FESTIVUS FOR THE STRESSED OF US…

23 December 2024…the day before the Christian holiday ‘Christmas’ and the Jewish holiday Hanukah, a somewhat rare co-merger of religious beliefs and at best a single moment of ‘diverse inclusion and equity’ in an otherwise chaotic year on this beleaguered planet that we infest (sic).

I’ve had my early AM ritualistic double espresso. Her Serene Imperial Grace, the Grand Duchess Nala of Eastern Siberia has had her obligatory croissant and I am therefore slightly lifted out of my annual holiday doldrums…if only for a few days and can put finger-tips to keyboard and tappity-tap out the following observations on the horrific mess we humming beans have made of our otherwise lovely (if grossly mistreated) little bit of cosmic dust that some Unknown Supreme Power has miserably infected with the Homo sapiens virus (AKA: Homo saps).

Am I a bit depressed by it all? Am I saddened to think that two thousand odd years of human religious craziness and techno-scientific ‘progress’ has produced only the collective insanity we see all around us at present? I don’t think I need to answer that question for you (unless you’re a real moron, and according to latest calculation there are roughly 250 million such blighted souls among our citizenry who fall under that definition).

Last evening I just happened to tune into the local (Sacramento) PBS station (KVIE-6) at the beginning of the annual Mormon hoop-de-la Christmas extravaganza that is put on each year at this time. I was in the mood for a bit of uplifting cheer and renewed faith in my fellow parasites, but alas! As I watched this over-the-top Mormon television blow-out (two long hours of it), all I could think of was how incredibly expensive the whole production must have been, since when the holidays roll around, Salt Lake City hosts an LDS Christmas celebration at their Temple that makes the most outrageously expensive Hollywood blockbuster look like a cheap, shoe-string budget home-movie.

As one of the wealthiest ‘religious’ cults (probably only secondary to the Roman Catholic Church) in the world, the Mormons have the financial wherewithal to kick up their Christian heels for Jebus like few others can! And as the good little God-fearing non-believer that I am, it all amounts to one of the most wretched excesses to ever assault our sensibilities during this ostensibly ‘High Holy Season’.

And the identity politics that saturated the production were just as smarmy since the Mormon Church Inc. is as much under the influence of that pernicious socio-political ideology as any American corporate institution can possible be. We had the mandatory sprinkling of Asians, blacks and what have you that constitute the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra…albeit drowned and completely submerged in a sea of fresh-scrubbed white Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian faces (that all looked as if the seasonal draught of JOY had infected them with Risus Sardonicus, such were their widescreen smiles and carefully scripted, general bon homme).

I couldn’t help but think that if they (the Mormon Church) were as much truly interested in spreading the erstwhile ‘joy’ of seasonal Christian message of peace and good will to humanity as we are to assume they are, they could have accomplished so many more good works by using all that multi-million-dollar Christmas production’s costs to feeding and ministering to the true victims of man’s inhumanity to our fellow man.

As it was, the deeper underlying message that was writ large (albeit in invisible ink) on the nation’s television screens during this whole TV spectacular seemed to constitute a VERY expensive, glitzy and narcissistic pat on the Mormon Church’s back for serving (self-appointed) as Jesus Christ’s advance promo man in our wayward civilization.

As for production costs, with all the celebrity guest-appearances, changes of costumes, backdrops as well as all the unseen logistical appurtenances go…well folks, they ain’t cheap, are they?

Underneath all that glitzy froofiness and sartorial fireworks there is also another message lurking at the bottom of it all. Namely a huge and costly promotional justification for the ‘legitimacy’ of the LDS Church itself, which ever since Joseph Smith uncovered the golden tablets bearing the Archangel Maroni’s message of faith to the Mormon believers (in a stone box, buried in a hill called Cumorah in New York), has suffered from the scorn and condemnation of mainstream Christianity as somewhat recently arrived entry-level believers.

But heck, look at what Joseph Smith’s followers finally achieved (aside from a total assets portfolio in excess of an estimated $30 billions, and possessors of one of the largest real estate holding aggregates in America, etc., etc.): They’ve got a killer winter skiing and snow sports mecca right next to their doorstep! Whoda thunkit, back in the mid-1800s, that people would someday each year spend several billion bucks to freeze their arses off on snow-covered peaks, slipping and sliding around on what amount to VERY expensive, state-of-the-art thermoplastic barrel staves!

