\u201cIt is Christmas in July!\u201d\u00a0 So the US boob-tube informs me every time I try to momentarily escape the real and surreal horrors of MSM news, alternative news, Internet news, news from the universe.<\/p>\n
I seek a morsel of sustenance; a moment of transcendent awareness\u2014a peak moment such as one used to find, rarely (admittedly) in old movies (when the convivial, hapless drunkard-father in \u201cA Tree Grows in Brooklyn\u201d sings \u201cAnnie Laurie,\u201d for example). And, instead, I get Hannity, O\u2019Reilly, Pelley and Kelly book-ending the real message of this summer: It is Christmas in July!<\/p>\n
(For the blissfully oblivious, residing in foreign climes, or for those\u00a0unrepentant, blessed\u00a0bibliophiles among us, what is “Christmas in July”?\u00a0 It appears to be the name that various and several US TV channels have designated to July programming that features Christmas stories and themes!)<\/p>\n
What oligopolistic cartel imagined such an advertising ploy? Ambush the unwary, heat\/humidity\/drought-badgered consumer with pictures of snowflakes, rosy cheeks, Christmas carols, and rev up the buying engines 5 months early! Get them in the mood to buy on Amazon, etc. No need to hit the terror-susceptible malls this year! To update Tammy Faye Baker: Shop till you drop on your own laptop!<\/p>\n
Christmas in July!…<\/p>\n
There are three kinds of lies, Mark Twain declared: \u201cLies, damn lies\u2026 and statistics!\u201d<\/p>\n
Even Twain, it seems, found it difficult to contemplate the most intractable of all lies: the half-truth! Why? Because it is half true! (But which side\u2019s up?)<\/p>\n
Maybe I first thought about this half-truth business as a senior in high-school. My family had moved from New York City (where the middle-class schools were quite good) to Miami Beach (where they were not!). The book I was forced to read (what else should I say, but \u201cforced\u201d?) in \u201cSocial Studies\u201d was \u201cCommunism versus Democracy.\u201d I asked my teacher: \u201cShouldn\u2019t the title be, \u2018Communism versus Capitalism\u2019? Or, maybe, \u2018Totalitarianism versus Democracy\u2019? Isn\u2019t the title as it stands making certain unwarranted assumptions or presumptions?\u201d<\/p>\n
Actually, I didn\u2019t ask. I was not as curmudgeonly then as I am now! But\u2026, a nascent dissident, I did think about it!<\/p>\n
Education in America is more about socialization than education. In high-school it\u2019s about male athletes (mostly) and female (mostly) cheerleaders, the \u201cin-group,\u201d and everyone else. (Add one more lie to the panoply: Call it the \u201chidden truth.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The hidden truth of a college education these days is that na\u00efve students are entangled in spiders\u2019 webs of inescapable debts while pursuing an \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d with which safe-cracking politician-\u201cguardians\u201d of the treasury have long since absconded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat sort of government do we have?\u201d the mythical \u201ccharwoman\u201d is supposed to have asked Ben Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention. \u201cA Republic,\u201d he synoptically replied\u2026 \u201cif you can keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, we couldn\u2019t keep it! By the time we rolled around to the 14th<\/sup> Amendment\u2014not quite out-and-out declaring that corporations were \u201cpersons\u201d with all the rights and entitlements of \u201cpersons\u201d under law, but for all intents and purposes establishing the corporatist credo\u2014we were by then, in the early 19th<\/sup> Century racing towards the sort of government we are now; viz., Oligarchy for the super-rich; Plutocracy for the merely rich; Bureaucracy for the Middle Class; Anarchy for the poor.<\/p>\n And so, during Christmas-in-July, over our imaginary turkeys, we bow our heads in grief for the nine innocents killed at the African-American Church in Charleston; but our half-baked, half-truth-be-told media have almost nothing to say about the equal number of Blacks (including children) killed in Chicago gun-gang violence within 1 week of that incident. And virtually nothing to say about the tens of thousands of Americans killing each other and themselves each year in this depraved and violent land!<\/p>\n But, protests the true-believer: We have the First Amendment\u2014freedom of speech! And we have the 2nd<\/sup> Amendment\u2014the right to protect ourselves!