......in which I, like most thinkers, take the week between Christmas and New Year off.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  I'll see you all in 2016.

..... in which I reflect on a Christmas Carol that I have previously underappreciated.

It's the most wonderful time of the year.  At least that's what Andy Williams used to say on my mother's old record that she used to play while we decorated the tree when I was a kid.  Back then, my mother's records were the only Christmas music available to listen to in the season leading up to the actual holiday, with the exceptions of the carols sung in church during Advent* and the

occasional airing of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" on the AM country station my dad listened to in the mornings.  Nowadays, of course, every major metropolitan center has a station that seems to dedicate a good month of its programming to Christmas music, and I'm pretty sure that Andy Williams has reminded me that it is, in fact, the most wonderful time of this particular year at least two dozen times since Thanksgiving. 

While the constant presence of Christmas music on the airwaves, to say nothing of it's being piped through retail and grocery stores may be very festive and serve to subconsciously help us enjoy the season, it also tends to fade into what it literally is, i.e. background noise.  As a result, most of us don't think too terribly much about what it is saying.  Sometimes, maybe that's a good thing, as feminists have recently reminded us with regards to "Baby it's Cold Outside."**  But often, I feel like it would be a good thing to actually engage the mind and soul a little bit when listening to Christmas music.  I had this thought again recently when, stopped at a rather lengthy traffic light, I was forced to actually listen to the words of "The Little Drummer Boy," and I realized that it is actually a pretty lyrically profound song.  Well, with the exception of the "parumpumpumpum," that is just a vocal attempt to mimic a drum and not terribly filled with meaning, but the rest of the song tells a pretty decent little story.  Since it's the week of Christmas, and since I've nothing more pressing to write on, I thought I'd spend this blog post explicating a little of the meaning that struck me at the traffic light.  Maybe lyrical explication will be something of a semi-regular feature on this blog.  We'll see how it goes.

Come, they told me
A newborn king to see. (I'll be skipping explication of the parumpumpumpums -- as I said above, it's a drum)

History tells us that the "Little Drummer Boy" was penned by Katherine K. Davis in 1941, supposedly as a transcription of a traditional Czech Carol, which has never been identified.  The story is apparently that of a poor drummer boy summoned by the three wise men to accompany them as they pay homage to the newborn Christ child.  The inclusion of the drummer boy is, of course, wholly apocryphal and found nowhere in biblical accounts, but it does, particularly in these lines, express a spirit quite appropriate to a holiday celebrating the birth of Christ.  That spirit being an invitation to everyone to come and adore the newborn king.  Unlike virtually every other royal baby that has ever been born anywhere in the history of the world, nobody is excluded from visiting this baby in the maternity ward on the basis of class.  That becomes all the more profound and humbling when one considers that this is the incarnate God laying in the manger.

Our finest gifts we bring
To lay before our king
When we come. 

Bringing gifts is only appropriate.  We still do this for the birth of nearly every baby, but of course in the case of a newborn king, the gifts are the finest that can be afforded.  This idea will become important in the next verse.  One of the great things about this carol that I've recently come to realize is the way that it narratively builds upon itself.  Here again, by the way, Jesus is exclusive among all royals and even all aristocrats and celebrities in the history of the world.  This is the only case I know of where giving gifts to a royal personage is not a case of the materially rich getting materially richer at the material expense of the poorer from whom they are receiving the gifts.

Little baby
I am a poor boy too.

The "too" is the operative word here.  Much has been made of God's coming down to earth as a humble, poor man, and there's nothing I'm going to say here to add to what is already a very theologically dense field of discussion.  What struck me at the traffic light as I was listening to this song, though, is something that is both much more simple and at the same time much more touching, which is this:  the thought of a child identifying with the infant Christ as a fellow "poor boy."  Let that sink in for a minute.  The king of heaven is simpatico with a poor drummer boy.

I have no gift to bring
That's fit to give a king.

This is not unexpected.  We've already established that the kid is poor.  Given, however, that we're talking about a kid at Christmas, it's touching that he's more worried about not having anything to give than not getting anything.  It's heart-wrenching enough to think about a poor kid's disappointment at not receiving anything from Santa Claus on Christmas; it does far more to wrangle our better angels to think for a bit about a kid's anxiety at not having anything to give.

Shall I play for you
On my drum?

But of course, he's reminded that he does, in fact, have something to give.  He can play his drum.  Wikipedia, the one apostolic repository of all information, tells us that "The Carol of the Drum," as this song was initially called, is very similar to a French medieval miracle story called "Le Jongleur de Notre Dame."  In this old legend, a juggler turns monk, and when the monks come to present their offerings at the statue of the Madonna, he has nothing to give, so he juggles.  The other monks are predisposed to punish him for blasphemy, but the statue validates his gift by smiling (or throwing a rose at him, or both, depending upon the version).  The point here is that not only does Jesus identify with the poorest of his creation, he also joyfully accepts whatever it is that we can give.  More on this in a moment.

Mary nodded.

As in the legend of Le Jongleur,*** Mary approves of this gift of entertainment.

The ox and lamb kept time.

This line is filler.  I won't go so far as to say a poetic mistake, but it doesn't add much.  I grew up on a ranch, and I can't find any profundity here, other than to emphasize we are in a stable -- humble beginnings and all.

I played my drum for him.
I played my best for him.

The imagery here again is incredibly touching, if we let it be.  Everyone, especially parents, know what it's like to watch a kid try his darnedest at something.  My 6 year old likes to draw.  Some of his work is  pretty proficient, but I think I actually prefer the stuff that tries for more but doesn't quite get there (as at left).  There's just something rather uplifting about a kid striving to do something good.  It's even more soul-stirring when he's trying with all his might to do something good for somebody else.  That's what's going on here: a kid with no gift to bring that is fit to give the creator of the universe (and really this describes us all, no matter how rich we are) doing the only thing he can do and doing it as best as he can.  I like to picture the drummer boy as not necessarily all that good on the drum and being in some senses half aware of that fact.  It makes the image more emotionally stirring for me.

Then he smiled at me,
Me and my drum.

