began to mention his discomfort with the persecution of Baptists. In Virginia at the time it was illegal to preach without a license from the Church of England (a law that continued after independence, when the Church changed its name to the Episcopal Church, and continued as the official church of Virginia). Madison’s family leaned toward Presbyterianism, though several of his cousins were clergymen in the Church of England, and one became a Bishop. Madison never experienced the sting of this religious persecution personally, but he felt that it was wrong for the law to impose one church upon everyone.
Madison was still a young man when he was elected to the Virginia Colonial legislature. It was as a delegate that he met Thomas Jefferson, with whom he formed a friendly working relationship. Madison remained in the legislature through the war of independence.
After the war, Madison became acquainted with Elijah Craig, a wealthy distiller and a Baptist who had been jailed numerous times for preaching without a license. Madison began working with Craig to introduce laws in the Virginia assembly to protect churches other than the official state church. Jefferson was keen on the idea, but thought Madison was going about it too timidly. When Jefferson began to champion the cause of disestablishing an official state church altogether, Madison threw his support behind it, and eventually the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom was passed.
In 1787, when it became clear to everyone that the weak central government that had been established after the revolution was not working, Madison was one of the delegates to what became the Constitutional Convention. Madison arrived at the convention with an outline for a new government, and it became the starting point. Although the final constitution drafted hardly resembled Madison’s outline at all by the time they were finished, the entire debate had consisted of amending and expanding on Madison’s idea, prompting many to start calling him the Father of the Constitution.
Madison was the source of one of the most brilliant ideas in the Constitution: the notion that two sovereigns meant more liberty, not less. Each citizen is answerable to both their state and the federal government, but each state is answerable to its citizens and to the rest of the states through the agency of the federal government. Similarly the federal government is answerable both to the states and the citizens. If a citizen feels wronged by his state, he can appeal to the federal government, for instance.
Madison was one of the key authors of the Federalist Papers, which were a series of essays explaining why the new Constitution was necessary.
After the Constitution was ratified, Madison was elected to the House or Representatives. Many people repeat the myth that several states ratified the Constitution on the condition that a Bill of Rights (listing specific rights that citizens could never be deprived of) would be added. That’s simply not true. Several delegates of the original Constitutional Convention thought there ought to be a Bill of Rights, but not a majority. During the debates throughout the states during ratification, many of the Anti-Federalists raised the lack of a Bill of Rights as an argument against ratification. In several of the states there were attempts to add a requirement for a Bill of Rights, but not one state actually passed such a requirement.
Madison had been of a mixed mind on the matter. He feared that if a specific list was drafted, future generations might argue that those would be the only rights people had (I’m looking at you, Justice Scalia), but he also worried about what would happen without an explicit list. He worried a lot about the “tyranny of the majority”—the fact that people in the majority could force their views on others, such as the laws that made it a crime to preach one’s religion if one wasn’t certified by the official church.
So, he arrived at Congress with a list, and introduced a bill to amend the new constitution.
Eventually, his list, rearranged and revised slightly, became 12 separate clauses that were passed by Congress and sent to the states. Ten of them were adopted within a few years, the First granting freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and the right of all citizens to petition the government. The second protected the right to keep and bear arms (though not for the reasons most people think). The third guaranteed that citizens could not be compelled to provide free room and board to soldiers (a source of painful memories shortly after the revolution, which seems a bit odd to us now). The fourth protects against unreasonable search and seizure, requiring warrants with probable cause. And so on, until the tenth, which covered Madison’s big worry by explicitly saying that any power not specifically mentioned in the constitution as belonging to the federal government belongs to the states and to individual citizens.
One other of Mr Madison’s original 12 wasn’t ratified until just over 200 years later, becoming the Twenty-seventh Amendment, limiting changes in salary of members of congress (and in certain circumstances, other officials) from taking effect until a new election of the House of Representatives has taken place.
Madison didn’t like it when people referred to him as Father of the Constitution (even his friend, Thomas Jefferson insisted on calling the document itself, “Mr Madison’s Constitution” for the rest of his life), but he was proud when they called him Father of the Bill of Rights.
Madison later served as Secretary of State when Jefferson was President, and was subsequently elected the fourth President of the United States. He was President during the War of 1812, the prosecution of which changed his mind about the need for the country to have a standing army, as well as a national banking system.
