I had a very convivial dinner last night at a South San Francisco restaurant which feels very much to me like the Brooklyn restaurants of my younger years. Actual people go there and eat real food and have a good time.
While we were waiting for our table, I got into a conversation at the bar with a group of women about the holidays. We were all in agreement that the old custom of having either Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah as the greetings was better than the empty Happy Holidays we are supposed to do now. Maybe the Manhattans helped the bonding and agreeableness, but nevertheless...
Yesterday on TV, NPR's Nina Totenberg talked about a government fete which was, as she said, "pardon the phrase, a Christmas party."
Christmas has been for generations our culture's most prominent and powerful public holiday. Like America itself, it overtly and easily blended the religious and seasonal. Now it has become a matter for hesitation and, real or imagined, offense. This is not a sign of health, but of self-erasure. The homogenization that goes with "inclusion" really means the disappearance of the very reason there is an issue in the first place. PC in all its forms, polite on the surface, is eventually cancerous.
Can you imagine Jews in Israel's ceasing to wish each other traditional greetings on Rosh Hashana or Passover for fear of offending their Arabs or their atheists?
I have had the grim thought this morning that the banishment of Merry Christmas is as powerful a sign as any of the death of our culture.
1 comment:
Catholic convert Richard Neuhaus created Neuhaus' Law: where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. True in the cultural sphere as well. What was once common sense and behavior eventually become pathology. It seems to me that where dominant culture or groups fall for the fake conviviality of political correctness, it is eventually the dominant group and its culture who will become the outlaws.
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