What I’m Blogging

Lately there have been a deluge of articles about political correctness and the debate about how much Christ should be in Christmas during this Holiday season. Well this post is is well in that vein of thought, but on a slightly narrower field. I propose that we give Christ a break and take him out of Christmas Cake. It could become a Holiday Cake, and then all denominations and faiths could equally share in the Curse joy that is cake encrusted dried fruit during their December celebrations.

…Let it be as universal, as it is universally despised!…

Christmas Cake, historians tell us, arrived in Europe in the 13th century as the bad idea to suspend newly imported dried fruit in a mixture of early edible cement, which was then passed around from house to house as a form of torture. It is undocumented, but widely believed (at least by me) that Christmas Cake was a chief weapon of the Spanish Inquisition. Didn’t expect that did you? Through the ages Christmas Cake has been reviled. Which Cake did you think Marie Antoinette suggested the citizens of Paris eat? You guessed it - Christmas Cake! Can you blame them for chopping off her head? I think not.

You also can’t get rid of the darned things. You give them away, and they keep coming back. They never decay, they just get older. As Russell Baker said, “Fruitcake is Forever”.

“Thirty-four years ago, I inherited the family fruitcake. Fruitcake is the only food durable enough to become a family heirloom. It had been in my grandmother’s possession since 1880, and she passed it to a niece in 1933. Surprisingly, the niece, who had always seemed to detest me, left it to me in her will….I would have renounced my inheritance except for the sentiment of the thing, for the family fruitcake was the symbol of our family’s roots. When my grandmother inherited it, it was already 86 years old, having been baked by her great-grandfather in 1794 as a Christmas gift for President George Washington. Washington, with his high-flown view of ethical standards for Government workers, sent it back with thanks, explaining that he thought it unseemly for Presidents to accept gifts weighing more than 80 pounds, even though they were only eight inches in diameter…There is no doubt…about the fruitcake’s great age. Sawing into it six Christmasses ago, I came across a fragment of a 1794 newspaper with an account of the lynching of a real-estate speculator in New York City.”

—”Fruitcake is Forever,” Russell Baker, New York Times, December 25, 1983, Section 6 (p. 10)

So does this deserve to be dumped on Christ? Does it deserve to be affixed to any one religious group? I say no. I say we should give long suffering Christians a break and let them crawl out from under the considerable weight and stickiness of the traditional Christmas Cake stigma. Let it be as universal, as it is universally despised!

And friends don’t send this “Holiday” Cake to friends. So find someone you really dislike, a mean teacher, an ex spouse, someone in political power, and send them all the cake you can.

It’s the birthday of the great English poet John Milton, born in London (1608). He’s best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). But he spent twenty years of his life writing almost nothing but essays on political and religious topics.

…Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself….

He married a woman named Mary Powell in 1642, but she quickly grew tired of him and left him almost immediately after their honeymoon. Milton was furious, but it was against the law to get a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. The next year, he wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in which he argued that couples should be able to divorce if the marriage turns out to be unhappy. He tried to prove that marriage was created to remedy the loneliness of men, and that if a wife failed to perform this function, her husband should have the right to divorce her. He also said that those who had lived freely in their youth were more likely to find happiness in marriage than those who were chaste and inexperienced. Milton addressed his tract to the British Parliament, but it didn’t go over well. He remained married to Powell until her death in 1652.

Milton was also one of the early crusaders against the government’s censorship of books and pamphlets. He argued that no one group should control the number of available opinions from which an individual can choose. He wrote, “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”

But his great masterpiece was Paradise Lost, from which many readers come away feeling that Satan is the most interesting and sympathetic character in the poem.

It’s the birthday of the conservative columnist Ann Coulter, born in New Canaan, Connecticut (1961). She founded the conservative Cornell Review in college at Cornell and then went on to law school at the University of Michigan, where she started a new chapter of the Federalist Society. She practiced law for more than a decade before she began her syndicated column for the Universal Press Syndicate in 1999. She was fired from a spot as a commentator on MSNBC when she told a disabled Vietnam veteran, “People like you caused us to lose that war.” She later said that she hadn’t realized he was disabled. After September 11, 2001, she lost her column on the National Review website when she wrote a column that said of muslims, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

She’s gone on to write several controversial and bestselling books of political commentary, including Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003).

When I was a lad, I went to school to learn. I thought money was something Dad brought home every week in a small brown envelope and gave to Mom. Now I wish I could learn more and worry about money less.

Poem: “You Go to School to Learn” by Thomas Lux from New & Selected Poems © Houghton Mifflin.

You go to school to learn to
read and add, to someday
make some money. It - money - makes
sense: you need
a better tractor, an addition
to the gameroom, you prefer
to buy your beancurd by the barrel.
There’s no other way to get the goods
you need. Besides, it keeps people busy
working - for it.
It’s sensible and, therefore, you go
to school to learn (and the teacher,
having learned, gets paid to teach you) how
to get it. Fine. But:
you’re taught away from poetry
or, say, dancing (That’s nice, dear,
but there’s no dough in it). No poem
ever bought a hamburger, or not too many. It’s true,
and so, every morning - it’s still dark!-
you see them, the children, like angels
being marched off to execution,
or banks. Their bodies luminous
in headlights. Going to school.

At the behest of Gigantic Concrete, I was again on the road today. This time it was off to jolly old London. London in the bush that is, not to be confused with the stomping grounds of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family who have been going under the alias “Windsor” for the better part of the last century due to some PR issues about being German… but I digress.

…Good thing I’m putting that University degree in philosophy to good use….

I spent the better part of the day driving through farm country to another large gravel pit on the fringe of the corporate empire, to spend a grand total of 45 minutes fixing a router, and installing a printer. Good thing I’m putting that University degree in philosophy to good use. Job done, back on the road home, but first, a small stop to get some lunch and a chance meeting with death. Well almost.

The burger was good and juicy. It was served at one of those restaurants that truckers like to stop at. When I’m on the road I eat where the trucks are parked. They know good food when they see it. So, I’m eating my yummy,delectable burger, and for some reason, while chewing, I get the urge to cough, and then inhale, ensuring that the piece of burger I’m chewing is now lodged (rather securely) in my wind pipe.

Had this been a Terry Pratchett novel, I would have expected DEATH on his mighty steed “Binky”. If DEATH was busy perhaps Death of Rats would make an appearance. It’s funny what passes through your mind as the O² levels start to decrease. I was choking. I was not breathing. I was surprisingly calm considering lack of air is a key cause of mortality in earthly carbon based life forms. Surprisingly calm, considering no one else in the joint did anything to help me. I mean truckers take their food pretty seriously. OK, the waitress did ask me if I wanted some water.

As no one seemed prepared to assist, I devised a self inflicted “Heimlich Maneuver” which involved coughing what little air was left in my lungs and smashing my fist into my chest. On my second try the burger bit dislodged and flew out of my mouth, and more importantly my throat. All I could think was good thing the waitress brought a fresh glass of water. Nearly croaking makes me thirsty.