In short, I am most definitely NOT impressed by the LDS Inc.’s annual Christmas extravaganza. But then, neither am I much approving of the Christian religion itself, with its claims that some Unknown Supreme Deity transcendently cohabited with a humming bean virgin and…P*O*P…out came the Son Of God (Reg. US Pat. Office, pending), whose mission (should he decide to suffer and die for it) is to save our wretched fellow-parasites from something called sin and reward them with everlasting paradise!

Ummmm, really!? Sorta like…what a coincidence…the Islamic terrorists, who have been promised…not just ONE…but 72 ever-loving virgins in Paradise (if they’ll just blow up themselves and take along a couple dozen infidels with them).

It would take the Mormons and other Christians a whole passle of promises in excess of that chauvinistic reward, to outdo the Islamic prophet’s exhortations to kill for God! Good golly!

Of course, the elephant in the philosophic/religious meeting room is the fact that our fellow humming beans have slain, murdered, killed, maimed, brutalized, tortured, dismembered and otherwise sought to eliminate the last trace of each other since the dawn of recorded history.

Remember that moment (the dawn of recorded history)? When the proto-human ‘ape’ in the first few minutes of Arthur C. Clarke’s famed SciFi film ‘2001: A SPACE ODDESSEY ‘ killed a rival ape and tossed the equine jawbone he used to do the job into the air?...where it promptly turned into a PanAm Moonliner? But no, no one under the age of 30 is much interested in history any more, are they? (I keep forgetting this!...).

Anyone who fails to sense the absolutely ludicrous and bald-assed obvious fact that we humming beans have conveniently sanctioned off a week or so each out of each year, between mass murdering sprees, wars, genocides and other base depravities, to celebrate the ‘Holy’ message of a fanciful Supreme Deity and ‘make nice’ before resuming hunting season on our fellow parasites, clearly needs to be sent back to the reasoning factory for re-grooving (as the 70s performing group FIRESIGN THEATRE would have put it)! As Zaneeta Shinn, a character in the wonderful 1962 Robert Preston musical, THE MUSIC MAN, would put it “Ye GODS!”

How anyone could overlook history’s plethora of crazed killers, mass murderers, brutal dictators, conquering generals and assorted other nut-case miscreants who best exemplify the dark side of humming beans, is so far beyond me that the fact that anyone in that group of simple souls can mutually agree to establish a two-week amnesty/armistice amidst all that historical slaughter (that merrily continues to this day, of course) to ‘smell the JOY!’ for a few days (to borrow Kamala Harris’s unforgettable exhortation to sniff that ethereal essence, from her recent campaign soap-box) also defies rationality! Especially since the ‘JOY’ in reference smells more like dried blood, rotting carrion, and putrefying humming bean remains than exquisite perfume.

So, yeah. I get no kick from sham-pains, especially those that masquerade as ‘JOY’ and so forth at Christmastime.

But let me give you a little back-story here, lest you think I am the Grinch’s Great Grandfather or Ebeneezer’s younger, dumber brother, or something like that.

I was raised as a good little Christian, initially in the Irish Roman Catholic Church, then under the behest of the Anglican Church’s Right Reverend Archbishop of Canterbury. Da was, of course, a good Irish Catholic; Mum was herself raised in the strict, dogmatic embrace of the Presbyterian Church, the daughter of a father who had two children (the other sib a boy). Her brother, who became a Doctor of Medicine (like his father) grew up as straight and four-square as his father. Mum, on the other hand, somehow inherited a wild Bohemian gene, and it was from that turgid genetic pool that I was created.

Despite her artistic inclinations, after Mum took her degree (at a prestigious Eastern women’s college) and went into teaching, Mum remained a good little Christian herself; when Da prematurely passed on in the early 50s (he was 25 years her senior), she promptly switched from the RC faith to the Church of England, and therein I was also brought up, completely indoctrinated in the Anglican high-church faith…until I hit a true-believer’s glass ceiling at the age of 13 and smashed right through it.

If anyone doubts the veracity of this, I have all my pictures of me as an ‘Alter Boy’ (note: fortunately NOT an ‘altered boy’, LoL, and processional cross bearer, etc. etc.) to prove my formative conventions and street-creds as a genuine (now-lapsed) Christian believer.

What’s always been curious (to me, at least) is that at age 13 I presciently intuited the full enormity of the fabrications and fantasies that had been foisted off on me by Christianity and I have been a non-believer of the Dawkins/Hitchens ilk, etc., ever since. I guess I was initially lured away from the faith by a character named Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a wildly unconventional and outspoken feminist proponent of non-belief (in Christianity) in the mid-1960s, when her inflammatory views quickly became controversial (in a then solidly Christian nation).

