ABOVE: R. Emmett “Bob” Tyrrell is often
mistaken for Fred Flintstone
Christmas has come and gone, but not without R. Emmett “Bob” Tyrrell reporting on this year’s winners and losers in the War on Christmas. As you might imagine, Bob sees the latest annual skirmish as one where the Christians only barely survived extermination by the grinchy liberals who ran even more amok than usual, burning Nativity scenes, lynching Christmas carolers, poisoning fruitcakes, pissing on snowmen and shooting flying reindeer out of the sky.
I have followed these disputes assiduously and watched an ever-wider array of Christmas decorations become malum prohibitum. At first, it was the Nativity scene …. Other traditional Christmas decorations are on the way out, too, though their religious content is often nil. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer has been the subject of disputes, and Santa Claus, too.
This, of course, is a smelly pile of reindeer hooey. The only dispute I know of involving Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is whether there is another reindeer named Olive or not.
Apparently Bob has the idea that Rudolph is under attack not because of any actual evidence of that but merely because he didn’t happen to see any reindeer decorations in Chicago this year:
I was in Chicago a week or two before Christmas and found that these time-honored Christmas symbols have been replaced by tin soldiers, Raggedy Ann dolls and mysterious conical trees covered with colored lights [I believe they call these Christmas trees, Bob — ed. note]. In three days, I saw not one Rudolph and only an occasional Santa. … Ever the provocateur, I feigned mild indignation over a squad of tin soldiers deployed in the lobby of a posh hotel. The concierge deferred to me immediately, tremulous with alarm. I suspect he feared that I might be a member of America’s powerful anti-war movement, ready to charge him with militarizing “the holidays.”
Er, no, Bob, the concierge understandably thought you were a crazy person when you started shouting about tin soldiers and reindeer in the lobby of an expensive hotel. Sane people have conversations with the concierge about the best place to dine, which is the concierge’s job, and not about the hotel’s Christmas motif, which isn’t.
Bob’s little essay on how the liberals stole Christmas, however, is just a little amuse-gueule before the main course, which is Bob’s discussion of why liberals are unprincipled monsters:
The liberal activist aspires to be an agent of “progress.” In fact, the liberal activist, whether male or female, often calls himself a progressive. Yet through the years, you will spot no coherent system of political values motivating liberal reforms.
But lacking an editor, a memory, a conscience, and enough sense to take a bath without drowning, Bob immediately contradicts himself:
There is, however, one political value that can be discerned motivating every one of their legendary reforms, from the ambitious (world peace) to the trivial (the criminalization of trans fats). That value is to disturb one’s neighbor, to disturb the peace. In all civilized criminal codes, such behavior constitutes a misdemeanor. Yet it is at the heart of the liberal project. Disturbing the peace is, I believe, at the heart of rendering Christmas controversial.
That’s right. Liberals want world peace in order to disturb the peace of people like Tyrrell and other neocons who want to be able to make war on other countries in peace. And if our criminal code were civilized, liberals would be thrown in jail for disturbing the peace of those neocons and trying to interfere with their plans to invade other countries. And since we can’t actually achieve our goal of disturbing the peace of the neocons, we’ve decided to annoy our neighbors by attacking Christmas instead.
Does anyone else think that this column was ghost-written for Bob by Michael Medved?