This is perhaps the profoundest image in the song.  The infant Christ smiling at the effort of the drummer boy.  The little bit of (possibly poorly played) entertainment that the child drummer can offer the baby Jesus is pleasing to him.  If we recall that the song traditionally has the young drummer accompanying the wise men, then we can surmise that this little riff on the drum strikes Jesus as just as good as, if not better than, the gold, frankincense, and myrrh, undoubtedly so because it is given with just as much effort of heart as those gifts that are given by the magi.  So much of this is really theological commonplace, but it's made all the more meaningful if you think about it while holding in mind at the same time the task of getting a baby to smile.  One of these (see picture at right) is actually pretty hard to procure, and pretty bloody satisfying when you get one.  And this is the closing image of the song:  The Creator of the universe is laying there as an infant in a manger; being honored by kings from the orient with costly gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh; angels are singing and possibly visible overhead; one star has suddenly stood out from the rest of the astronomical cosmos and is beaming noticeably down on this stable; and among all of this, it's the simple little riff of a poor and not terribly skilled drummer boy that produces a baby smile out of the incarnate God.

Again, it's all quite apocryphal, and undoubtedly susceptible of being pooh-poohed by biblical scholars and skeptical postmoderns alike.  But I think the spirit of this little carol is quite appropriate to the spirit of Christmas and, for that matter, to the spirit of Christianity.  It certainly deserves to be more than background noise.  So the next time you hear it piping through whatever speaker is bathing you in the sounds of the season, might I encourage you to slow down and take a minute to listen and engage your soul.  I suspect it will do good things for you.




*Many modern evangelical churches have abandoned the practice of singing old carols at Christmas (along with the rest of the church calendar it seems) in favor of sticking with the contemporary praise choruses that are the standard fare of every other week and very few of which seem to celebrate Christmas as such.  I'm not sure why they do this.  Perhaps it's that the contemporary music is felt to go better with the music of the worship band.  Perhaps it's an unexamined but held over aversion to old carols as being too ceremonial and thus too much like musty old Roman Catholicism.  I don't know what it is, but as the rest of this blog will attempt to point out in one specific case, we rob ourselves of a whole world of potential meaning and celebration by not singing all the verses of a carol in church, and this is to say nothing of the enjoyment of celebrating the seasons (something I wrote on in an earlier post on craft brewing). In any case, yours truly is dying to sing 4 verses of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" in the congregation -- not the first verse set to a zippier arrangement with an intellectually puerile chorus that we repeat several times as opposed to pondering the poetry of following verses, but the old carol as it was originally set down in its entirety.  I digress here, of course, but that's why it's in a footnote, so as not to interrupt the original post with the digression.

**On the other hand, maybe the feminists actually want us to think more closely about what this song is saying and then excise it from the canon.  They probably have a point, but that would be a little sad.  In any case, the song makes for a hell of a good Barnes and Noble commercial.

***In case it isn't readily apparent, Le Jongleur is French for The Juggler.

......in which I attempt to apply a poultice to a wounded body politic, with apologies for length and possible incoherence.

So, I was watching the late re-run of The O'Reilly Factor the other night.  The Talking Points Memo was on "The Age of Anger."  In the run-down, Bill talked about the rising tide of frustration and anger in America that is fuelling the insurgent and subversive campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  After the Memo, Juan Williams and Laura Ingraham were on as guests, and both of them noted that constituencies on both the right and left of American politics are well beyond frustrated with what they perceive as the state of the country, reaching a rather high pitch of anger. 

Of course, I didn't really need Ingraham or Williams to tell me that.  I see a string of malcontented comments and posts daily in my Facebook feed.  Often enough, those posts and comments frustrate me a little myself -- sometimes at the particular political or cultural event that has frustrated the commenter and sometimes at the commentary itself.  It's getting so that I don't even want to fritter away time on social media (see, there's a silver lining to everything). 

Anyone with any sense of history knows that it isn't an unusual thing for Americans to be angry with their government.  I mean, the nation is founded on anger with the government.  If it weren't for anger with the government, we'd still be British colonies, or, more likely, a relatively inconsequential commonwealth country with a penchant for hockey and socialized medicine.  (No offense, Canada.)  What's become disturbing to me about this round of anger, though, is it seems like it's almost more cultural than political, and what that entails is that we Americans aren't just angry at our government; we're getting more and more ticked off at each other.  Of course, we've been here before, too (cf. the years 1860-65).

 The media has forwarded a number of causes for the anger, ranging from political disenfranchisement (particularly of American minorities), to a stagnant economy, to voters not seeing their values reflected in the political establishment, to racism itself, to what have you.  It's a big country with, as the Donald says, "a loooot of problems."  You want a reason to be pissed off?  Pick one.  There's plenty to go around.

But the thing is, there have always been a lot of problems, and that hasn't -- at least in my lifetime -- divided us against each other to quite the extent that it has here recently.  I'm not going to presume to diagnose the illness definitively in the few (albeit probably too many) words of this blog post, but I've been ruminating for a while now on one thing that I think is a huge problem, which is this:  I think we're losing the concept of "us," i.e. there's profoundly less and less of a sense of who we are as Americans, and I think that, in turn, is due in large part to our loss -- or even casting aside -- of our national narrative, that is to say, the story of America.

Notice I didn't say the history of America.  I said the story of America.  The mythos of the nation, if you will.  They're not unrelated, of course, but the identity of America is more grounded in the legends surrounding George Washington, Pecos Bill, Geronimo, and Paul Bunyan -- or to use a more recent example, the heroism of the soldiers who Tom Hanks took along with him to save Private Ryan -- than it is in the economic vicissitudes of the Hawley-Smoot tariff or the politics of passing the Federal Highway Act.  See, the stories of America, the legends of her heroes and such, build a set of ideals and values, an ethos that is felt in the blood, with which we can identify, which -- in a way -- forms our identity, gives us a sense of who we are.  We seem to have lost a good bit of that recently, and that has had consequences that I don't think are terribly good.