After leaving the Presidency, he retired to the family plantation, which had entered into financial difficulties while being managed by Madison’s stepson.
His last work in government was as a delegate, at the age of 78, to a constitutional convention for the State of Virginia. The primary accomplishment of the convention was to remove the requirement that a man had to own property in order to vote (yes, that was still happening in 1829), but the convention failed to resolve the equal apportionment of delegates in the legislature, which Madison had championed.
Madison’s most famous accomplishment may be the Bill of Rights, but what I admired about him was his passion for increasing liberty and improving the ways government served the people. And I love that he always came prepared with a proposal, but was also always ready to accept revisions in service of the greater goal. He had strong opinions, and spoke both eloquently and passionately for them, but he wasn’t afraid to admit when he had been wrong, and to sincerely change course when necessary.
His philosophy might be best summed up by something he wrote in the Federalist Papers:
It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part… In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.
By the time he died on June 28, 1836, every other man who is considered a Founding Father of the U.S. had died before him. He was the last Founding Father, but no one could say that he was the least.
I usually avoid writing about Father’s Day.
Lots of people have great dads. Some people have more than one awesome dad. Why should I ruin their special day to tell their awesome dad just how great he is by talking about the other kinds of dads? So the few times I have written anything about the subject of Father’s Day, I’ve instead focused on my experiences with my awesome grandfathers and my wonderful great-grandfather. Because they were great and awesome, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have had them in my life.
But I’m not the only person who did not have a great dad. I’m not the only person who cringes when certain statements or stereotypes of fatherhood are trotted out with the implication that every single father who ever existed was a shining paragon of wisdom, hard work, and sacrifice. I’m not the only one who has been chastised (sometimes by complete strangers) with statements like, “He’s your father! Can’t you at least show a little gratitude for the things he did right?”
Besides, reminding people that bad fathers exist actually makes all the great dads more remarkable. It reminds us that being a good father is not automatic, it doesn’t just naturally happen, and it isn’t easy. Being a good father takes work. Those fathers who are great, awesome, and wonderful deserve to be appreciated and loved and praised for the remarkable people they are.
Bad fathers come in many forms. When I was young, my father was verbally and physically abusive. That abuse resulted in broken bones or wounds requiring stitches on more than one occasion. The abuse was always worst when he was drunk, and he seemed to be drunk an awful lot. After my parents divorced, Mom, my sister, and I moved 1200 miles away.
Dad remarried and started a second family. A series of accidents led him to admit he had a drinking problem, so he joined AA. Certain relatives kept telling me that he had changed since getting sober. He was a completely different person, they said, and I should give him another chance. He never sounded any different on the phone, or the couple of times I saw him in person afterward, but they were around him more often than me. I don’t know whether I just wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, or if I like to believe that everyone is capable of redemption, or maybe I just prefer stories with happy endings, but for a while I told people that he’d straightened his life out and I wished him well.
I eventually learned that the abuse never stopped. The alcoholism was never the cause, it was just the excuse. There was a period of over a year where at least one of his other kids had restraining orders out on him, forbidding him from being around his own grandchildren without supervision. In the few conversations we have now, he still holds all the racist, misogynist, and generally angry opinions about everyone else, blaming everything wrong in his life on other people.
Yes, he has some good points. He kept a roof over his families’ heads, put food on the table, and helped out when certain kinds of problems arose. He is capable of the occasional gesture of affection—sometimes coming through in surprising ways. But those things don’t make up for the abusing, the controlling, the blaming and shaming, or the refusal to take responsibility for the damage he causes.
I don’t hate him. I fear becoming him. I was definitely on the road to becoming him at one point. I’m glad that I had friends who were willing to stand up to me and tell me I was turning into a verbal bully.
Counseling help. Friends who pointed out when I backslid, but remained friends, helped. Coming out of the closet helped an incredible amount. All that energy expended hiding who I was, plus the fear of being discovered, and the anger about the presumed rejection was like an over-pressurized boiler ready to explode. I seem to have avoided that path, though I still worry about it. Any times when certain tones of voice come out of my mouth, for instance.
