Black Friday
(Because there is no way to describe/explain the insanity of a family holiday dinner in any way that will make sense other than an endless row of the "headdesk" icon but done in psychedelic colors with distortion filters, the trappedness of it that makes (not just) me wish it were feasible to fake one's own death, change my name and vanish to Kathmandu before Christmas. There's a little of "dining under the hollow hills" about it, or the Barmecide's Feast...aaarghhhhh)
It occurs to me that some if not most overseas readers may not be familiar with this custom and it should have some explanation, since it forms such an important part of our state religion. Black Friday, as it has come to be called, sounds like a day of mourning, and in fact it is a penitential rite, although the curious thing about it is that it is celebrated with outward forms of gaiety and festive decoration.
But everyone knows that this is a day of sacrifice and self-abnegation, and part of the festival-specific suffering is the very fact that it's carried out with the trappings of cheer and the exhortations of fun. For some people this creates a self-aware, ironic layer to the flagellation, but for many if not most, the effect is mostly depression induced by cognitive dissonance on top of the stress of the actual ritual itself. And this too is a most pleasing sacrifice unto the nostrils of Tashlan.
In less poetic terms, "Black Friday" is the day* when everyone rushes out to take advantage of mega-sales that are synchronized by common consent to take place the day after Thanksgiving, symbolizing the formal start of the Holiday Shopping Season; you may have bought presents at varying times all year round (freak!) and stores may have put out a few tentative holly and snowman decorations in October, but today is the true beginning, the only one that counts. And so all across the country, shoppers will rush out en masse and wait in lines for stores to open, battle all day in the metal melee for parking places, scavenge and lunge with declining rationality all day for packaged plastic junk and expensive unnecessary in malls and boutiques and generally make themselves thoroughly miserable as well as everyone else they come in contact with, only to come home and find that while they have egregiously overspent, they have still not gotten half of the people on the list gifts.
But not to worry! There are still T-[X] Shopping Days 'Til Christmas!
Of course there are always heretics and holdouts - those who think that the Winter Solstice is a time of communal celebration, not slavish commercialism, a time for people to celebrate their various deities' connections with the earth, and immanentize them on a personal scale, not one determined by standards of social excess and mass-production. Unfortunately, the Inquisition under the direction of the Order of St. Podsnap has not wholly succeeded in discrediting this by disinformation campaigns, though a recent effort in reviving previously-effective memes ("The Jews Liberals Who Stole Christmas") is showing some results, it's still too soon to tell.
Why does it matter, if there are Recusants who refuse to plunge unquestioningly and wholeheartedly into the maelstrom of Mandatory Fun and Happiness Via Visa Card? Surely there aren't enough of them to make a difference? Well, it matters on two levels. It is important, because the economy has become dependent on Christmas shopping sprees, for some retailers this is the only way that they profit, on sales this coming month. And that itself makes for the whole US economic index, if consumer confidence falters and people don't go out and buy, extravagantly, the whole juggernaut shudders, even big chain stores (as I know from having worked several Holiday seasons in one) in the malls must carefully measure their daily performance against last Nov-Dec, and failures mean store closings and cutbacks all around.
On a mystical level, at a more powerful level of decisionmaking in the Hegemony's Lowerarchy, it is important enough that Sir Rupert Murdoch and others in the ranks of Minitrue (which now includes Penguin Books egads!) must expend a great deal of time and energy to promoting the notion that Christmas Is Under Attack not simply to prevent any dimishing of the number of fiscal sacrifices swiped through the cashbox altars, but also because it serves them particularly well in the Divide/Conquer and Handwaving fronts.**
Keep the happy people of Brutopia het up over the thought of those godless heathens and humanists trying to take away their Midnight Masses and "Silent Night" and manger scenes, of the unspeakable oppression of being forced to recognize that this is still a country that espouses freedom of religion and rejects a state church on paper, and a moderate fraction of their fellow citizens are going to be celebrating Hanukkah, Yule (sacred or secular), or possibly even Festivus, (or Hogswatch) while others have already or will later make their own feasts celebrating the triumph-of-life, and it would be a considerate act to acknowledge this heterogenous reality.
