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Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The Paganization of Christmas 

As any scholar of Christian history knows, the Christmas holiday is rooted in pre-Christian traditions. It marries the Roman winter holiday with traditions from the Germanic festival of Yule. Keeping these familiar elements intact was key to Christianity's success in converting heathens during the early centuries of the Christian church.

As time passes, Christmas loses more of its Christian nature and returns to its Pagan roots. Corporations view Christmas as a time to dig out of debt and turn a profit. We're bombarded with commercials telling us that you need to buy your wife a diamond or a Lexus in order to be a good husband. We're bombarded with six non-stop weeks of Christmas music, beginning a week or more before Thanksgiving. In fact, every recording artist under the sun feels an obligation to crank out an album of soulless and derivative Christmas songs. (Perhaps the most egregious example of this is Barbra Streisand's Christmas efforts.)

The sense of obligation has much to do with the cheapening of Christmas. It's become a secular gift-giving holiday with little or no sense of the reason behind the gifts. People often buy and give because everybody else is doing it, even if they "don't even believe in Jebus." Isn't our giving supposed to symbolize the gifts of the Magi to the Holy Family, and indeed the ultimate gift of a savior and teacher by God the father to a sinful people?

In the Christmas madness, the teachings of Jesus are often lost. Every day I see the rudeness, aggressiveness and lack of compassion on the part of everyday people. Some of it is directly related to the materialism of corporate Christmas, but much of it is the everyday byproduct of an angry society in a world that desperately needs the teachings of Jesus more than ever. Perhaps it's just a small minority who are guilty of frequent cruelty, but they drag everybody down. After all, it only takes one "whoops" to wipe out a hundred "atta-boy"s.

The problem with Corporate Christmas is the bait-and-switch we've gotten with the symbols of Christmas. We don't see the Christian symbols of the Holy Family and Magi in a manger with the Christ-child. Instead, we get the Germanic and Norse images of reindeer, elves and a fat-ass in a red suit. I recently saw a church sign reminding people that Santa didn't die for their sins. The sign's message gave me gleeful images of Santa Claus nailed to a cross and flayed with a whip. The Corporate Christmas mythology is helpful to fuel the rampant and unchecked consumerism they want to see. It makes Christmas something whimsical for children while obfuscating the Christian significance of the holiday.

Christmas is often regarded as a children's holiday, perhaps because it is the celebration of Christ's humble birth. I can remember the magical way Christmas morning felt as I unwrapped each gift and marveled at whatever plastic form was underneath the wrapping. But the temporal joy of toys is tempered by the haste with which my interest in them died. In hindsight, it seems like all the Herculean labors my father went through in search of the ideal Christmas toys were a fool's errand. Perhaps my case is an exception, since I have the attention span of a fruit fly. But I'd have traded all of the Christmas toys in the world for quality time and a better relationship with my father during the formative years of my life.

In Christmas shopping and Christmas cheer, I'd ask all Christians to constantly ask themselves, "Is this how Jesus would handle my situation?" This is a challenge for me as much as (or more than) any of my readership. The most precio9us gift of all is neither gold nor frankincense nor myrrh. It's the gift of time we spend with the people we love and the strangers we should get to know. Our lives are measured by how we use this most precious gift of all.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Missing the Mark on Health Insurance 

A trend begins to emerge in the Obama decision-making process. While President Obama seems to have a pretty keen grasp on identifying the key issues that face Americans, he too often settles for yet another wasteful big-government program that completely misses the issue. We saw it on the stimulus package, where the need for short-term job creation was satisfied with long-term funding for traditional Democrat constituencies. The result is an average cost to the taxpayers of over $240,000 for every job created.

We're seeing the same worrisome trend during the health-care debate. President Obama believes that the burdens of rising health-care costs endanger the standard of living for all Americans. He's right, at least as far as identifying the problem is concerned. But his preferred solution was a publicly-subsidized health insurance plan that subverted the forces of supply and demand while ensuring that the health insurance "haves" pay for the health insurance "have nots."

Here's a radical idea: rather than coming up with a health insurance plan that completely ignores basic laws of supply and demand, let's come up with one that does a better job of embracing supply and demand than our current system. Why limit people's health insurance choices to the plans offered by employers, or the plans based within their state's borders? Reduce demand by allowing health insurance providers to offer discounted rates to people who make healthy lifestyle choices. Mandate higher co-payments for routine medical services, deterring abuses of the system. Increase supply through government grants to aspiring doctors and health-care providers. Buy the rights to patented drugs and second-source them to other pharmaceutical companies.

President Obama correctly identified the risk-aversion of doctors as a factor in driving up health-care costs, often involving needless diagnostic procedures to confirm a diagnosis and avoid lawsuits. But the fear of massive malpractice suits also means higher insurance rates for health-care providers, which are passed onto the consumers in the form of higher fees for services. Will the Democrats ever get serious about curbing the damages during malpractice lawsuits, at the expense of their trial-lawyer constituents?

