House of Eratosthenes

I upgraded our new television package to the next step up. You know how all these things work, right…they start out with some number of channels that sounds like a lot when you say it out loud, but the basic package just includes Fox and CNN and Cartoon and local and a big ol’ bunch of jewelry on sale at 1 in the morning…and On-Demand…but if you spend another $20 you can have some of the good stuff. Well, we spent the $20. I was teasing my lady about how wonderful it was to put out just a little bit of cash, and be able to surround the love of my life with a bunch of man-bashing crap to remind her what towering assholes us guys are. No WAY can this turn out to be a mistake. She knows I don’t really mean it, that I understand she has the intellectual wherewithal to filter that crap out when she sees it. She also understands my feelings about television in general — I think it’s fair to say that since the 1950’s, it’s lost its luster as a “hub” in the living room, around which family members can gather and share a common experience and grow closer together. It’s become more of a wedge, in my opinion, that drives families apart if they allow it to.

It’s the programming. It’s just plain hostile. And not by accident. Men are idiots, unless they wear neckties at night, in which case they’re evil and might still be idiots. Women are only concerned about one thing, and that’s getting what they want out of life, hell with everybody else. Girls are concerned that everybody isn’t paying attention to them all the time, and boys are aspiring to grow up into sad, angry, sullen men with dirty consciences. Those are the straight people. The gay people are whining about how oppressed they are by the straight people, when they aren’t showing off how much more fun they are than those stiff-assed straight people. Ethnic minorities, well, they live in a whole different world. They seem a lot less integrated in the boob tube than they are in real life. I’ve come to see television as a hundreds-of-channels endless menagerie of different classes of folks, just spoiling for a fight, but presenting themselves as if they aren’t. As un-integrated as different classes of people can possibly get without heading for the hills away from each other as fast as their little legs can carry ’em.

That’s what I’ve come to expect. But during my one marathon of television, nodding off and waking up and nodding off and waking up like a real December-25 lazy-man…I saw something else. Maybe this isn’t as bad, but I dunno. What I described above, you can escape. This stuff you can’t.

I’m referring to the de-commercialization of Christmas. I think it’s gone too far. Way too far.

Time after time after time, I saw these modern “Christmas stories” as having something to do with how evil material things are. Oh, I understand what is intended here, and I still think highly of the motives involved. But it seems there is a terrible misinterpretation taking place, perhaps even a usurpation.

The common thread I keep seeing is that there is a regrettable evil involved in simply earning the money. When I was a little kid we delighted in observing Ebenezer Scrooge to be a pitiful man on an errant path; we understood financial solvency was the least of his problems. But he was a parsimonious miser. He got his money by making people suffer, and he renegotiated his contracts with just as much ruthlessness as an independently-wealthy old man as he did when he was a skinny kid just getting started. And as that wealthy old man, his life was unhappy. He didn’t know what to spend the money on; he was just an empty shell, going through the motions.

And now? Every new Christmas story I see — someone needs salvation, a kick in the butt from a wiser all-knowing ghost, or simply to do some growing up. Because they made a life choice involving money. It can be something that doesn’t hurt anybody. Just taking a high-paying job. Our modern Scrooges are scolded, and then put through some melodramatic spiritual-cleansing process, after having indulged in a purely victim-less crime of getting rich.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But it bothers me tremendously when I see the same old story, but this time it appears someone’s been very careful to trim away any collateral damage. The whole point to “It’s A Wonderful Life,” for example, was not the welfare of George Bailey, but rather the welfare of everyone around him. People he spent his entire life helping, not even fully understanding how awful life would have been without him. The spoiler to Frank Capra’s classic is that the titular “Life” is not his at all, it’s everybody else’s.

I believe we are in the process of losing that. One made-for-TV that disturbed me greatly had to do with a gorgeous young red-haired lady who ditched her fiance and got a high-paying job in New York City, ending up spending Christmas alone because she had started an affair with her boss who it turned out wasn’t as quick to divorce his wife as she was led to believe. At the story’s conclusion she was able to mend her ways and ended up married to her boyfriend after all. Except — without any consequences. She was still rich. Richer than before, if I read the ending right. Everything was good now because she was the center of attention, and at the beginning, was not…and what about everybody else? Looked to me like all their lives were the same, one way or t’other.

All about her, her, her.

And it wouldn’t be fair for me to look that one up so I could single her out. It seems every single modern effort to re-tell “A Christmas Carol” makes the same, of what in my view is, a mistake. Something has been sacrificed for wealth, and with the help of some spiritual adviser a “new way” is found that undoes the sacrifice. The wealth remains. Nobody else is hurt; nobody else is helped.

It’s like the necessity to trash capitalism came first, and within that framework all the holes were filled in. To as scant an extent as could be possible. It’s like the television networks want to tell us the story of Scrooge, and at the same time, show us what he looks like.

There is another angle to this that I think needs to be considered. We happen to be living in an age in which we enjoy a number of opportunities to bring injury to one another, by capitalizing our various efforts inadequately. Yes, if you don’t spend enough on Christmas presents you might see some long faces when it comes time to open them. But there are other things. Drive without car insurance, you might change someone else’s life for the worse for a very long time. Grow old with debts and no coverage plans to take care of them, you make problems for your heirs. Fail to cover your burial costs, someone suffers. Get a divorce, your kids will have to grow up in a broken home.

