Month: December 2005

Week Thirteen: A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

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My wife gave me a bike for Christmas, and I cannot wait to use it. Davis, being a college town (and flat as a pancake) is a bicycle haven, being the most two-wheel friendly city in the US. The bike lanes are bigger than the car lanes and run all over the place. I think I will have to wait until a little while for the maiden voyage though, because right now it is raining hard, and according to the news there is plenty more to come.

I swear to you, the news here in California is obsessed with the weather. The nightly headlines always open with the weather, promising downpours and showers, and warnings like “if you go outside, please bring an umbrella.” The local Sacramento station has a snazzy machine, the ‘Doppler Three’, a kind of radar which detects the stormclouds rolling in from the Pacific. Colourful images wash across the screen, commentated by excited forecasters on the verge of seizure. It is their favourite toy, and they play with it as much as possible.

A few weeks ago, the temperature actually dropped below freezing for about an hour or so. It happened overnight, but we had plenty of warning, telling us to “cover over plants” and “keeps pets indoors”. Meanwhile, in other parts of the US, ice-storms are ravaging communities and severe blizzards are blocking up roads and bringing down power-lines. Here in California though, it’s a little bit nippy – ooh, better watch out, better wear them gloves! The rest of the country must think Californians, so unused to adverse weather, are such babies.

It is easy to make fun, of course, and forget that the heavy rain is a serious issue in flood-threatened Sacramento valley. A lot of people are out on the roads over the Holiday Season, and the wet freeways can be very, very dangerous. Already this year California has seen more road-deaths over Christmas than last year – twenty-seven in all. But what gets me about the news service’s over-emphasis on the weather is that it provides a nice distraction from the real news. Shootings are reported every night in Sacramento; it’s like shotgun alley down there, but it almost always comes second to the weather. The other night it was briefly mentioned that President Bush managed to extend the heinous Patriot Act, while Dick Cheney was announcing ‘essential’ budget cuts to medicare and student loans. But it was all glossed over very quickly, because we had to get back to our report from Doppler Three, “Hey, where’s that rain?!”

Coming from the UK, I know about precipitation. It’s even in the national anthem (“Long To Rain Over Us…”). Part of me is even jealous of that Doppler machine – I bet Michael Fish wishes he had one of those back in ’87. But when there is real news going on in America, with its President conducting illegal wiretaps and members of his administration facing indictment after indictment, and when the weather in other states is beyond California’s wildest nightmares, I think it might be a good idea to step away from the Doppler. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go and try out my bike. Luckily, my wife bought me a rain jacket too.

Week Twelve: Santa’s Claws

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He has a long white beard, lives in a cave in the North Pole that nobody can find, he has hundreds of splinter cells in major cities around the world, he breaks into people’s houses and leaves unmarked packages about the place, and his elusiveness is causing many to question his very existence. I caught up with the man most Americans know as ‘Santa’ and most Brits call ‘Father Christmas’ recently, and asked him what he thought of the so-called ‘War On Christmas’ raging in the US.

“I’m not very Merry about it,” he grumbled. “For one thing, I’m the one who does all the work every year, sleighing all over the world, going up and down strange chimneys, delivering presents to orphans, but who gets the credit? Jesus! I mean, they don’t call it ‘Claus-mas’, do they?” He went on to complain that not only does America have no National Elf Service, but also has no mince pies. Surprisingly, he also revealed that he hates it when children leave him milk. “Don’t they know I’m lactose intolerant?”

So does he prefer to say ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Holidays’? “Holiday? Not for me, mate. Work my woolly hat off, I do.” Santa doesn’t mince his pies. “The whole Holiday Tree thing made me go ‘ho ho ho’, I tell you. Who are they offending? You don’t see Jewish people calling the Menorah a ‘Holiday Candlestick’, do you?” Well, there’s also Kwanzaa, I reminded him. “Oh yeah, Kwanzaa! What is that, exactly? Is it something Madonna’s doing?” Okay Santa, back to bed.

I admitted I wasn’t sure myself, but moved things along, asking him finally what list George W Bush was on this year – ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’. “It’s very close,” he revealed. “I think this one will go right up to Christmas Eve. It could all depend on Ohio.”

Originally posted 12/20/2005

Week Eleven: Revenge of the State

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As I write, news is coming out that Stanley Tookie Williams has just been executed at San Quentin prison California. A founding member of a notorious LA street gang, he has been on Death Row for 24 years, but has since become a reformed character, writing books for children urging them away from gang culture and brokering peace deals between warring gangs. As a model for rehabilitation he has nonetheless been a figure of debate, not least for the fact he has always denied committing the murders for which he was convicted. Today it fell to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency and offer Tookie a life rather than death sentence, but he chose to reprise his role as Terminator, and now Tookie Williams is dead, and redemption is rendered meaningless.