Dad’s issues are different than mine. I know some of the sources of his anger and resentment. I’m sure there are more extenuating circumstance than the ones I’m aware of. It does give me sympathy for his situation. I sincerely hope that someday he finds a way out of them and into a place of peace. I do wish him well.
I don’t hold massive grudges against him. Truth be told, I seldom think about him at all. I think it’s sad that we don’t have the kind of relationship that we’re supposed to be thankful for on this day especially.
But I’m glad that many other people do.
Grandma often called it by the older name, “Decoration Day.” Each spring, as May approached, Grandma would start making phone calls to distant friends and relatives, making sure that flowers would be placed on the graves of relatives in that area. She would also make plans for the graves of relatives that were within a reasonable drive of her home. During the days in the week before Memorial Day she would visit each of those graves and place flowers. If the particular relative in question had also been a war veteran, she would place a small U.S. flag along with the flowers.
The pastors in the Southern Baptist churches we attended might give a sermon on the last Sunday in May about the importance of turning grief into rejoicing because someone has been “taken home to be with the Lord.” There would be some mention of people who died in military service (often as part of one of the prayers, asking god to comfort the families of the fallen soldiers, airman, marines, and sailors), but it was seldom the primary focus of the sermon.
For most of my childhood, I understood that Memorial Day was a time for families to visit the graves of loved ones. It was about remembering anyone who had died. The fact that many people used the day to specifically remember and honor those who had died in battle seemed to be a subset of the larger goal of celebrating the lives of all your loved ones who had died.
Most of my grade school career occurred before the passage of the federal Uniform Monday Holiday Act, so Memorial Day landed on whatever day of the week May 30 was, and I don’t think we were usually let out of school to observe it. When the Monday Holiday Act went into effect, I remember a lot of grumbling from various adults in my life. One particular rant stood out: an older man at the church potluck in May started complaining about “Yankees taking a good, pro-family holiday and turning it into a pro-federalist celebration of war!” He was shushed by his wife before he got too far along.
I didn’t meet my first Radical Memorialist until High School. Someone made a comment about the big barbecue their parents were planning for the weekend, and another of my classmates went ballistic. Memorial Day was not supposed to be about parties and celebrations! It was a serious day to remember people “who gave the ultimate sacrifice to keep this country free!” Anyone who didn’t do that was ignorant and shallow at best, selfish and unpatriotic at worst.
I genuinely was stunned. This being in the Stone Age (before the advent of the internet), I had to look up Memorial Day in an Encyclopedia. And that’s when I first learned how the original Memorial Day had been observed in 1866 intended to honor “those fallen in battle defending their nation during the recent rebellion.” A decidedly northern perspective.
Before that time, many southern states had a tradition of a Decoration Sunday that sometimes happened in April, in other places in May, where the aim had been to put flowers on the graves of family members. Families would frequently have a picnic lunch in the graveyard or cemetery, telling stories and celebrating the lives of their dearly departed. These often turned into family reunions, because family members living far away would try to get home for Decoration Sunday.
Which is why for many years a few southern states didn’t recognize a state holiday of Memorial Day. Several of those that did recognize Memorial Day still also had a separate Confederate Memorial Day or Confederate Decoration Day, because even today in those places Memorial Day is seen by many as “pro-Union.”
Of course, the historical reality is more complicated than that original encyclopedia article I read. While the Civil War was still raging, groups of people, mostly women, in both the north and the south organized days to decorate graves of soldiers from both sides. There was a recognition of the common humanity of all the soldiers. Some people coordinated it with the existing Decoration Days, others did not.
When I saw certain people going off on rants this weekend, angry that there are people who don’t spend the entire three day weekend on the sober, solemn, and somber business of mourning fallen veterans, I felt conflicting emotions. Of course we should be grateful to the memories of the men and women who have died in battle, fighting in our name in various wars and conflicts around the world. Of course we should comfort grieving widows and widowers. We, as a nation, should take care of children bereft of a parent because of a war fought in our name. Of course we should do all of those things.
But being a jerk to people who don’t choose to do it precisely the same way and at precisely the same time as you? That isn’t something I can support.