I will say something about blame for the crumbling of the American narrative.  A good bit of the blame for this can be laid right at the feet of Academia, and more particularly the feet of my colleagues in Literature departments.  For years now, the handling of story in the halls of the Ivory Tower has been an exercise of deconstruction* and undermining of myths rather than extrapolating of meaning from stories.  This process of deconstruction has been particularly damaging to our traditional American heroes.  We are told repeatedly that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, that most of the founding fathers were simply angling for lower taxes, that Patton and MacArthur were violent warmongers, that John Henry was an ignorant oppressed worker, etc.  Kindergartners in our country think it folly to believe that Davy Crockett "killed him a bar when he was only three."  Or they would if they had any idea who Davy Crockett was, which, of course, most of them don't, because the final stages of the deconstruction of any national mythos is throwing it out altogether.

Academia, which has always insisted on the virtue of being too clever by half, has been about this for quite a while, and the process has filtered down from university all the way to grade school.  It seems we can't start too early demystifying everything for our citizens.  I recently watched "A Very Goofy Christmas" with my 6 year old son on the Disney Channel.  The cartoon is clearly geared towards very young kids, but nonetheless takes up the question of the empirical reality of Santa Claus.  It's a sickness of sorts, the scientific and analytic habit of mind run completely amok, pulling the veil away from everything and showing it for what it "really" is.**  The cultural result of this habit of mind is that we are left with no cultural heroes, really with no enduring concept of cultural heroism, and hence, with no enduring set of ideals and virtues which those heroes embody and which bequeath to a culture its touchstone of identity.

To put it more clearly, perhaps, heroes tell a culture how to act and who they are, i.e. people grow up saying,  "I want to be like that guy or gal."  When a whole nation grows up thinking this, you get a cultural identity, something which with everyone identifies and which, consequently, draws the people together in unity.  It has always been this way, at least in the West.  The ancient Greek city-states, history tells us, were constantly bickering with one another, politically speaking, but culturally, they all saw themselves as descended from the heroes of Homeric myth, and Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules, et. al. were, for them, embodiments of the very virtues and ideals they strove to live by.  It is important to note that these ideals are rooted in story.***  And the stories have to be believed in.  Not factually.  Factuality is rather beside the point, as every "kid" who believes in Santa Claus can tell you intimately.

I've perhaps gotten off topic by way of explaining the importance of story, but what I'm driving at is that our lack of belief in our national stories and our corresponding lack of belief in the ideals that make up our national ethos, we have lost the sense of unity that binds us together as Americans. 

Two objections must be countered before concluding.  One is an objection often leveled against the collection of American narratives -- as it is against most all Western narratives:  that the narrative of America is classist, misogynist and racist.  It excludes people of color, women, and the poor.  That objection is wrong on almost all counts.  John Henry was an African-American, as was Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman.****  Abigail Adams and Calamity Jane were women, and the poor vastly outnumber the rich in American myths.  Beyond its actual diversity, however, the nature of the American story is such that it is perennially subject to expansion and revision and therefore potentially includes anyone who wants to be included.  At the bottom of Lady Liberty, it says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these homeless, tempest-tossed to me."  We have always welcomed anyone to add to the story.  There is an important catch though, which is that, implicitly, though we invite anyone to contribute to the story, we'd rather not that they come in with a red pen and edit out large portions of our story, our ethos, what it is that makes us Americans, because it offends them.  I don't mean this to be rude or xenophobic, but, honestly, if people vastly prefer their own culture to ours, they should stay in the geographic locale where their own culture is dominant.  We like what we have and who we are, and we should.  It's something to be proud of.  Join us, please, but don't come to our home and piss in our Wheaties.  But I digress.  The point is that it is the nature of the American story to be inclusive.  It is nothing to be ashamed of.

The second objection will be that the critiques of American heroes are, in fact, true.  George Washington did own slaves.  John Henry's sense of pride in his work probably was exploited by his greedy employers (and songs like "16 Tons" are much to the point here -- the other neat thing about the whole of American story is that it possesses the resources for criticizing itself).  But none of these facts do away with the ideals and the virtues that these figures embody in American myth.  The very idea that they would is rather absurd if you think about it.  The honesty that is the moral of the story of George Washington not lying about chopping down the cherry tree has nothing to do with his slave owning as an adult.  In fact, I might go so far as to say the flaws of our heroes are an integral part of the story itself.  Just as the American story is always open for new contribution, it is always open for needed revision.  To my knowledge, we have never claimed to be perfect as a people.  We do the best we can and constantly try to do better. 

Anyway, the conclusion of this whole long-winded affair is that we, like the Greeks before us, have traditionally found our unity in our story, in the mythos of America, in America as an embodiment of ideals that we all strive to live up to regardless of race, economic class, cultural heritage, or religion.  E pluribus unum it says on the banner carried by the eagle on our national seal.  Out of many, one.  Initially, of course, this was intended to signify the unity of the 13 colonies, but we've retained it because the principle is larger than just that.  We Americans come from many places, but we are one.  We find that unity in our continually evolving -- but rooted in common ideals -- national story and myth, and we debunk that myth at the peril of our unity.  We can see that process unfortunately playing out all around us.  Sure, our myth has got some bad parts, but it still has a lot of effective good in it that might just save the country if we let go of our self-righteous clever analysis and believe in it again.  I mean, there was enough good left in Darth Vader that he single-handedly saved the universe.*****  Luke Skywalker believed the good was there, and he was not a fool for doing so.

I mentioned at the outset that the impetus for giving voice to this now and attempting to effect what societal change I might through the means of reaching 200 blog readers is the "anger" that is raging in the land.  (Incidentally, I would argue that the success of Donald Trump is less due to anger than it is to the fact that his "Make America Great Again" campaign, with its decidedly un-analytic optimism about what we can and will do with the country through sheer force of will, taps into the vestiges of the American myth that I've been talking about in the above paragraphs.  I may come back to this in a future post.)  It is also due to the fact that, in the face of an attack from outside (the San Bernardino attacks) on our neighbors, rather than pulling together, the nation has pitted itself against each other again along familiar battle lines over the very incident.  That is to say, the talking points about "gun-control", "Islamic extremism," etc. -- the traditional liberal vs. conservative B.S. has held court in national and social media.  Admittedly, it was a small attack, but there were no American flag Facebook profiles; there was more argument.  This sort of divisiveness in the face of attack from outside wasn't present even 14 years ago.  Things have gotten bad.  If we can't mend our bridges in the face of a common enemy, maybe we are in severe decline. 