Out of the death-penalty states, California is not exactly major-league. Tookie was only the twelfth to receive capital punishment here – compare that with the 355 or so that Texas has killed (source: BBC). The US recently passed its 1000th execution mark – a thousand, that is, since the death penalty was reintroduced back in the seventies (Gary Gilmore was the first, him from that song by the Adverts). President Bush terminated many during his reign as Texas Governor, but of course not nearly as many as he has condemned to death since the invasion of Iraq. This weekend he finally addressed the mind-boggling number of Iraqi citizens who have perished since he ordered the troops in – about thirty thousand. Their ghosts would fill White Hart Lane (and probably make more noise, too). If he has few qualms about those sorts of figures, then sparing the lives of convicted killers is unlikely to keep him up at night. But what gives the State the right to commit what is effectively murder with an official name?

What’s more, it seems to be the Christian right-wing that is the strongest supporter of capital punishment, quoting ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. Surely as Christians they should be focusing more on the New Testament than the Old, on forgiveness rather than vengeance? Murder never solves murder, even for the families of the victims. Sure, the temptation to give in to base hatred is enormous when you have lost loved ones, but as a society aren’t we striving to rise above hate? Besides, if a man were to go out and kill in order to exact revenge, the State would class him as a murderer. Why then is the State not seen as a murderer when it carries out executions?

Because, as the Iraq conflict has shown, the State has no problem with being a murderer, none at all, and therein lies the problem. Why should we be surprised if there are people who want to kill us for the crimes of our State? We call them madmen, but our State is the one encouraging that kind of thinking. As one wise fellow standing outside San Quentin tonight lamented, “‘an eye for an eye…’ makes everyone blind and everyone toothless.” Murder does not appease Hate, it foments it.

Originally posted 12/13/2005

Week Ten: Do They Know It’s Christmas?

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We bought our Christmas Tree at the weekend, just a little one, very inoffensive – or so I thought. Apparently, some people are offended by the term ‘Christmas’ Tree, preferring to use the general term ‘Holiday’ Tree. It sounds trifling, I know, but this debate is gripping the nation. On one side, the anti-religious lobby and political correctionists argue that ‘Christmas’ offends those who aren’t Christian, despite the utter lack of Christian imagery anywhere in Christmas paraphernalia (were there candy canes and reindeer in Bethlehem? I doubt it). On the other, there are the reactionists, who have decided they will boycott stores who fail to use the term ‘Christmas’. Backlash and counter-backlash, as if Santa hasn’t got enough to deal with just working out who’s been naughty and nice.

I bet they are laughing at this in other countries. For one thing, to call it the ‘Holiday’ season is kind of a misnomer – they don’t even get Boxing Day off here. Most people have to go back to work while still under the influence of turkey, unlike at Thanksgiving. Secondly, if ‘Holiday’ is such a safe alternative, how come nobody has realised that its etymology is ‘holy day’? Isn’t that, you know, religious? While we are on the subject why don’t we change the names of the days of the week? I mean, ‘Thursday’, I don’t want to offend people who don’t worship Thor. The whole ‘separation of church and state’ thing here has become so divisive that it has lost all perspective. I don’t know anybody that would seriously be ‘offended’ if I wished them a ‘Merry Christmas’, and not a ‘Happy Holiday’. If I wanted to offend, I could do a lot worse.

We could just call it ‘Yule’. They still do in Scandinavia (cf. Danish ‘jul’). The French seem happy with ‘Noël’, and the Germans are content with ‘Weihnacht’ (‘holy night’). They, from whom we adopted the tradition, call their trees ‘Tannenbaums’. I find it incredible that in American English the word ‘Christ’ should suddenly cause so much offense at this time of year. But I am not American. I understand that this country does have issues where religion is concerned.

Which leaves us with the whole problem of Jesus’ birthday. Those who advocate ‘Christmas’ over Holidays for reasons of the nativity will argue tooth and nail that as Christ’s birthday, it should be named as such. Now I know that the day was chosen by the Church many years ago because it coincided with the holy day of Mithras, celebrated by the Romans. But I never understood why Christians hold so fast to the belief that Jesus was actually born on the 25th of December, when surely (if all years begin from his birth) it should have been January 1st? I tell you, after all this tiring debate, everyone needs a Holiday.

Originally posted 12/6/2005