It's a Wonderful Lie

Christmas seems to bring out the worst in Americans, particularly the ones who still think "hippies" are burning flags to protest a war that most Americans don't remember.  You know, those Bully Boys who walk around with a chip on their shoulders daring you to say anything that allows them to pick a fight with the "politically correct" or those who have read history.

This thing has been making the rounds today and judging by the comments, not too many people realize that the "founding Fathers" version of that propaganda aimed at school children was written in 1892, not 1776.  When Eisenhower was pressured by godmongers to change it in 1954, during the height of the cold war, it wasn't mentioned that it had been written by a Socialist -- surprising in an era where that other relic, inseparable from the holiday, It's a Wonderful Life was seen as containing secret Communist messages to corrupt the young mind and was investigated by HUAC. After all it does criticize the Sacred Banks and other institutions of Capitalist  greed.  The original pledge called it "My" flag after all, suggesting that it belongs to all of us, not just to some Armed Patriot's Sovereign Citizen Christian Militia of God, Guns and Guts.

Am I suggesting that these penis-waving patriots are possessed of disordered personalities as well as a fair amount of ignorance and dishonesty? Well yes I am, thank you very much and thanks to them for another Fuck You Christmas.

I suppose the dark days of the late 1940's and the 1950's are that

great golden age these Trumpish idiots would return to: forgetting all the while about those 90% marginal tax brackets and dramatically higher poverty levels.  The middle class was doing pretty well after all with all that commie stuff like a 5 day work week -- and Socialist Security didn't bankrupt the wealthy after all. With all the bitching and moaning at the time, we still remember it as a wonderful life with the same hubris we talk about Christmas as a time of peace while making it into a Jesus Jihad against Liberals, atheists and Mooslims who once had the audacity to see the sacred flag and this sacred soil as theirs.

Yes, Christmas, that Holiday Christians have denounced and promoted in equal measure since the Romans invented it is nothing but a billboard, a soap box on which meanness, anger, aggression and greed are proclaimed throughout the land. To say Merry Christmas has become too much like that debauched and sordid "pledge" wherein the oppressed abused, exploited and downtrodden are forced to acknowledged the gods of greed and to pretend that the USA is a place of "liberty and justice for all."  It's a wonderful lie, once again.