Perhaps it would behoove us all to rediscover a little vintage Charlie Daniels Band.  In his '70s hit "In America",  Daniels sings about the coming together of a fractured American populace in the face of (the then contemporary) Soviet threat.  The second verse runs thusly:

From the sound up in Long Island out to San
Francisco Bay, and ev'ry thing that's in between
them is our home. And we may have done a little
bit of fighting amongst ourselves, but you outside
people best leave us alone. Cause we'll all stick
together and you can take that to the bank.
That's the cowboys and the hippies and the rebels
and the yanks.

Those are some opposed groups that come together in that last line, but that's part of the American mythos too.  We healed after a bloody Civil War.  E pluribus unum.  Out of many, one.  We, like the Greeks before us in the face of the threat from Persia, pull together.  That's our story.  We see the best in each other when it counts.  "You [enemies] just go and lay your hand on a Pittsburgh Steeler fan," Daniels sings in the next line, "and I think you're gonna finally understand."  Our divisions are big, and often they are real, but they don't need to finally separate us.  I will not vote for Hillary Clinton, not under any circumstances that I can imagine.  But I like to think that I would step in between her deplorably smarmy person and a bullet coming from a terrorist's pistol.  That's what it means to be an American, eh? 

 

*That is deconstruction with a lower case "d", not Deconstruction the particular system of linguistic analysis, which is not unrelated, but something else and not what I mean by my usage of the word here.  Also, for any of my academic amigos reading this post, I am aware I am overgeneralizing a point, but I don't think it's in bad faith, and, in the interests of keeping as many of my 200 loyal readers as I can, I will not go into the tedious exactitude required to keep from overstating any case.

**Lest anybody miss it, the quotation marks around really in this sentence denote it as ironic, i.e. I mean to assert that 'really' here means exactly its opposite.

***In Greek, the word "myth" means story.

****Yes, I'm conflating historical figures and figures of American myth.  They contribute equally and in the same way to what we might call American values and meaning.  If that bothers you, you are miles away from my point.  Start again at the beginning. 

*****Yeah, it's a bad joke, but we're in need of comic relief at this point, yeah?

...... in which I take some umbrage with craft brewing.

During the two years I recently spent teaching abroad in Dubai, I will admit that I missed a number of things about my homeland, the good old U.S. of A.  Prominent among them was American micro-brewed beer, or craft beer, as it has come to be called.  Don't get me wrong -- or give me too much credit, as the case may be -- I'm not particularly a beer snob.  I'm perfectly happy with a Budweiser or three, with or without buffalo wings.  But I do very much enjoy the copious variety of beer selection available at any decent American supermarket.  I'm a curious sort, and I like sampling (which is why I have come to love Wegmans' Craft-Your-Own-Six-Pack, but I digress). 

Of course, it's more than just the variety of flavors.  It's the names:  Moose Drool, Hoptimus Prime, Little Sumpin' Sumpin', Dead Guy Ale, etc.  Drinking a craft beer is an entire aesthetic experience, particularly when the name, the label art, the tastes, and the occasion all come together perfectly.  Today, for instance, I did not go into the office as I had no finals to give, and for lunch, I had one of Long Trail's winter offerings, which goes by the name of Sick Day.  I'm thankfully not sick, but that's kind of the point, right?  The beer is meant to be consumed when you're supposed to be at work.  The beer has its own ambience, and the name adds something to the experience. 

Anyway, it's this sort of thing that I like about microbrews.  There's one for virtually every occasion, with more being added to the list of options each day.  My very favorite part of craft brewing, though, is the way that it tends to follow the rhythms of the seasons.*  I suppose I probably got into this during the years I spent in Boston frequenting pubs doing my Ph.D.  I recall watching for the Sam Adams and Harpoon seasonal taps to change at our favorite watering holes, waiting anxiously for the far-too-citrusy-for-me Sam Summer Ale to relinquish it's reign -- which lasted far longer than the Boston summers, by the way -- and give way to the Octoberfest, which is still one of my favorite beers.  That's what I missed most in Dubai,** the sort of excitement that comes along with the seasonal change of the beer selection, and I recall very distinctly my first trip to Wegmans in the fall of 2013 when I got back to the States and saw, to my delight, the literally dozens of Oktoberfest and pumpkin style beers available at my fingertips.  It reminded me of when my housemate Mollie would bring home the first six-pack of Post Road Pumpkin Ale of the fall back in Boston.  The sight was glorious.

While the sight of so many fall beers for the picking may have been glorious, the experience of tasting wasn't quite as good as I'd remembered.  It seemed something had happened to craft brewing during my two year hiatus, something that was particularly noticeable in the variety of pumpkin ales.  See, the old pumpkin ales that I had remembered, like Post Road or the Smuttynose Pumpkin (I forget it's name; maybe it was just Pumpkin Ale), were for the most part just beers brewed with pumpkin, after the tradition of our Pilgrim forebears, who couldn't find any barley to brew with but would be damned if they were going to go without their beer.  Recently, however, the trend in pumpkin ales has been less in the direction of beer and more in the direction of pie.  Most pumpkin ales that I was able to find stocked in supermarket shelves this fall were loaded with a bevy of fall spices like cinnamon and cloves, brown sugar, maple syrup, whipped cream -- well, O.K. not whipped cream, but at this point it wouldn't surprised me.   