The fact that nobody actually is trying to legally prevent any Christians, anywhere in the country, from celebrating Christmas, is beside the point. Christians have in the past been so assiduous in preventing other religions from celebrating their own faiths that it might be seen as projection; it might also be seen as ironic, given that certain powerful and not so powerful Christian sects have rejected the celebration of Christmas as heretical itself, pagan either in history or in essence, and while the Jehovah's Witnesses who hold the latter have no political power, the Puritans certainly once did, and banned such worldly celebrations - although they were very good capitalists themselves, and provided Tashlan with much blood in return for plenty of treasure. Not to mention the irony of celebrating a spiritual victory in the name of a deity who mandates humility, communal caring, and elevates poverty over materialism and consigns wealthy warmongers to the outer darkness - by going out and splurging on exhorbitantly-priced (and often slave-produced) goods imported by a destructive and unsustainable transportation system maintained by war, all purchased by going deeper into debt so as to maintain the illusion of prosperity and live up to the (often-imaginary) expectations of neighbors.***
But it works well at keeping the god-fearing (or agnostic-but-sentimental, e.g. the majority) American masses distracted and fixated on scapegoats, and fearful of being forced to become drugged-out homosexuals as Bill O'Lielly asserts, and prevents them from questioning the whole business of sacrificing to Tashlan and the fact that the Ritual has become such an all-consuming thing that it has destroyed all the actual joy and celebration about it, creating a "Bah, humbug!" backlash from the people who are most involved in doing it, against their will, "for the children" -- who also quickly come to loathe the Mandatory Fun and hollowness of it all--
And we can't, Mustn't, ever stop because if we do, The Whole World Will Fall Apart. We know this, because many wise men have said so, very often - and do you want to risk finding out what will happen if there are no more sacrifices?
So get out there, good citizens, and Shop 'Til You Drop!!! --Or don't, be Nonconformist holdouts, enjoying the blessings of Tashlan without giving back anything -- your time will come...
* According to Wikipedia this is because this Holy Day puts retailers "in the black", that is, on the positive side of the balance sheet, instead of "in the red", that is, losing money. For all I know it's true, but I really don't know how long it's been called that or where it got started.
** Imagine how horrified the handlers of Falafel O'Reilly and John 'Five in the Noggin' Gibson would be, if a majority of citizens in the Anglosphere chose to celebrate Christmas with nothing but church services and quiet family gatherings with an exchange of small, inexpensive but heartfelt gifts, and a massive outpouring of corporal works of mercy to all in need, regardless of color or creed. X-Box-lusting children would wail, Wall Street would collapse and the rest of the dysfunctional US economy with it, but Christ would have certainly been put back in Christmas. And I doubt very much that any Pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Jews, or Atheists would be offended by it at all. But you can see how disturbing even the idea of Responsible Holiday Shopping has been, even on the Center-Left - which just goes to show that the worship of Tashlan whether in his sanguine Ares guise or his benevolent Mammon guise really is the state religion here, and on the other side of the Pond too.
*** The Oil Baron's Weekly acknowledges this disconnect ever so slightly, prefacing their "Christmas Gift Guide" with an editor's note that begins, "Theologically ideal or not, Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season" and closes "Have a blessed one. And happy shopping too" after reccing a Victor Davis Hanson book on the Peloponnessian war and other books of slanderous fiction. (via World O'Crap)
It occurs to me that some if not most overseas readers may not be familiar with this custom and it should have some explanation, since it forms such an important part of our state religion. Black Friday, as it has come to be called, sounds like a day of mourning, and in fact it is a penitential rite, although the curious thing about it is that it is celebrated with outward forms of gaiety and festive decoration.
But everyone knows that this is a day of sacrifice and self-abnegation, and part of the festival-specific suffering is the very fact that it's carried out with the trappings of cheer and the exhortations of fun. For some people this creates a self-aware, ironic layer to the flagellation, but for many if not most, the effect is mostly depression induced by cognitive dissonance on top of the stress of the actual ritual itself. And this too is a most pleasing sacrifice unto the nostrils of Tashlan.
In less poetic terms, "Black Friday" is the day* when everyone rushes out to take advantage of mega-sales that are synchronized by common consent to take place the day after Thanksgiving, symbolizing the formal start of the Holiday Shopping Season; you may have bought presents at varying times all year round (freak!) and stores may have put out a few tentative holly and snowman decorations in October, but today is the true beginning, the only one that counts. And so all across the country, shoppers will rush out en masse and wait in lines for stores to open, battle all day in the metal melee for parking places, scavenge and lunge with declining rationality all day for packaged plastic junk and expensive unnecessary in malls and boutiques and generally make themselves thoroughly miserable as well as everyone else they come in contact with, only to come home and find that while they have egregiously overspent, they have still not gotten half of the people on the list gifts.
But not to worry! There are still T-[X] Shopping Days 'Til Christmas!
Of course there are always heretics and holdouts - those who think that the Winter Solstice is a time of communal celebration, not slavish commercialism, a time for people to celebrate their various deities' connections with the earth, and immanentize them on a personal scale, not one determined by standards of social excess and mass-production. Unfortunately, the Inquisition under the direction of the Order of St. Podsnap has not wholly succeeded in discrediting this by disinformation campaigns, though a recent effort in reviving previously-effective memes ("The Jews Liberals Who Stole Christmas") is showing some results, it's still too soon to tell.
