The rightwing effort to destroy Christmas in the name of saving it is now in its second year. The absurdity is transparent. The premise is that saying "Happy Holidays," for example, is an attack on Christmas, since you
should be saying "Merry Christmas."
No one can really take this seriously, though. How can they? Bill O'Reilly, one of the main propagandists in this war, even has the dreaded "H" word in a pull-down menu on his website!
This blatant politicizing of religion is the exact opposite of what it's proponents claim. They are not bringing religious morality into politics. They are brining political immorality into religion.
And yet, there are very real struggles over the meaning and signifiance of the holidays in an increasingly diverse American culture. Good luck finding any serious discussion of this news media. Fortunately, when it comes to "entertainment," we can get something better--as seen in last night's episode of "Grey's Anatomy."
Before jumping into the main body, a bit more that wouldn't fit into the intro: The political manipulation of religion seen here is is part of a common pattern that spans religions. In his book,
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Mahmood Mamdani traces Islamic political extremism to purely political roots. The principle figures in brining it to life were secular political figures,
not religious leaders.
"Grey's Anatomy"
For those not familiar with it, "Grey's Anatomy" is a blend--hospital drama and chick show. It has a very interesting set-up, IMHO. The main character/narrator, Meredith Gray, is a young surgeon in training, who shares her house with a couple of colleagues-in-training, Goerge and Izzy (Isobel). Two others are main characters as well--Christina (the incredibly wonderful, incredible bitchy Sandra Oh) and Alex, along with some of the doctors who supervise their training--including two candidates for chief of surgery, Derek (white) and Preston (black). Her mother is a legendary path-breaking surgeon, now suffering (secretly at first) from Alzheimers.
It provides an excellent setup for expoloring all sorts of tensions and challenges experienced by women in the third-wave feminist generation, and even though they're all professionals, Izzy is clearly identified with working class roots (grew up in a trailer park, paid for med school by modeling), as well as dealing with class issues involving medical care. There are also three black characters--all staff doctors, no trainees--as well as Oh's Asian-American character.
There are also lots of sexual relationships and entanglements--clashing with hospital regulations, for one thing, which are treated as seriously as the people involved take them to be. In short, the set-up is a microcosm for dealing with basic questions of moral autonomy against a background of both tradition and post-modern flux. The dialogue, delivery and overall tone (as well as theme music) make for a relatively fluffy exterior, however.
This last episodes was one of the best. Izzy's would-be romance with Alex was recently derailed when she walked in on him having sex with an old girlfriend. She feels betrayed by her friends--who all despised Alex (as did Izzy at first)--for not supporting her. She has turned the living room into a wall-to-wall Halmark Christmas tableau. Meredith and George walk in, gasp, gulp, agree to be supportive, and tell Izzy it's just wonderful.
Christine is the opposite poll. She's just moved in with Preston, and is still very freaked out by their relationship. Walking in and discovering a small, as-yet-undecorated tree, she freaks out. First, she reminds Preston she's Jewish (via her step-father). Then she reveals that's she's militantly secular.
Along with the usual life-and-death stuff, three main developments anchor this episode.
(1) Alex failed one part of his medical boards and is in danger of being canned if he fails his makeup. Although they despise him, and he has hidden his predicament from them, all of Izzy's friends, who still despise him, nonetheless force themselves on him, one after the other to help him cram, simply because he is "one of them."
(2) Preston and Christine deal with a very young kid who doesn't want a heart transplant, doesn't like Christmas, and doesn't believe in Santa or God. Preston tells Christine that the boy will die if he doesn't change his mind--he believes there's a mind/body/spirit connection, that Christine simply cannot accept.
(3) A warm, bubbly father suffers head trauma in a fall while hanging Christmas/Chanukka decorations. He turns out to have a hematoma, and is operated on, only to emerge as a totally different, angry, bitter person who sends his family into despair.
Okay, semi-spoiler alert here. You can skip the section below, and get my main point: there are serious moral as well as mind/body/spirit questions raised here, and presented in a diverse set of different guises. People wrestle with their beliefs. They do things they really don't want to do, because they feel moral obligations--whether or not they feel that moral obligations have a grounding in God or any other absolute. As opposed to the phony rightwing "war on Christmas," this is wonderfully rich, complex view of the sorts of things that people really do struggle with in trying to make sense of their relationships to God, religion, spirituality, moral duty, community, and one another as human beings.
So, what happens? Well, not to tell everything, but...
Spoiler Zone
(1) Izzy discovers all her friends have been helping Alex. She's furious and feels betrayed alll over again. Why are they doing it? Meredith and George turn it around and tell her she should help him, too. Why? Because of the spirit of holiday that she is cramming down their throats. She goes to help Alex, who asks her why she's doing it. "Because it's what Jesus would friggin do!" she almost screams at him in anger.
(2) Christine gets through to the kid precisely because she shares his skepticism--which, it turns out, comes from the fact that, as he sees it, his mother has been praying for another child to die so that he can receive that child's heart, which doesn't come from Santa Claus or God, as he's been told.
(3) Does it really matter? The point's been made that a sudden change in the physical brain can turn someone into a totally different person--a warm loving husband and father into a bitter cynic. And yet, in a very real sense, the second person is not real. He's certainly not who has been all his life. And yet, the potential to be him has always been there.
End Spoiler Zone
It's my simple contention that we are saved by art. For it provides the means for us to externalize all the conflicts we experience, to put them out before us in common space, dramatize and deal with them. It's also my contention that religion is, fundamentally, a primal form of art. All the dietary rules and other prohibitions--much less dogmas--that attach are all secondary to what it is at its core, a shared endeavor to deal with most challenging conflicts of the human condition. And those who make religious war make war on religion--all religion, including their own.
p.s.Sandra Oh was one of 11 actors who took part in a recent reading from Howard Zinn's new book, "Voices of A People's History of the United States." You can read about it here.