But by the time I was in the US Air Farce, a short time later, I was also a keen SciFi fan, a HUGE follower of JRR Tolkien’s incredibly brilliant fantasies, and all these influences came together to percolate my personal belief that any attempt to TRULY ‘understand’ whatever created myself and my fellow parasites was far too complex to even attempt to get my mind around (unlike so many of my peers, who think that the Christian God (or the Islamic one), for example, has all the answers to the Meaning of Life!).

For the above reasons, whenever someone tries to snow me with beliefs in ANY sort of Omniscient Supreme Deity, I just have to chuckle to myself and wish them well, since, after all, in this swirling maelstrom of the unknown that is the evolutionary product of biological life on Planet Earth, anyone who thinks they have all the answers to all this is to be pitied and felt sorry for (rather than worshiped)!

Thus it was that, in the usual dreadful mood of morbid self-assessment that I suffer every year at this time, I was in desperate need of something…anything…that was uplifting, however briefly, as life as we know it continues to spin out of control towards that gaping black oblivion called (for lack of a better descriptive term) Infinite Eternity (cue ''suspenseful music'', as they do on AMAZON).

And thus also it was that I was both fascinated and absolutely appalled by the sheer chutzpah of the Mormons, as they regurgitated all the ideological joy and slickly packaged good cheer upon those of us (via PBS) who happened to tune in their annual wretched excess celebration of a fanciful (and grossly expensive) God who actually CARES personally about each and every one of us! What a load of…well, you get the idea!

I say that not because I feel a grievous lack of uplifting joy in hearing about someone else’s BS stories of fanciful redemption, but because I do not personally need ANY religion to provide me with a standard and system of morals and ethics governing my relationship with my fellow parasites. I’ve long felt that ethics and morals of a strictly secular (read: logical, rational, philosophical and scholarly in origin) nature are just as suitable for maintaining a responsible and perhaps even exemplary life among my fellows as the best of Joseph Smith’s minions (or those of the Islamic Prophet, PBUH)…or any other ‘priest’ of any other conventional religion. So there, neener-neener-neener!

But getting back to my annual immersion in the green Absinthe of Despond, for reasons unknown, at this time of the year I somehow topple into an abyss of recriminations, self-doubt and criticism that is devastating. With no belief in a higher, redeeming ‘entity’, such a circumstance is a natural affliction one must periodically endure…and believe me, I have a shite-load of such personal regrets that are chained as firmly to me as Scrooge’s partner Jacob Marley’s strongboxes of money are to his ghost in the Dickens classic Christmas parable.

All of the failed opportunities, deficit decisions wrought, wrong turns on the path of life made and glacial crevasses of error I have fallen into all return to haunt me in late December like a plague of insatiable ravens masquerading as swallows, at Mission Capistrano. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, I am beset with the wickedly sharp recollection of all my multiple failings and I find it both difficult and unforgivable to simple plough past them (as my training in classical Stoic literature admonishes me to) and mindlessly keep plodding along on the trail that leads towards that yawning Bergschrund (called Death).

Fortunately, I usually pull out of my terminal nosedive at the last minute each year, hauling my roasted chestnuts out of the fires for another sidereal voyage around the sun, yet again. And I suppose I shall continue to do so unless some wacko like Vladimir Putin (or Kim Jong Un, or Xi-Jingping, etc.) pushes the Big Red Button and resolves all our collective concerns permanently and forever (hopefully) for us.

On that happy note, my wonderful Christian wifie has just returned from her rounds distributing holiday gifts of homemade baked goodies to elderly, stay-at-home members of her Chinese Christian Church, and in honor of that selfless charitable act of love and good fellowship, I’ll wish all of you a tolerable, perhaps even fulfilling Winter Equinox! (She’s a real keeper, by the way!).

And I also thank the Gods (whomever or whatever they may be) for comic geniuses like Jerry Seinfeld and his character Frank Costanza’s marvelously droll ‘FESTIVUS’ in this time of terminal ennui! At least, though we mortals be doomed to an ultimately meaningless existence, filled as it is with briefly suspended violence, uninterrupted terror and intermittent uncertainties, we may yet laugh in the very face of Capricious Fate, hug the Festivus Tree and indulge in the sacred rituals of airing furious grievances, engaging in feats of (Stoic) strength and muttering oaths to the Gods of Holidays Unfulfilled!

And now, please excuse me as I overdose in a terminal ingestion of holiday cookies. (No worries, as I keep the cookie equivalent of Naxolone handy, of course!).