Even with market-based reform, some people won't be making enough money to afford health insurance. While I feel that health insurance is often overrated (especially for healthy people, whose premiums serve to pay for sicker patients,) there should always be the option of enrolling in expanded Medicaid program. Nobody ever said that Medicaid was very good, but it's better than nothing for people who can't afford basic health-care. While some congressional Dems have been touted a Medicare expansion, the fact remains that Medicaid, not Medicare, was designed for meeting the needs of people below retirement age who need medical care. An expanded Medicaid meets the basic needs of people who aren't served by a market-based system, and gives people an incentive to better themselves, earn better jobs, and earn enough money to afford better health insurance.

The Scum of the Earth Comes to Illinois... 

... and for once, I'm not talking about Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Rather, I'm talking about the transfer of al Qaeda inmates from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the underutilized prison in Thomson, Illinois. While the proposed transfer marks the beginning of the end for Gitmo as a symbol of perceived American abuses towards Muslims, the problem is never going away. The Thomson prison will likely be more transparent than Gitmo when it comes to media scrutiny, but it still won't stop America's critics from claiming abuse of captured al Qaeda terrorists.

Why was Thomson chosen over other underutilized prisons in places such as Montana? It all boils down to federal money and new jobs. The transfer to Thomson prison guarantees 500 or so new jobs in the state that sent Barack Obama and Dick Durbin to the senate. The president and the senior Senate Democrat still manage to bring the pork back home.

The residents of Thomson, and perhaps the nearby Quad Cities, welcome the move for its economic benefits. But the state of Illinois as a whole will likely reject having the scum of the earth in their own backyard. It will certainly be a major theme of Rep. Mark Kirk's bid to win one of Illinois's Senate seats back for the Republicans in 2010. The chances of escape from the maximum security prison in Thomson are remote, but not impossible. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine an escaped al Qaeda hitch-hiking or carjacking his way to the Chicago suburbs, where he'd find refuge with sympathetic elements of the Muslim community. Opposition of Illinoisians to terrorists in Thomson is NIMBY-ism in its purest form; yet sometimes the NIMBY's have a good point to make.

In thinking of the financial, legal and national security ramifications of the Thomson move, I'm starting to get sentimental about Gitmo. It was far from an ideal solution to the problem of captured "illegal combatants" who did not fit within either the US criminal justice system or the Geneva Conventions. But of all the bad solutions to the problem, Gitmo was the least bad.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The Schizoid Surge: Road to Defeat 

The American people have not been well-served by the reporting from Afghanistan; reporters are reluctant to either embed with the military or go native in a country that makes Iraq look like the Ritz Carlton. But they're not getting good coverage about the way Washington is handling Afghanistan, either.

Most press reports about President Obama's Afghanistan plan focus on sending 30,000 troops within the next six months. They tend to downplay the decision to retreat from Afghanistan between 2011 and 2013. The 30,000 troops may help to secure Afghanistan's population centers. But the second aspect of the strategy, the "date certain" for a phased withdrawal, ensures that the lives lost during the Afghan surge will have been lost in vain.

The president is trying to appease the factions within the Democrats and amongst the American people who have grown weary of Afghanistan. He's ascribed to fantasy stories from Carl Levin about training Afghanistan's army, and Joe Biden's delusion's that al Qaeda is finished in Afghanistan.

There's roughly 18 months between the start of the Afghan surge and the beginning of the withdrawal. Does anybody really think that 18 months is enough time to secure the Afghan populace, build its government's credibility, and build an army with any capability as a cohesive fighting force? The Iraqi Army and Iraqi government both required five years before America felt it was safe to start drawing down. And the challenge in Afghanistan, where central government and uniformed armies are alien concepts, is far greater than the one of Iraq's nation-building.

The war categorized as "the good war" to wipe out al Qaeda's safe haven after the 9/11 attacks is certainly doomed to failure, and no soldier should be asked to risk his life for an effort that America's leaders have no desire to win. In Afghanistan, the Karzai government will likely collapse within three years of America's withdrawal, just as the Soviet-backed government of Mohammed Najibullah did. And it will come as no shock when Hamid Karzai's mutilated body will be paraded around on CNN by the Taliban after they retake Afghanistan. A terrorist attack on American soil with the magnitude of 9/11 attacks won't be much of a shock either; al Qaeda will have no deterrent towards rebuilding in Afghanistan or attacking America after witnessing our lack of resolve in Afghanistan.

The notion of "Have you forgotten?" may seem like a schmaltzy lyric from a patriotic country balad, but the righteous anger and horror we once felt towards al Qaeda is gone. America has pledged its allegiance to a man who worshipped at the altar of "God Damn America." And now he's hoisting the white flag of surrender while asking our troops to die for a lost cause. The Obama Afghan strategy is about accepting defeat but delaying it past the end of his first term. President Obama wanted to make sure that the next president wouldn't be inheriting this war. I only hope and pray that our next president is a gutsy leader who will replace the schmuck from Chicago in 2012.

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