<\/p>\n Frankly, I\u2019m tired of these hackneyed responses. The First Amendment was trundled neatly into its place behind the legal tomes by Justice (!) Holmes when he argued that one couldn\u2019t yell \u201cfire!\u201d in a crowded theater when there was no fire! Fair enough\u2026 except that Holmes was talking about peaceniks and war-resisters during the First World War, who, according to Holmes\u2019 judgment, had no right protesting war near a recruiting station! As for the 2nd<\/sup> Amendment\u2014it\u2019s adherents always seem to forget the dependent clause about a \u201cwell-regulated militia\u201d!<\/p>\n Frankly, these days, I\u2019m much more concerned about the 4th<\/sup> Amendment\u2014that overlooked sibling which is supposed to keep us \u201csecure\u201d in our persons, our homes, our personal effects. (To quote from the Legal Information Institute website:\u00a0 “The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, ‘[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.’\u00a0 The ultimate goal of this provision is to protect people\u2019s right to privacy and freedom from arbitrary governmental\u00a0intrusions.”)<\/p>\n At a time when the FBI can be hacked and 21 million Americans\u2019 personal and business records are God-knows-where, why is there no hullabaloo about the rankling sacking of our 4th<\/sup> Amendment rights?<\/p>\n But\u2026, forsooth, it\u2019s Christmas in July! Slow down and smell the mistletoe!<\/p>\n There\u2019s really nothing to worry about\u2026 except the \u201cLone Wolf\u201d!\u00a0 (For the blissfully oblivious again, “Lone Wolf” is the designation that various enforcement agencies– military, police, etc.–, public officials and politicians, the mass media and\u00a0the public at large employ to describe “terrorists” who are not connected to any particular terrorist group, who are “self-radicalized” via the Internet, etc.)\u00a0 And could it possibly be true that there are thousands, or tens of thousands, of these “lone wolves,” lurking, awaiting their perverse opportunity to pounce?<\/p>\n Why do they hate us? Americans wondered after 911. And, our Philosopher-King George W. Bush answered majestically: \u201cThey hate us for our freedoms!\u201d<\/p>\n And most goody-goody Americans went back to sleep.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u201d couldn\u2019t possibly hate us for the Gulf War, when W\u2019s namby-pamby father refused to pay America\u2019s former ally, Saddam Hussein, for the debts he had incurred while fighting our proxy war against Iran? \u201cThey\u201d couldn\u2019t hate us for the \u201cturkey shoot\u201d when our brave pilots slaughtered tens of thousands of retreating Iraqi forces in that \u201cclean-their-clocks\u201d Gulf War? Could they possibly hate us for our invasion of Iraq, killing and maiming and displacing millions of Iraqi fathers, mothers, children\u2014destroying the most advanced Arab nation, with the best access to advanced education for women in the Arab world? Could they hate us for ransacking \u201cthe Arab Spring,\u201d bringing in dictator el-Sisi in Egypt\u2026 or for ramming a sword up Qaddafi\u2019s ass while Hillary Shrillary made a dumb joke about it?<\/p>\n We pride ourselves on our \u201cseparation of Church and State,\u201d but who ever proposed that we separate Morality and the State, or Wisdom and the State?<\/p>\n Perhaps during this \u201cChristmas in July,\u201d we would be wise to wipe the snowflakes from our eyes and consider this old algorithm from the Book of Proverbs: \u201cThen I saw and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction.\u201d<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n Gary Corseri <\/em>has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library, and his dramas have been produced on <\/em>PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. He has published novels and collections of poetry, has taught in public schools, prisons and universities, and has published work at <\/em>TMS (Transcend Media Service)<\/a>,\u00a0The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook Magazine and other publications and websites worldwide. Contact: gary_corseri@comcast.net<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why do they hate us? Americans wondered after 911. And, our Philosopher-King George W. Bush answered majestically: \u201cThey hate us for our freedoms!\u201d And most goody-goody Americans went back to sleep. We pride ourselves on our \u201cseparation of Church and State,\u201d but who ever proposed that we separate Morality and the State, or Wisdom and the State?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}