The winter/Christmas beers seem to be following the same trend.  Over the past couple of weeks, I've crafted a couple of my own six-packs at Wegmans, and I've noticed that, while the packaging and naming is perhaps slicker than ever,*** the actual beer in the bottle is getting more and more....well, curious.  To wit, Flying Dog brewers released a dual Christmas offering:  one beer a golden Belgian called Nice and the other a dark Belgian called Naughty (pictured right).  I don't know if you can read the small print, but the Naughty is brewed with orange peels and habanero peppers.  You read that right:  habanero peppers.  In one sense at least the names were appropriate.  Nice was delicious, something of a reward for good deeds done during the day.  Naughty was kind of punishing.  The thing about drinking habanero peppers is that the sting doesn't so much linger pleasantly on the front of the tongue as it does rake the back of the throat.  It was an interesting experience to drink but, in the immortal words of the great Paula Deen, uttered once after eating a too-piquant taco during a season of Food Truck Wars, I don't like my food to hurt me.  Habaneros, however, are not the only bizarre beer ingredient to appear in this season's Christmas brews.  The Evil Genius Beer Company has released a Christmas beer called "Santa!! I know him!" (props to Elf), which is brewed with rose hips, black currants, and chamomile (because the 7.2% ABV isn't relaxing enough; I need some chamomile to calm me down).  Blue Moon has a Gingerbread flavored beer.  My lovely wife has remarked after tasting many of these beers that they don't pair terribly well with food.  Well, of course not, they're designed to be desserts.  Except for the one with habaneros.  That is apparently supposed to take the place of chips and a spicy salsa, which means I need a margarita to wash it down with.     

While I applaud the creativity of the makers of these beers, particularly in packaging and naming, the trend is a little disturbing to me.  And it isn't just fall and winter, holiday type beers that are going in this direction.  All kinds of craft brews are being produced with all manner of ingredients beyond barley, hops, water, and yeast.  Leinenkugel's has a whole line of shandies available, including Cocoa Berry and Spiced Pear.  The folks at Dogfish Head -- producers of "off centered ales for off center people" -- will seemingly put anything into their beers.  Some examples of ingredients include but are not limited to lemon grass, orange and coriander (Namaste); syrah grape must (Sixty-one); and peaches (Festina Peche****).  Perhaps the most egregious example of craft brewing gone too crafty, in my humble opinion, is DuClaw's Sweet Baby Jesus chocolate peanut butter porter.  This beer is sacrilegious on two separate matrices.  Craft brewing is beginning to remind me of the projects carried on by the Grand Academy on the island of Lagado in the third of Gulliver's travels.  The Grand Academy, to remind those of you who've forgotten, is the place where scientists were attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, reduce human excrement to its food particles for reuse in alimentation, and cure colic by "priming the gastrointestinal pump," i.e. inserting air into the anus.  The point Jonathan Swift was making in that satire is that it is pure folly to attempt to improve too much upon nature, and I kind of feel like that is what craft brewers are doing when, for instance, they test the utter limits of just how many hops they can possibly stuff into a West Coast IPA.  I mean, ladies and gentlemen, we're trying to improve upon beer here.  Let me say that again.  Trying to improve upon beer, the very substance of which Ben Franklin said that it is "proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."  It's beer.  It's good the way it is.  Of course, slight alterations and seasonal recipes are lovely, but at the end of the day, I want my beer to taste like beer, not a spice cake, or a Reese's Peanut Butter cup, or a spicy Latin appetizer.

As I write this, I'm enjoying a Stone Coffee Milk Stout.  It claims that there's roasted coffee beans in the brew, and maybe there is, but if so, it's faint and only accents the beer-like flavors of the milk stout, a time-tested brew.  That's the direction craft-brewing ought to tack towards, making good beer.  If one wants a beverage that tastes like something other than the beverage that it claims to be, one can always get a specialty coffee at Starbucks. 


*I am indebted to whoever writes the commercials for Sam Adams beer for this phrase in this context.

**For the curious, beer is pretty readily available in Dubai.  One has to get an ID card that identifies you as non-Muslim, and there are only two chains of licensed distributors (and a 30% tax), but it is not difficult to procure beer.  For the most part, it's macro-brewed beer, whether American or European.  Yours truly drank a good deal of Amstel -- regular, not light, which is not available in the U.S. anymore and used to be a favorite of the fictional private eye Spenser in the '70s.

*** It must be admitted that I am a total sucker for clever beer packaging and naming, which leaves me rather defenseless in the face of Christmas beers especially.  I mean, look at this can.  Who could not buy it?  It looks like a candy cane and has a "To:-From:" tag and everything.  The beer inside tasted something not unlike my Grandma Eunice's fruitcake.

****Full disclosure:  Festina Peche is a terrific beer, so maybe unusual ingredients aren't always a bad thing.

......in which I postpone this week's edition until at least Thursday.

End of semester madness has set in in my world.  No time for a blog post today, but I'll hopefully have one ready for my readers on Thursday.  Cheers.

.....in which I give thanks for some things.

I suspect many bloggers will take the opportunity that this week presents to list some things for which they are thankful.  Normally, I don't like to do what everyone else does, but to not take some time to think about the things that I'm thankful for would seem ungrateful, so here we go:  a list of things that I am thankful for on the week of Thanksgiving, 2015, with some brief comments on why I am thankful for them.  In, of course, no particular order.

• Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That probably sounds pretty patriotic, even jingoistic, but when I look around at the world today -- to say nothing of human history -- it's a pretty substantial blessing to be living in a time and place where I don't have to worry over much about getting shot, being imprisoned, starving to death, dying of rampant disease, spending my life exploited in a sweatshop, etc., etc., etc.  Screwed up as we are, it is still a pretty good thing to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
• Other human beings.  I've been privileged in life to know a lot of people who are superlatively interesting, fun loving, kind, generous and/or some combination of all of them.  We need people around us.  It's part of life.  Didn't Aristotle say something about man being, at base, a political (which is to say social) animal?  Even that new Fox show about the Last Man on Earth couldn't survive long without throwing some other people into the mix.  We should learn from that.  It's probably the only thing we can learn from that show, beyond the folly of expecting Will Forte to carry his own program, but it's an important lesson.  We should truly appreciate the people around us. 
• Beer:  Those four letters pretty much say it all.  If they don't, I'm not sure anything else I could write by way of explanation would help.
• Golf:  See above on the four letters and their adequacy/inadequacy regarding explanation.
• I am thankful that when my infant son cries because he is hungry, we are generally able to do something about it.  I had this thought the other day.  It's embarrassing and tragic that in a world as technologically and economically advanced as we are that there are numbers of parents who still have to listen to their children cry out in hunger and not be able to do anything about it beyond hold them and cry with them.  Dammit but we need to do better about this. 
• Cars that run.  I'm at the moment driving a 2006 Volvo S40 that my wife bought new nearly 10 years ago.  112k miles with barely any mechanical work beyond routine maintenance.  That's not my general experience with cars.  I'll take it.
• That I was born and raised in Montana.  It's hard to say this without implying insult to people born anyplace else, but there's just something superlative in Montana character development.  Mind you, this isn't to trumpet my own character.  It's to imagine how much more flawed it would be if I weren't from Montana.
• Air travel.  I'm not the most well-travelled man in the world, but I've been some pretty cool places.  I've seen temples in Thailand and India, cathedrals in Europe, and mosques in the Arabian Desert.  Not bad for a farm boy from Montana, and I doubt any of it would have happened without the modern system of air travel.  Also it allows my parents to visit me frequently though I live miles away from home.  Or it would if my mom weren't paralyzed with fear of flying and my dad could stand to be away from a firearm for more than 30 minutes.  Maybe I should re-think that Montana bit.
• The crumbling American economy.  Stay with me on this one.  I'm told by those who should know that it is becoming harder and harder for Americans to achieve any real financial independence anymore.  Lower median income and mounting student debt are making such things as owning homes more unrealistic for an increasing number of people, and people are dependent on their parents for more than just health insurance much later in life.  One side effect of this is that it is taking Americans longer and longer to effectively grow up.  Effectively, that is to say, we're younger longer.  My experience meshes with this.  I'm just over 40, and I still feel like a relatively young man, particularly economically speaking.  20 years ago, I would have been identified as middle aged.  So, yeah, bring on the mortgage that I can hardly pay even though my salary is near the top of national averages for professors in my discipline at comparable colleges.  If it means I can keep credibly pretending I'm 29, I'm all for it.  Or at least I keep telling myself that.
• The increasingly long, expensive, and sensationalized American Presidential election cycle.  No, I'm not serious here.  I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.
• The Public School system.  As incredibly fraught with problems as it is (more on this below), it is a pretty nice thing to be able to drop my son off in the morning and know that he is safe, taken care of, and that someone is at least making some kind of attempt to educate him while I am at work. 
• I am thankful that I went through the process of public schooling when and where I did.  Education has gotten shockingly bad in our day and age, as this video of students at Texas Tech shows.  There's seemingly no guarantee anymore that being "educated" will result in one not being an ignoramus.  I suppose if we as a society have to choose between feeding everyone and making sure that our next generation knows anything beyond what's going on with the Kardashians, I'll take feeding the hungry, but come on, we can do better.  Speaking of college students.....
• I'm thankful for my students at Patrick Henry College.  Being a college prof is pretty much a plum job in any case (but for the cavernous debt and low salaries) but the intellectual acumen, maturity, and curiosity of PHC students make teaching class an experience that pretty much approaches conversation with colleagues.  Those of you reading this, thanks sincerely.  It's much appreciated.
• Dogs.  The most loving and non-judgmental part of God's creation.  Mankind couldn't ask for a better best friend.  Speaking of non-judgment......
• Grace.  I am profoundly thankful beyond measure that good Lord in heaven above has forgiven me my sins, both egregious and otherwise.  Beyond that, I'm quite thankful to the people who know and love me for putting up with the barrels of grief* that I am prone to dish out along with all of this wit and charm.  I'm looking especially at you, Nicole Grewell.  You're a saint, and it means the world to me.

I'm sure there's more I could and should list, but I don't want this to turn into an Oscars acceptance speech.  I will say lastly that if you've read this far, I'm thankful to you for reading.  If you're still reading and glutton for more punishment, you might be interested in checking out a piece I recently published in Transpositions, a really nifty online journal out of St. Andrews University on Imagination and the Arts.  The piece is on reading "dark" literature.  Otherwise, I'll hope to see you all next Tuesday.  Happy Thanksgiving!

*I might have chosen a more appropriately descriptive word here, but I felt the internal rhyme with "wit" later on in the sentence was a bit much.

......in which I inadvertently defend Donald Trump from accusations of racism.

In the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley offhand referred to Donald Trump as a "racist carnival barker."  I like "carnival barker."  It's good satire.  It's funny.  It picks on the Donald for less than laudable character traits and -- as is appropriate for a Democratic politician in that sort of format -- casts significant doubts in the minds of would-be voters as to whether or not Trump would be a good choice for the highest office in the land.  I am, however, bothered by O'Malley's assertion that Trump is a racist.  I'm even more bothered by the fact that this epithet, which has been leveled at the Donald repeatedly since his much ballyhooed announcement of his candidacy, seems to be more or less uncritically accepted by Trump's political opponents as a truism.  While it is undoubtedly true that the Donald said some not so nice and probably insensitive things about people who emigrate to the United States from Mexico (illegally, by the way, Trump has numerous times clarified that his comments do not pertain to legal immigrants), those comments are not racist in themselves and by no means provide any clear proof that Donald Trump is a racist.

I should clarify a couple of things here before I go on to make my case.  First, I am not claiming that Trump is not a racist.  He may or may not be.  I don't know the Donald beyond what I've seen on TV.  For all I know, he may be the very embodiment of the kind of man Homer Simpson claimed to be when he was trying to get out of jury duty:  i.e.  "prejudiced against all races."  All I'm arguing here is that his comments weren't, technically speaking -- and this is important -- racist as such.