Why does it matter, if there are Recusants who refuse to plunge unquestioningly and wholeheartedly into the maelstrom of Mandatory Fun and Happiness Via Visa Card? Surely there aren't enough of them to make a difference? Well, it matters on two levels. It is important, because the economy has become dependent on Christmas shopping sprees, for some retailers this is the only way that they profit, on sales this coming month. And that itself makes for the whole US economic index, if consumer confidence falters and people don't go out and buy, extravagantly, the whole juggernaut shudders, even big chain stores (as I know from having worked several Holiday seasons in one) in the malls must carefully measure their daily performance against last Nov-Dec, and failures mean store closings and cutbacks all around.
On a mystical level, at a more powerful level of decisionmaking in the Hegemony's Lowerarchy, it is important enough that Sir Rupert Murdoch and others in the ranks of Minitrue (which now includes Penguin Books egads!) must expend a great deal of time and energy to promoting the notion that Christmas Is Under Attack not simply to prevent any dimishing of the number of fiscal sacrifices swiped through the cashbox altars, but also because it serves them particularly well in the Divide/Conquer and Handwaving fronts.**
Keep the happy people of Brutopia het up over the thought of those godless heathens and humanists trying to take away their Midnight Masses and "Silent Night" and manger scenes, of the unspeakable oppression of being forced to recognize that this is still a country that espouses freedom of religion and rejects a state church on paper, and a moderate fraction of their fellow citizens are going to be celebrating Hanukkah, Yule (sacred or secular), or possibly even Festivus, (or Hogswatch) while others have already or will later make their own feasts celebrating the triumph-of-life, and it would be a considerate act to acknowledge this heterogenous reality.
The fact that nobody actually is trying to legally prevent any Christians, anywhere in the country, from celebrating Christmas, is beside the point. Christians have in the past been so assiduous in preventing other religions from celebrating their own faiths that it might be seen as projection; it might also be seen as ironic, given that certain powerful and not so powerful Christian sects have rejected the celebration of Christmas as heretical itself, pagan either in history or in essence, and while the Jehovah's Witnesses who hold the latter have no political power, the Puritans certainly once did, and banned such worldly celebrations - although they were very good capitalists themselves, and provided Tashlan with much blood in return for plenty of treasure. Not to mention the irony of celebrating a spiritual victory in the name of a deity who mandates humility, communal caring, and elevates poverty over materialism and consigns wealthy warmongers to the outer darkness - by going out and splurging on exhorbitantly-priced (and often slave-produced) goods imported by a destructive and unsustainable transportation system maintained by war, all purchased by going deeper into debt so as to maintain the illusion of prosperity and live up to the (often-imaginary) expectations of neighbors.***
But it works well at keeping the god-fearing (or agnostic-but-sentimental, e.g. the majority) American masses distracted and fixated on scapegoats, and fearful of being forced to become drugged-out homosexuals as Bill O'Lielly asserts, and prevents them from questioning the whole business of sacrificing to Tashlan and the fact that the Ritual has become such an all-consuming thing that it has destroyed all the actual joy and celebration about it, creating a "Bah, humbug!" backlash from the people who are most involved in doing it, against their will, "for the children" -- who also quickly come to loathe the Mandatory Fun and hollowness of it all--
And we can't, Mustn't, ever stop because if we do, The Whole World Will Fall Apart. We know this, because many wise men have said so, very often - and do you want to risk finding out what will happen if there are no more sacrifices?
So get out there, good citizens, and Shop 'Til You Drop!!! --Or don't, be Nonconformist holdouts, enjoying the blessings of Tashlan without giving back anything -- your time will come...
* According to Wikipedia this is because this Holy Day puts retailers "in the black", that is, on the positive side of the balance sheet, instead of "in the red", that is, losing money. For all I know it's true, but I really don't know how long it's been called that or where it got started.
** Imagine how horrified the handlers of Falafel O'Reilly and John 'Five in the Noggin' Gibson would be, if a majority of citizens in the Anglosphere chose to celebrate Christmas with nothing but church services and quiet family gatherings with an exchange of small, inexpensive but heartfelt gifts, and a massive outpouring of corporal works of mercy to all in need, regardless of color or creed. X-Box-lusting children would wail, Wall Street would collapse and the rest of the dysfunctional US economy with it, but Christ would have certainly been put back in Christmas. And I doubt very much that any Pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Jews, or Atheists would be offended by it at all. But you can see how disturbing even the idea of Responsible Holiday Shopping has been, even on the Center-Left - which just goes to show that the worship of Tashlan whether in his sanguine Ares guise or his benevolent Mammon guise really is the state religion here, and on the other side of the Pond too.
*** The Oil Baron's Weekly acknowledges this disconnect ever so slightly, prefacing their "Christmas Gift Guide" with an editor's note that begins, "Theologically ideal or not, Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season" and closes "Have a blessed one. And happy shopping too" after reccing a Victor Davis Hanson book on the Peloponnessian war and other books of slanderous fiction. (via World O'Crap)