And so to define poor spiritual health as a willingness to generate money, that and nothing more, in an age where spiritual health has so little definition — seems to me a recipe for disaster. We need money to survive. Money is supposed to be…and it seems to me, for the most part still is…a measure of what kind of help we are extending to our neighbors. Because whether we like to admit it or not, our nature is to take care of our own stuff — write blogs, watch television, go shopping, whatever. We’d just do what we want all day long, not helping others, if we could get away with it. If only someone would make us sandwiches and put a roof over our heads. But we aren’t here to do that, so sooner or later we need to go to work and do something FOR somebody else.

And get paid to do it. Well, hey — there’s a fine line between observing what people do when they aren’t paid to do it, and observing what people do when they think nobody’s watching. If we’re going to be so quick to judge each other, and I have many reasons for thinking that an unwise thing, I’d much rather see us judge each other according to the second of those two things than according to the first.

I guess what it all comes down to is, we’ve left ourselves open to manipulation for making Christmas into a season for the boob tube to be preaching at us. And as a middle-aged man, I’m just doing what middle-aged men do, which is to carp away about how much better things used to be. But in this case, I find it hard to sympathize with any other viewpoint. We’re being preached at by our television sets to not make any decisions that might result in money for ourselves…through programs that, I suspect, generated no small amount of money for the folks who put ’em together for us. But the message from yesterday, had more to do with a lesson that we shouldn’t be dickholes to each other.

Maybe it’s because I like money, but I liked the lesson of old a lot better. Don’t make money…don’t be a dick. I wish, nowadays, there were some recently-made productions offering the lesson to potential viewers that they shouldn’t act like dicks. Maybe this is closing the barn door after the horse has left, but my Christmas television viewing has left me with the impression this is a lost art. It’s put something of a damper on my holiday, if only for a minute or two. Maybe my Christmases should all be television-free from here on in.

So I say, Happy 2008. Say please and thank you, even to people who are paid to be doing things for you. Hold doors open for people. Donate to worthy causes, put heavy suitcases in overhead bins for other people, pull over and help jump-start that guy’s car. And make as much money as you want, as long as it’s through honest means, and you aren’t taking advantage of people in their unfortunate economic circumstances or lackluster intellectual abilities. Just don’t screw people. They’re your brothers. Is that message so hard to get across that we have to simplify it for new generations?

I’d really like to think that is not the case. I’m convinced there are people who disagree with me about that…I’m just hoping that I’m right and they’re wrong…

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have see a sitcom where the father is a hard working, well adjusted, funny guy who goes to church and pays his taxes?

I won’t hold my breath.

Your other point is well made. Money is what we use to survive, food, shelter, health care, transportation, all these things require money, unless your Nancy Pelosi and believe these are rights that should be provided at no cost to the citizenry of this nation. Scratch that last one, provided to anyone who happens be living in the United States. The cost? We will make the rich pay for this Utopia.

Having been on both sides of financial fortune, several times, I can say that in my own experiences, I was not any less content with myself when I had $80 to my name then when I was making great money during the tech boom. I will say I worried about how I was going to pay my bills a lot more when I was broke, but when I was flush with cash, I was just worrying about something else.

I once spent two weeks selling cars (don’t tell anyone) while waiting to get my contractor’s license. I sold 5 and a half cars in that two weeks and made a few thousand dollars. I quit after selling a new SUV to a young couple who had a two year old SUV of the same make and model. They were upside down in their current loan and were happy to roll that debt into the new loan so they could get a “new” car.

My sales manager could figure out why I was leaving. I was doing great, especially for a new sales guy, but I felt dirty making money on people’s stupid financial decisions.

I didn’t sell all my belonging and walk the earth in search for enlightenment, I found another job and a few years later I now make a comfortable living, noting extravagant mind you, but we are putting away money for the future and living within our means.

The mistakes that make a great screen play are the ‘didn’t marry for love’ story or the ‘never followed my dreams’ story or the ever popular ‘ I gave up my dream for you’ story.

Getting back to stories that will never make it to the boob tube, how about this. A young couple who doesn’t buy that new Lexus with the 750 dollar payment and instead buys a two year old Camry for 290 dollars a month and puts that $460 a month into a retirement account. It doesn’t make for great TV, but it makes for a great lesson.

Again, I will refrain from holding my breath.
- Yolo Cowboy | 12/26/2007 @ 13:53
Maybe my Christmases should all be television-free from here on in.

Good idea. Ignorance in this case really IS bliss. I wouldn’t go as far these days as I’ve gone in the past (i.e., three years without a teevee…nary a single one…in the late ’70s – early ’80s), but I severely limit what I watch…which is to say nothing except The History Channel and its associates (TLC, Discovery, et al) and the news. And a lot of stuff on PBS.

There’s more than enough angst in everyday life; I don’t need Hollywood to raise (lower?) the bar in that area for me, thankyouverymuch.
- Buck | 12/26/2007 @ 17:15
Congratulations. You’ve been nominated for the “Fallaci” award on Little Green Footballs, which may or may not be considered an honor.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=28409_2007_LGF_Awards_Nominations_Open&only

“The Fallaci, on the other hand, goes to the person or group who best exemplified the fight against the heartbreak of moonbattitude. The Fallaci was just introduced last year and our first winner was former UN ambassador John Bolton.”
- Roll-Aid | 12/26/2007 @ 19:36

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Let’s Re-Commercialize ChristmasWednesday, December 26th, 2007

Let’s Re-Commercialize Christmas
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007