Secondly, this is not a defense of nor an endorsement for Donald Trump as either a person or a presidential candidate.  I'm only obliquely concerned with Donald Trump at all.  What I'm really concerned about in the ongoing rhetoric about Trump's racism is the sloppy and incorrect usage of the term "racist."  My stance here towards those who accuse Donald Trump of racism is that of Inigo Montoya to Viccini in The Princess Bride when he questions him about his usage of the term "inconceivable":  i.e.  "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."  The issue is one of language.  See, the problem is that language follows usage, so if we keep using the word incorrectly, then it loses the meaning it has had and therefore uses its utility in the production of cultural meaning.  I'm a professor of language and literature.  I read, write, and try to teach others to do the same.  Words are the tools that I work with.  It concerns me when they get distorted and bent out of shape because then I can't use them anymore, at least not in the way that they were designed to be useful to me.   My dad is, among other things, a mechanic.  He used to get justifiably a little upset at my brothers and me when we were kids for misusing his tools because if we lost or broke them, then he didn't have them when he needed them.  That's how I feel about words.  It's important to keep them where they belong so that they're there when we need them.  My post is thus linguistic more than it is political.  Put another way, though I am in fact a registered Republican, it is not as a Republican that the misuse of the term "racist" offends me, it is as a linguist.  I feel a little bit like Jerry Seinfeld in the "Anti-Dentite" episode, where his dentist, Nick Watley converts to Judaism for the jokes; he notes that the conversion offends him not as a Jew, but as a comedian.  Anyway, on to the case that Trump's remarks were not racist.

Before looking at the remarks themselves, I should, of course, attempt to settle what the term "racist" means.  I'm going to make the assumption that we can rely on the folks working over at Merriam-Webster to do this for us.  Their dictionary provides two working definitions of racism.  The first reads, "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race" and the second is "racial prejudice or discrimination."  The second seems to be the one most people are attributing to the Donald in his comments on Mexican immigrants.

The thing is, though, that Mexicanity (thanks to the venerable Michael Scott for this handy term) is not, properly speaking, a race.  It's a nationality.  And in this day and age, one imagines that there are people of numerous races who are, in fact, Mexican.  Thus, even if we grant that the Donald is prejudiced against people from Mexico -- and I don't know that we can safely say that he is; he did after all, even in his most strident comments against the (illegal) immigrants, be careful to note that "some [Mexican (illegal) immigrants], I assume, are good people" -- that does not necessarily make him a racist, because Mexicanity is not a race. 

I suppose that many of the Donald's detractors are trying to make the case that his comments betray a general prejudice against people of Hispanic descent.  A case that, by the way, is a completely unfair stretching of his actual comments. Seriously, look at them again and leave your own prejudices against Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general at the door.  They don't say anything about Cubans, South Americans, El Salvadorians, Americans of Hispanic descent, etc.  They are limited to Mexican (illegal) immigrants.  Yet, even if we grant that the Donald is denigrating Hispanics, according to FBI race codes, even that wouldn't make the comments racist, technically speaking, because "Hispanic" refers not to a race, but an ethnicity.  Ethnicity is a marker that includes race, among other things, in its distinguishing capacity, but it is a much larger concept.  You might argue that this makes Trump's comments more offensive, not less.  Perhaps.  But they are not "racist."

One might ask why it is important to be so precise.  Well, aside from the general idea of the utility of language that I've referred to above, it is important to limit the term "racism" to its actual meaning because the thing it refers to is important.  Discrimination against a people on account of their race is an odious thing.  This becomes obvious when we look at historically racist institutions, e.g. Nazi Germany, the ante-bellum American South, etc.  We are repeatedly told that racism is still a lingering problem in our country, and it probably to some extent is, but if we are to work towards eradicating it, it seems to me important that we don't sloppily conflate the issue with arguments about the relative merits and demerits of broader cultural and ethnic groups.  We run into a similar confusion in our conversations about Islam, which is, of course neither a race nor an ethnicity but a religion.  Any conversation about Islam that employs the terms "race" or "racism" is problematic from the start because it miscategorizes the issue by misusing the terms of discussion.

I think it's important to protect a term like "racism" from suffering the same linguistic fate that the term "barter" has suffered in the English language.  Of course, the folks down at Merriam-Webster are holding the line on "barter," reminding us that it means, "to trade by exchanging one commodity for another," but we are probably all are familiar with friends who have innocently yet ignorantly used the term in place of "haggle," which means to negotiate over price.  The barter/haggle confusion is a textbook instance of needless degeneration of language.  We don't need to confuse the definition of barter; we have a word for what we want to say.  The sloppy usage of "racism" puts the word in danger of suffering the same confusion as "barter," and the cultural stakes of unsettling "racism" as a moniker are much higher than a few dollars saved on a purchase.

As with barter/haggle, we don't have to misuse the term "racist" when discussing Donald Trump's comments on Mexican (illegal) immigrants.  There are words available to describe the insensitive tone of the Donald's remarks.  In fact, I've just used one:  "insensitive."  Personally, I prefer the term "boorish."  I especially like boorish because, not only is it more accurate, but when the adjective, which can be used to describe the Donald's comments, is put into the noun form, boor, it still seems to accurately describe the Donald's person.  And it does so in a way that still gives me pause when considering him as a candidate for the presidency. 

Of course, "boor" is not as damning as "racist."  Being a boor probably does not disqualify one for public office in the same way that being a racist does.  Boorish remarks can still be funny, as when the Donald noted that Hillary Clinton is running for president in order to stay out of prison.  (In the words of Mater the tow-truck, "That's funny right there.")  I suspect this is the reason Trump's opponents prefer the less-accurate epithet of "racist," but that's a discussion for another time, and I don't want to speculate on political motives here anyway.  What I do want to do is urge us as a culture to be more careful and precise in how we use language.          

   

....in which I tackle a pressing issue of immediate cultural relevance: The Plain Red Starbucks Cup

I'm already too late to the party, I suppose, to weigh in with anything like a fresh perspective about this year's first installment of the annual War on Christmas conversation, that being the furor and counter-furor over the plain red Starbucks Christmas cup.  The positions, for the most part, have been taken, solidified, and countered thousands of times on social media in the scant few days since Joshua Feuerstein posted his Facebook rant lamenting the absence of Christmas semiotics on his plain red Starbucks Christmas cup.  (By the way, did anyone else catch the irony that Feuerstein is wearing a red ballcap turned around backwards, so that we are missing the symbols that would explicitly identify with his team?)  This morning, my own social media feed was laced with well-meaning but ill-thought-through posts by Christians jumping on the Feuerstein bandwagon, with well-meaning and significantly-more-thought-through posts by Christians pointedly NOT identifying with Feuerstein's rant, and with a few puzzled posts by my liberal friends wondering what the Christians are so worked up about this time.  So the positions are established already.  Well and good.  I don't want to take a position so much anyway as I want to lament the fact that he entire conversation exists.  I'm irritated that, to use the vernacular of my undergraduate students, this is a thing.

