‘Tis the season for Faux News to crank up its annual “Secularists War Against Christmas.”

Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:

“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company excused themselves, and said it went against their …consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them, till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon, from their work, he found them in the street at play openly; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them, that was against his conscience, that they should play, and others work; if they made the keeping of it matter of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming, or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” (Bradford, Of Plimmouth Plantation, chapter 12, Anno 1621)

If you missed the point: Our “Christian founders” forbade Christmas, which they thought to be a Popish festival, filled with pagan symbolism and having no scriptural basis.

The Vatican claims that this ad is “damaging not only to the dignity of the pope and the Catholic Church but also to the feelings of believers.” I can think of some things that the Vatican and its minions have done that have already done this damage. The Vatican is threatening suit to prevent the image’s circulation.

Circulate.

The Spielberg Generation–by which I do not mean Steven Spielberg’s own Baby Boomer Generation (he was born in 1946), but the generation that grew up on Spielberg films and whose fractured families are often represented in Spielberg films–is now suffering separation anxiety as still another “Daddy” has abandoned them.

Generation Kewl’s surrogate father, Steve Jobs, is leaving home. . . again. The media frenzy about Jobs’s departure from Apple is equaled by the blog, tweet, and Facebook chatter about Daddy Kewl, and about what Gen Kewl feels about Dad’s leaving: There will never be anything kewl for us again.

Who’s going to keep giving us kewl stuff?

What I don’t hear is any solicitude for Mr. Jobs, who has been for some time , and is apparently more precipitously now, dying. Dying. Dying from cancer. Death. Death is not kewl (unless it’s in one of the scores of movies available on iTunes). Cancer is not kewl. Instead, it’s about how I feel about Daddy Kewl’s abandoning me.

I’m old enough to remember the first divorce, when Daddy Kewl was thrown out of the house and shacked up with NeXT. Then there was the reconciliation.

I’m also old enough to remember the poignantly failed Apple computer project, The Lisa, which according to the official version was the acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture, but was also the name of Jobs’s daughter from a relationship and a daughter whose paternity he initially denied. Daddy Kewl’s been leaving for a long time.

When his time comes, may flights of angels speed Steve Jobs to his rest. In the meantime, I hope he has the opportunity to reflect on the rich, complex life he has lived and the ways that he has given joy. And sorrow.

Back in the 1980s and 90s, I usually brought my home-electronics custom to Circuit City, a Richmond, Virginia, based company, a regional big-box discount retailer. The prices were right, the selection was good, and the staff were skilled. Then in a stupendously stupid move earlier in the current century, they began to lay off their veteran sales staff, hiring kewl young guys to replace them. Suddenly Circuit City became a young adults’ social club for its sales employees. I never bought anything from them again. Then Circuit City went bankrupt. Now it appears only to have an afterlife as a zombie on-line retailer.

This history came to mind when I read in the Sunday Times that Best Buy, which was successful in replacing Circuit City in some markets, has marshaled all its legal talent to object to a parody video advert by a new guy, Newegg, an on-line electronics dealer whose claim is “Take It from Geek.” Big bloated Best Buy does not like Newegg’s snarky insinuation that a Big Box store whose callow sales staff wears Blue Shirts might not offer knowledgeable service (the ghost of Circuit City coming back to haunt us).

Newegg claims that it offers extensive customer reviews of its products, many posted by genuine geeks. Best Buy doesn’t like their use of the word “geek,” which it views as the intellectual property of its “Geek Squad” franchise. Best Buy claims to own “geek.”

Best Buy lawyers sent Newegg a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that Newegg’s ad is not a parody because it “ridicules.” According to J.A. Cuddon’s classic Dictionary of Literary Terms, a “parody” consists in the “imitative use of the words, style, attitude, tone and ideas of an author in such a way as to make them ridiculous” [emphasis mine].

Judge for yourself:

Donald Trump, frontrunner for the Republicon presidential nomination, revealed today that his hair was designed by American architect Frank Gehry. This revelation came on the heals of Trump’s victory in forcing the hand of President Obama to make available his alleged Hawaiian birth certificate. Since then critics and bloggers had begun to question the national origin of Trump’s hair, some even claiming that his hair was of extraterrestrial origins.