Memorial Day in my family was always a day to honor the memories of people such as my great-grandparents: people I knew and loved and who are no longer with us. It was a time to call my maternal grandmother to hear about everyone she had contacted while arranging the flowers, to get news from distant relatives (many of whom I barely remembered). For the last several years I haven’t been able to do that part. Grandma died on the Friday before Memorial Day, 2007. She was putting flowers on the grave of one of my great-aunts. My step-grandfather was getting ready to take a picture, when Grandma looked up, said she didn’t feel good, and then she fell over, suffering a massive aneurism.
We realized the next Memorial Day that none of us knew how to contact everyone that Grandma always got hold of to make sure flowers were placed on the graves of my great-grandparents, or Great-great-Aunt Pearl, or several others of the more distant relatives. My aunt located a few. One of my cousins tracked down a few others. and all of us spend some time on this weekend thinking about Grandma, and all the ways she kept everyone connected.
I’ve spent other time this weekend thus far thinking of many people I have had the privilege of knowing and loving who are no longer with us. My two grandfathers and eight great-uncles who served in WWII among them. Rather than lament their loss, I think about the good things they did, and about the fun times we had together. Memorializing someone should be about celebrating their life. Not just weeping.
And it certainly shouldn’t be about scolding people who have the temerity to wish you a happy holiday weekend.
…but I am not posting an April Fools’ Day joke.
I have done a few. In college as member of the editorial board of two different campus papers, I helped produce a few April Fool’s Day editions. On my old LiveJournal I am still rather proud of the post I wrote explaining why I had decided to become a Gay Republican and start actively working to oppress myself.
If I were to do an April Fool’s Day post, I would adhere to the following rules:
I have, over the years since I started blogging, only come up with a few that met those conditions. Even though I tried to pick things that I didn’t think would upset someone, I managed to do so two of those times—the opening sentence of the Gay Republican joke made one friend think that Michael and I were breaking up, and one of my fellow bibliophile friends fell for the one where I Michael and I decided to throw away all 6000+ books in our house.
The point of a joke is to make people laugh. If they aren’t laughing, it isn’t funny.
I am fond of a good news April Fool’s Pranks. Among my favorites:
NPR: Portable Zip Codes
Garden News: Dinosaur vine
And I can’t find a link to this one: one of the local radio stations did a story claiming one of the island out in Puget Sound had come loose from its moorings and was floating wildly around the Sound. They kept giving updates throughout the afternoon as the island was sighted in different places, along with attempts to try to capture it and tow it back.
Which came first, the bunny or the egg? It is a question which has baffled philosophers1 since the dawn of time4.
The real question is: which came first, the quaint custom surrounding a particular commemoration or the highly unlikely5 explanation of its origin which insists said tradition is far more ancient than it could reasonably be? Which may seem a silly question, because obviously the post-dated fantastical explanation of a custom or tradition wouldn’t have any need to be concocted until after the custom or tradition had come into existence, right9?
I don’t have a good answer, other than to say there is no such thing as too many excuses to indulge in chocolate22.
Notes:
1. Or at least preschoolers2.
2. And smart-ass bloggers3.
3. Who, maturity-wise, often lag far behind the average preschool child.
4. Or, at least since the 19th Century, which is when the first contemporaneous reports of giving children decorated eggs at Easter are found, as well as the invention of the first “Easter Card” when one publisher first offered for sale stationary pre-printed with a drawing of a bunny and an Easter greeting.
5. Don’t get me started on just how ludicrous the various Ishtar/Mithra/Ēostre6 explanations are.
6. Bede’s Latin was superb and he is generally considered a good historical source, don’t get me wrong, but he wrote De temporum ratione with at least two political agendas in mind: a) the unification of the various ethnic groups of Britain into one nation7, and b) his animosity to the British method of calculating the date of Easter8.
7. Which was far from a foregone conclusion in the year 725 AD when Bede wrote that treatise.
8. A controversy which has divided the church for much of its history. Just last night our waitress, who was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church, was commenting on the fact that her relatives back home aren’t celebrating Easter until May 5, as the resolution adopted at the Summit of Alepo, Syria by the World Council of Churches in 1997 has still not been put into effect.
9. Trying to inject logic into a discussion like this is clearly a fool’s errand10.
10. Mind you, as foolish as it may be, it can also be a lot of fun. Not unlike the debate about whether Jesus was a Zombie or a Lich which my husband interrupted my writing to give me a play-by-play of11.
