The holiday season ‘at our throats’
The turn of the calendar to this time of year prompts rambling ruminations on the season’s festivities, now including the Johnny-comelately holiday, Kwanzaa.
Christmas remains, however, despite all efforts to the contrary, the Big One. It was an English author who first took note of the mass frenzy unleashed in this farewell month of the year. “Soon,” said Jeeves, a character in a P.G. Wodehouse story, “we shall be having Christmas at our throats.”
Well, no longer. Nowadays it’s the “holiday season.” And it’s not just the merchandizers but also the hard-core secular humanists and the militant atheists who are at our throats.
Disrupting the lofty sentiment of peace on earth, goodwill toward men, a cacophony of sales spiels barks from loudspeakers in every direction. And just one step behind this comes an aggressive legal vigilance bent on preventing religion from encroaching so much as a millimeter on the line separating church and state.
At precisely the moment the Salvation Army sets out the kettles, a hawk-eyed ACLU goes on the lookout for creches or carols that infringe ever so slightly upon public space.
Keep an eyeball on those Christians and Jews or next thing you know they’ll be setting themselves up as bossy ayatollahs or muftis.
Uh, actually, speaking of ayatollahs and muftis, their particular faith gets something of a pass here. Gotta be mindful that, as regards Islam, secularism almost at once takes on the coloration of Islamophobia. Fingerwagging progressive scolds put aside their secular catechism just long enough to remind us so.
And so, America’s legal mutawe’en — not unlike those Saudi religion police who scour the streets of Mecca to root out such contraband as Crucifixes and Stars of David — keep the tape measures at hand to regulate with utmost scrupulosity the precise placement of magi or menorahs.
Such fastidious legalism has spread confusion now that Kwanzaa has been welcomed into the holiday-season fold.
Just how has it come about, perplexed Christians and Jews want to know, that public schools go all out in heralding the advent of Kwanzaa while legal teams do forensic sweeps of school holiday events looking to ferret out telltale hints of Judeo-Christian theological infiltration — the infiltration of pageants by, say, such sinister artifacts as dradles or replicas of angels and mangers?
That’s an easy question, the ACLU’s lawyers patiently explain for us simpletons. Kwanzaa unlike Christmas and Hanukkah is not a religious-related event. This relative newcomer holiday — established by a California convict-turned-academic — is cultural, not theological in nature, the distinction is pointed out.
A fellow named Ron Everett, aka Maulana Karenga (“Master Teacher/Keeper of Tradition”), created the holiday, he said, to celebrate the African heritage of American black folks.
As described by Professor Karenga, the Dec. 26 to Jan. 1 holiday reprises the tradition of festivals marking the annual harvest in West Africa, the part of the continent where the ancestors of many American blacks were taken into slavery.
Kwanzaa means “fruits of the harvest” in Swahili, Professor Karenga tells us, and Kwanzaa fairly sparkles with many Swahili words. The exact contours of the holiday get a little hazy, though, starting with the confusing detail that Swahili is the language of distant East Africa, not West. Besides which the dates of Kwanzaa put it out of sync with harvest time in that region of the world.
Well, let us not be picky. Can the historical underpinnings of Kwanzaa be any more wobbly than the underpinnings of Jolly Old St. Nick’s story? Or for that matter, the Nativity. (Check out the contradictory details in the Gospels.)
Professor Karenga himself has a colorful backstory predating his midwifing of Kwanzaa — a backstory our public schools and news media for whatever reasons rigorously avoid ever mentioning. The professor at one point engaged in violent, sectarian, pitched battles with the Black Panthers. He was a leader of an opposition revolutionary black nationalist faction, “United Slaves.”
His curriculum vitae is reported to include a period as a provocateur/informant for the FBI. When he was sent off to do his prison stretch, the rap against him involved using a soldering iron and electrical cord as instruments for torturing two women he held captive against their will.
Well, anybody can slip up and make a mistake every now and then, no? And we at least have the comfort of knowing the professor’s holiday involves no insidious religious dogma. The holiday, as he describes it, seems largely to involve an emphasis on race, with a thin overlay of collectivism. Maybe one day the holiday will work a Jolly Old St. Marx into its observances.
In any event, the core principles of Kwanzaa — family unity, self-sufficiency, community improvement, etc. — sound unexceptionable enough, even admirable, especially taking into account Professor Karenga’s checkered past. Given that past, Kwanzaa could just as easily have been a holiday of Panthers/United Slaves re-enactors exchanging gunfire and political slogans while taunting the crackerocracy.
Any who wish to celebrate Kwanzaa are, of course, welcome and certainly constitutionally entitled to do so. That said, there remains, however, a patronizing tone to the huffery-puffery that public schools and the media devote to promoting the holiday — a holiday that was, after all, slapdashed together out of mismatched geographical and cultural scraps by a hustler of crackpot racial and loony political ideology.
All the same, be that as it may, happy holidays to all — Happy Kwanza included. And — dare it be uttered? — Merry Christmas, too. In any event may the season not be too much at your throat.