Trump, pictured below, said, “Frank Gehry is big. Very, very big. He’s the biggest. Gehry is also very classy. Like Donald Trump, he is an American icon.”

Gehry, whose recent signature building is the Walt Disney Cconcert Hall in Los Angeles (seen below in exterior and interior views), could not be reached for comment.

This is my first and last comment on The Wedding. Like any queen, I am Anglophile. And I wish anyone well who makes public promises, especially given the recent connubial track record of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (as they were known before tidily Anglicizing the name of “the firm” to “Windsor” during World War I), but please spare me the trite farrago of heterosexual privilege, which as frequently as not ends up at the doorstep of a divorce attorney. 

Not that I don’t envy fidelity or even some measure of romance. Twenty-five years ago, accompanied by The Man (for me, he will always be The Man, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, or Watson on Holmes) I saw Les Misérables on Broadway. All the rage at the time. But it left me cold. The image that came to my mind was someone’s singing on tip-toes at the loudest top of one’s voice as substitute for depth and nuance. Trite. Even “Bring Him Home.” Especially “Bring Him Home.”

When Bill Pfeiffer, RN, laid to rest his partner of many years, Mike Peppler, MD, “Bring Him Home” was played at the funeral. Then Bill died a year or so later. I had attended their simulacrum of a wedding (all that is allowed queers in most of the Lower Forty-Eight); the ritual was sham, only the sentiments were real.

In the current issue of the London Times Literary Supplement, Judith Flanders observes of Les Misérables:

. . . the complexities of a narrative were no longer necessary for success, a realization that leads to Cameron Mackintosh’s Les Misérables, which substitutes music-cued generic emotions for the (complicated) original story of Javert and Jean Valjean. . . . Here, via their circular return to melodrama, language was no longer a barrier to understanding . . . relying on musical cues rather than narrative to produce their emotional effects: spectacle replaces narrative and character.

Manufactured, pre-package emotion. So, too, The Wedding: Two photogenic inconsequentialities plight their troth, spectacularly. Cue anthems. Cue tears. Cue change ringing.

Weddings should be private affairs, with public celebrations for the 25th and 50th anniversaries (if at all). I prefer love’s alchemy, especially now, having misplaced my Philosopher’s Stone. So my romantic hero is John Donne: marrying a woman against her father’s and his patron’s wishes, landing him in jail, and costing him a diplomatic career. Reluctantly he became a priest. After the death of his wife, Anne More, he did not remarry. Surviving is the celebration of that most frail of loves, the marital, in the poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”:

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by’a love so much refined

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assuréd of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

I wish the young Windsor couple banked fires.

This news item comes under the “kulcha” category.

Reported today, Rutgers University (chartered in 1766 as Queens College, opening in 1771) is bringing to its campus this week Nicole Polizzi, someone who is otherwise known as “Snooki.”

No maven of pop kulcha, I even know that “Snooki” is a celebrity du jour  on one of the myriad of “reality” television shows. In other words she is a vacuous and talentless entity who has produced nothing of lasting value or worth, but is famous for being famous.

Presumably, student activity fees at Rutgers are paying for the privilege. New Jerseyites must be proud. Which says something about New Jersey.

Much in the news au courant, the “singularity” when wetware merges with hardware and software. Not exactly a new preoccupation, as Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler in the final scene of Dinner at Eight will attest.

Several years ago at a gay writers conference, Dorothy Allison suggested that no one under 35 should publish a memoir, to which Jim Grimsley added: “Yeah, and only then if they’ve actually done something.” I found that amusing because a young acquaintance of mine had recently published a memoir of his early queer years, and he was in his mid-twenties.

Neil Genzlinger writing in the NY Times Book Reviewsuggests that it is time to “restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre” and offers four axioms for citizens of the People’s Republic of Self Esteemia before they put pen (or ink jet) to paper:

1. “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir . . .”
2. “No one wants to relive your misery.”
3. “If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it.”
4. “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.”

In a review of four recently published memoirs, only one in Genzlinger’s view successfully meets these criteria, Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love.

Reminds me of the numerous times an eager undergraduate English major has sat in front of me (though on those occasions I was not nearly so jaundiced in my perspective as the professor avatar here).