11. At the time, the Lich partisans were deeply engaged in a discussion of what object functioned as his phylactery1216
12. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons form of a horcrux13.
13. The Harry Potter-verse version of a muo-ping14.
14. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer-verse version of a soul jar15
15. A container or object which holds all or part of a person’s soul (or life, or heart) outside of their body, thus makes that person immortal and/or invulnerable so long as the Soul Jar remains intact.
16. The leading candidates being the Cross itself, the chalice that caught his blood, or the enchanted bread17 he fed his disciples at the Last Supper. All of which are, of course, incorrect20.
17. Which had spawned a mini debate about whether that meant that each of the 12 disciples as a Soul Container, or was the bread enchanted somehow to be indigestible21.
18. In which case, is the real reason Judas hung himself19 to try to thwart Jesus’ revivification?
19. Assuming you believe he did hang himself. Or was it murder?
20. Because obviously the place he hid his soul was the Keys that he gave to Peter. Why else has the elaborate system of selecting who gets to hold those keys evolved into the bizarre ritual of the Conclave of Cardinals that gather to select a new Pope?
21. Which leads to gross implications that I do not want to contemplate!
22. Make mine dark, please!
This time of year I often find myself saying, “You don’t have to get me anything. No, seriously.” And I mean it.
One reason I mean it is because I already have too much stuff. I’m a packrat, son of packrats, grandson of packrats, great-grandson of packrats, and things accumulate around me. I hang on to extra adaptor cables, chargers, old gadgets that have been replaced with newer models because someone might need that someday. I collect books, certain kinds of toys, pens, earrings, paper products, movies, music, and other things because I like them. Or because they have some kind of sentimental value.
And my husband has similar tendencies.
So, on one level, I literally don’t need more stuff.
On the other hand, who doesn’t like getting gifts? Particularly if it’s something really wonderful? A couple of friends found an old book I didn’t know existed, written by an author I love, illustrated by an artist I like, featuring a character both my husband and I have enjoyed reading about, and with a hilarious title which was perfectly innocent when the book was written in the 1930s, but now sounds like a sensational expose of some secret gay life of the character in question.
It was a perfect gift for us. And I was truly ecstatic when I opened it.
Several years ago, when my mom was trying to come to grips with the problems inherent in her packrat tendencies, asked me to refrain from buying her things that would just sit around taking up space. “If it isn’t something I can use up or that you know I need, please don’t.”
It has proven a valuable guideline, which I have been trying to apply to everyone I shop for at Christmas time. And I really enjoy getting that kind of present from others. For instance, another friend gave me some really comfortable, extra warm socks in my favorite color. They’re perfect for cold winter evenings when I need to keep my toes warm. And yeah, they’ll wear out eventually, but the whole point is to use them, including use them up.
Another friends got us a custom engraved photo frame with the date of our elopement. We were blessed to have several friends take some really great pictures of the event, and yes, I want to display a few of them. One of aforementioned friends gave us framed printouts of some of the best of the pictures he took. More great gifts.
I know that I have ignored others telling me that I don’t need to get them something. I’m not trying to be difficult, and I certainly don’t want them to feel obligated to reciprocate. I do it because I want to give them something. Sometimes it’s because I saw something in a store or at a craft fair or in a dealer’s den and I thought, “Oh! So-and-so simply must have that!” And sometimes it just means I was thinking of them.
And I recognize that the same thing is happening with the people who give me things when I say they don’t need to.
It’s a dilemma with no easy solution.
Well, actually, the solution is quite easy: now that I’ve typed it. Instead of telling people they don’t need to get me anything, I should just stick to a heart-felt “Thank you!”
I don’t get the holiday blues.
I used to feel guilty about that, since I have known many people who do. Then one friend, who suffers from rather severe holiday depression, said that she wanted to hear about other people having a good time. “Just because I can’t enjoy it, doesn’t mean I want no one else to.”
My late husband, Ray, struggled with depression most of his life, but he couldn’t stand people who talked gloom and doom all the time. He was often a very happy person, which seems to contradict the previous sentence. He usually explained depression this way, “It’s not that I’m sad or glum all the time. It’s that, no matter how happy I am right now, no matter how well things are going, there’s this constant certainty deep inside that all of it will be taken away any second, now.” Depression is not a bad mood. Depression is not being down in the dumps. Depression is not a dread that things won’t go well. It is a certainty that bad things will happen. Because “bad things always do happen to me,” or “I don’t deserve good things,” or “I always mess things up,” and so on.