For starters, the indignation over the cup is rather ridiculous.  It has been well documented by virtually everybody that none of the images on the old Starbucks Christmas cups was terribly Christian as such.  Many of them are not even terribly Christmas-y, exhibiting, as they do, merely images of winter:  ice skates, snow men, snowflakes, etc.  Several of my friends have pointed out that the red color is really the most Christian thing about the old cups, so that Starbucks has actually retained the essential semiotic of Christmas in the red cup.  This line of reasoning is bolstered by the fact that this year's edition of Starbucks' Christmas Blend -- you'll notice that these leftist Grinches have sloppily left "Christ" in their Christmas Blend -- is the same plain red packaging as the coffee cups. 

As I said above though, the self-righteousness silliness of Christmas zealots and the less-so-but-still-kind-of-self-righteous anxiety of more open-minded Christians to distance themselves from those zealots are both screwing up the opening to my Christmas.  And it's not even Veteran's Day.

See, twenty-some-odd years ago, when I was a kid still, but old enough to drink coffee, Starbucks would have introduced their Christmas cups as plain red cups, and the only thing I or anyone I knew would have thought was, "Huh.  The Christmas cups are plain red this year."  Actually, I doubt we would have even given voice to a thought as vapid as that.  It simply would have been the Christmas cup.  Someone might have noticed that, aesthetically speaking, they preferred the white snowflakes, as my wife did this morning.  (It's an interesting point of fact that the particular cup I think she had in mind hasn't been around since 2007.)  But I don't think anyone would have made anything of the appearance of the cup as an assault on Christmas.  That's because, to a large extent, the culture war over Christmas, with all of its outrage and counter-outrage, didn't exist, at least not to nearly the extent that it does today, and we were all happier for it.

Today, because of the culture of offense and outrage, rather than being happy about the red cup signaling the advent of the Christmas season, I have to think about whether or not the lack of winter symbols on the cup signal some sort of renunciation of the Christmas Holiday.  It's another log on the same fire already stacked with the horribly annoying conversations over whether one ought say, "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays."  When I was a kid, you could say either, and everyone knew you were simply being festive about the Christmas season.  I said "Happy Holidays" sometimes because I heard Bing Crosby sing it on my mom's records, not because I was trying to be especially sensitive to the Jewish kids in town.  (I don't think that there were actually any Jewish kids in the small town I grew up in, but that's beside the point.  It wouldn't have changed anything). 

The "Merry Christmas"/"Happy Holidays" dilemma, while I'm on the subject, is another annoyingly manufactured and completely false occasion for moral outrage.  I'm not offended by either festive greeting.  I am, however, tremendously irritated at anyone being offended by either greeting, because, again, instead of being able to enjoy Christmas in a spirit of joyous festivity, I'm forced to think about our painfully annoying cultural moment.  I think it was actually the politically correct crowd on the left that was responsible for kicking off this one.  There was some idiotic idea that wishing a merry Christmas to someone who wasn't a practicing Christian was somehow forcing your religion on them.  The solution was to generically refer to Christmas as "the Holiday" or "the Season" as if somehow not naming it made it more innocuous.  Actually, I find that the combination of abstraction and adding the definite article actually seems to result in a veritable apotheosis of Christmas as THE HOLIDAY, the holiday above all other holidays.  Thusly, Christmas is, albeit unwittingly, more exalted than ever.  Sure, Hanukkah is right around the corner and Kwanzaa (in all it's manufactured glory) almost overlaps, but Christmas is "the Holiday."  Never thought of it that way, eh? 

Of course, there are those who will maintain that "Happy Holidays" is nice because it is inclusive all of the holidays that surround Christmas, including Thanksgiving, and I'm sure they mean it when they say so, but really, we all know that the etymology of the phrase in common usage refers to Christmas, or at most Christmas and New Year, the veritable season of the 12 Days.  

In any case, the outrage is needless.  Only in America could we be so dumb as to somehow turn a timeless greeting of good will ("Merry Christmas") into something offensive, and then react by the equally stupid decision to take offense at a less-specific-but-equally-festive-and-well-meant greeting ("Happy Holidays") as an assault on Christmas.  When I was teaching in Dubai, my students routinely wished me a Happy Eid before we took the holiday break from university.  I don't recall ever thinking that their greeting was offensive or an attempt to force their Islam on me.  I took it as a genuine wish that I would enjoy the holiday, which was, in fact, Eid, whether I celebrated it with religious observation or not.  Incidentally, the same students wished me a Merry Christmas before we broke at Christmas time.  Muslims wished me Merry Christmas.  I assume that was because they knew I celebrated Christmas and, again, hoped it was happy.  I wished them both Merry Christmas and Happy Eid in turn, for similar reasons.  I wished my Indian students Happy Diwali.  See, in Dubai, they really have a good take on being mulit-cultural, especially as regards holidays.  If there's a holiday, celebrated by a member of the cultural constituency, let's all celebrate it.  That's the idea there.  Nobody is offended.  If it's religious for you, it's religious.  If it's not, it's not.  But nobody has to pretend like a holiday doesn't exist, nor does anyone get worked up by anybody else's observance or lack thereof.  We could learn from that. 
   
So, I guess what I'm saying is that this Christmas, it would be lovely if nobody got offended about anything.  Personally, I like to wait until at least Thanksgiving weekend to celebrate in earnest, but, once that gets here, let's pass around those plain red cups full of Eggnog Latte and wish each other good cheer.  After all, the spirit of Christmas, authorized by the angels themselves, was not socio-political zealotry, but was rather, "peace on earth, good will towards men."