In my early teens a relative on Dad’s side of the family decided to tell me in great detail how many members of Mom’s side of the family had had nervous breakdowns. Back then, “nervous breakdown” was the term medical people would use to describe to laymen various acute mental disorders serious enough to impair a person’s day-to-day functioning, usually including the symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. It was usually assumed to be a temporary event triggered by stress. But this relative (who had almost a 19th Century attitude toward mental illness) was trying to convince me that that side of the family had a congenital mental defect. This whole thing happened as my parents’ marriage was breaking down, and I realized later it was a rather clumsy attempt to get me to tell the divorce judge I wanted to be placed in Dad’s custody.
One of the instances she cited was a great-uncle who served in the Marines in WWII (in the Pacific campaign) and who subsequently had a serious breakdown a few years after the war. Now I recognize that it was a classic instance of untreated post traumatic stress disorder, not necessarily indicative of any genetic pre-disposition.
Throughout my teens and well into my twenties, I would periodically have depressive states that I couldn’t shake for days for no apparent reason. Because of some other weird medical happenings when I was 17, and because one of my siblings was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was evaluated. The verdict was that my issues were ordinary teen-age volatility, perhaps exacerbated by a higher-than-normal testosterone level (no one was more surprised than I at that last bit!).
Years later, when I finally came out of the closet completely, those periodic instances became much less severe. Since learning that men have hormone cycles, too (most just don’t want to admit it), I figured that those incidents had been a combination of ordinary hormones combined with all that anxiety, worry, and stress from trying to keep a big part of myself secret.
Plus, of course, I’m always deliriously (and annoyingly) bouncy and cheerful from Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s. As regular as clockwork, you could say.
After my late husband, Ray, was diagnosed with an incurable illness, as his body deteriorated before my eyes through rounds of chemotherapy and other treatments, those periodic moody periods became bad, again. And since his death, every year for a couple months—from approximately his birthday until the anniversary of his death—I’m moody and slightly more prone to feeling down.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I understand that depression, mood disorders, or simply bad moods are neither simple nor trivial.
But I also understand that they don’t have to be the end of anyone’s story. It is often said that we can’t control how we feel. I think that’s an over simplification. We can’t completely control how we feel, but we can decide how we react to our feelings. We can find ways to channel them, to moderate them, to reinforce the ones we want to keep, and diminish the ones we don’t want.
I’m not saying it is easy. But I am saying we always have a choice. And even when the choices are between unpleasant options, there is always at least one that doesn’t involve lashing out.
So, if you don’t feel like dancing, that’s fine. Don’t dance. But also, don’t bitch at those who do.
Many, many years ago, before what most people think of as the internet, I was active in several forums on Fidonet. One December someone started a thread about Christmas movies, and someone else posted into that thread a brief explanation of why The Bing Crosby, Danny Kay, and Rosemary Clooney White Christmas was their favorite movie.
And one of the first replies to that post was a cranky rant about how that movie was not the film which had introduced the song of the same name, that the song had been originally written for the Fred Astaire film, Holiday Inn, and no one should like White Christmas because it wasn’t the movie that introduced the song.
Nothing in the original message had even mentioned the song, “White Christmas.” The person had even said that the movie was full of corny and silly bits, with a highly improbable plot.
I shrugged my shoulders at the cranky, crazy person, and went on to read other people’s recommendations of their favorite Christmas movies.
A year or so later, I think it was on a Usenet forum, a similar thread was in progress, and again, not long after someone mentioned White Christmas, there was another angry rant about how that movie wasn’t the one that introduced the song, and how much the person wished people would stop saying it had. Except, of course, that once again, no one had.
I’ve seen it again, and again. Mention the movie, White Christmas, and some troll will post a rant about it not being the movie that introduced the song. Now, sometimes, before the troll got there, someone would mention in a more friendly way the fact that the song was originally written for another movie, but had become so popular that a studio decided to base an entire film on the song. But eventually, there would be the angry post conveying the same fact.
When I posted on an old blog a list of my favorite Christmas movies, I got an anonymous message from someone, ignoring all the other movies in the list, to angrily tell me he’s tired of people mistakenly believing that White Christmas, the movie, introduced “White Christmas,” the song. Which, of course, I hadn’t said.
It’s perfectly legitimate to dislike a movie that someone else likes. It is also socially acceptable to join a virtual conversation about a movie by sharing some trivia about the film, one of the people in it, and so on. The part that I don’t get is why this movie, of all the innocuous, corny, trivial films that have ever been made, seems to always attract this one particular rant.
I have wondered if it’s just the same troll. Does he have alerts set up searching for mentions of this film, so he can log into whereever someone mentions it and post his rant?
If it isn’t the same troll, what makes several people feel a need to react with righteous outrage about a movie named after a song which it didn’t introduce? How can such a trivial detail provoke such outrage?
People get angry about things that other people enjoy all the time. No matter how wrong headed (and factually wrong) it is, I underatand why people get worked up about the so-called war on Christmas, for instance. Something that represents their faith and their personal history appears to be under attack. I think they are deluded to think it’s under attack, but I understand why traditions and beliefs and treasured memories are important to them.
But which movie introduced a sentimental holiday song? Really?
And of all the things about that song to get exercised about, again, it’s which movie introduced it? Not the fact that it’s a secular song about a sacred holiday? Not that a song for a Christian holiday was written by a Jewish man? (Actually, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that—because now the war on Christmas folks will decide that Irving Berlin started their whole war, or something.)
Maybe these folks just need to be visited by some ghosts, perhaps the spirits of Musicals Past, Present, and Yet To Come.
Haven’t you always wanted to see those ghosts doing jazz hands?
My late husband and I had been dating not quite three months, when one night he said he was going to make some coffee, then he turned and gave me the goofiest grin, “I got Jingle Java!”
It was early in my coffee evolution. I’d been raised in households that depended on cans of Folgers ground coffee, with jars of Taster’s Choice instant as a backup for those times when you didn’t want to percolate an entire pot. I had been introduced to Starbucks just a couple years earlier, since my place of employment was only a couple of blocks from the location of the original Starbucks store, and had quickly become addicted.
The Jingle Java blend he had picked up was a store brand of whole bean coffee, and it wasn’t bad. So the next time I saw Ray, I brought a bag of Starbuck’s holiday blend as a present. Unfortunately, it turned out Ray thought all but the very lightest Starbuck’s coffees were too darkly roasted, and didn’t much care for the holiday blend.
By the next Christmas season we were living together, and I wound up buying a small amount of Starbuck’s holiday blend for me, and a large bag of Jingle Java for Ray. Since I’d done that, Ray found another coffee company’s holiday blend for us to try (I don’t remember if it was SBC, Tulley’s, Peet’s, or someone else). I’ve never liked the notion of flavored coffee beans, so we stuck to the blends.
So a tradition started in which every December we’d get several different holiday blends of coffee and rotate through them throughout the month (and usually well into January). Which I kept doing after Ray died. Michael hates coffee, so it’s just me drinking it, now. Which means I’m often not finishing them up until mid-February.
Except this year, I’ve been having a hard time finding many varieties. Over the last couple of years, the variety of whole been coffees available in grocery stores has significantly decreased. I don’t know if it’s because after two decades the grind-your-own coffee craze is finally dying out, so only us hard cases are doing it, or if the economy just has people buying as cheaply as they can, or what. At most of the grocery stores I’ve been to, the only thing I’ve found is Peet’s Holiday Blend, already ground. Coffee starts oxidizing as soon as you grind it, which changes the taste, so I don’t like pre-ground coffee.
And the store brand Jingle Java we used to buy—nowhere in sight.
There are flavored coffees, but those usually just taste like someone poured nail polish remover into my cup. At least to me.
At one upscale market (that’s within walking distance of my house), I happened to find a display of one of the brands of coffee that I never see anywhere else, and they had a Holiday Blend, so I have two this year. I like both, there’s no reason that I need more than two to choose from–I don’t need any, obviously. But it’s something I liked doing. A silly tradition. An excuse to think about Ray and the many fun and silly things we’d do together every Christmas season.
I love new things. I just wish the universe would give me veto power over some changes, you know?
Font Folly 