podpolia

i dreamed that some hideous disaster befel the earth, and all of our technology ceased to work… society as we knew it crumbled…
…and the amish ruled the earth!

…and as soon as i write a friggin' novel about an idea in my head, i get the latest issue of the federalist and it contains a quote that sums it all up neatly in 19 words. ben franklin, you were too smart for your own good…

“how many observe Christ's birthday! How few, his precepts! O! 'tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.”
-benjamin franklin

as we get older, we lose our childish sense of wonder. christmas is an excellent example of this: when you were young, you were undoubtedly electrified each year with anticipation for the upcoming holiday. as you get older though, christmas seems to lose the simple magic it once held.
perhaps this is just a result of growing up — of the sundry nasties of reality impinging on your view of the world and how it works. perhaps not. in any event, this loss of and longing for childhood seems to me to be driving the commercialization of the holiday season.
why does society feel the need to become children at the holiday season? it becomes no easier to recapture the childlike innocence and wonder at the season if one simply acts like a child again — in fact, it makes it more difficult. spending money doesn't buy happiness — it may buy something to fill your time, something that will amuse you and put a smile on your face briefly, but in the long run when the credit card bills come in and the bright lights have been turned out, you're lower than you were before.
this cycle repeats itself over and over again: every year we rush out and try to buy happiness for ourselves and one another, and every year we come home exhausted, broke, and with stacks and stacks of stuff that we must put in boxes to get out next year — the singing and dancing santa, the gaudy decorations, the lights — and settle back into our routine and wonder why it wasn't quite so magical as it was when we were small.
it all comes down to this. it sounds like a cliche, but it's true: christmas isn't about the presents, or about the food, or about the parties. those are sheerly incidental to the joy we felt at christmas when we were young. christmas is simply different for the young — the joie vivre of youth captures christmas and makes it its own. recapturing the holiday as it was when i was a child will do me no good, and i will simply end up the same older and more depressed person when it is over if i attempt to capture it in that way.
as we are no longer young, then, how should we celebrate christmas? if the youthful joy of christmas is gone with our youth, then some other means is necessary to make it a special time of the year. now that we are grown, to paraphrase a wise man, we should put childish ways behind us. if you have kids, make the season special for them — not by acting like a child yourself, but by acting like the adult you are and enabling them to be children for themselves.
the joy you find for yourself in christmas should be unique this year and every year — not in attempting to recapture what is lost, but in the joy of living each new day that God gives us.
christmas, in the eyes of children, is a special time when all the normal activities are given up for new and special ones. what causes the special time should be more for adults than simply traditional repetitions: “we HAVE to put up the christmas tree this week, because we always do and because if we don't get it up this week, we won't have time with all the parties that we HAVE to go to and the other things that we MUST do.” creating a 'special' time of the year simply by a stressful upheval of the normal routine in the 'holiday spirit' is, naturally, impossible. there must be a deeper meaning behind something special. the original meaning perhaps…
and this leads us back 2000-odd years to where the tradition began, in a hole in some rocks behind a dilapidated building in the levant, among piles of animal dung and dirt, where the ultimate break in tradition began — where an infinite being outside of time became the lowliest of us poor wretches who live our brief and bitter existance on a dirty chunk of rock in a side section of a second class galaxy in the midst of an enormous universe that couldn't care less if we were here. not only this, but he came to be humiliated, spat upon, beaten, and killed for the very same jerks who humiliated, beat and killed him, and for every one of us today. the infinite becoming finite in order to save the finite from ourselves.

so we finally got saddam.
tonight in iraq i'm sure there are thousands of happy people. with saddam's shade firmly attached to his haggard figure in an american cell instead of roaming through the minds of the millions of iraqis who suffered under his rule, many will sleep more soundly tonight.
but not all. some ba'athists who once thrived in the limelight of power, and have since taken to building bombs to kill a scattering of american soldiers along with many of their fellow iraqis are undoubtedly worried. saddam is captured, in american custody, and quite likely out of the country. even if they could band together all the guerillas currently fighting in iraq, they probably wouldn't be able to free him — something made all the more improbably by the impossibility of large-scale coordination and the fact that quite a number of the insurgents hate saddam to begin with.
so they're without a leader. many of those fighting in the name of the fallen regime are likely to simply give up their cause as lost — perhaps after one last bombing — and slink home. why fight for an impossibility?
what about the other insurgents, the shi'ites fighting to create another fundamentalist islamic hellhole like iran, the iraqis who want the americans out, the foreigners who have come into the country simply to fight on the central front against the 'great satan'? they would be well advised to follow on the heels of saddam's supporters. with the massive intelligence manpower, not to mention the special forces and ground troops freed from scouring the countryside for hussein, the pressure on the insurgents will increase significantly. with the tougher methods being used recently by american forces, attacks may briefly spike because of those who now feel they have nothing to lose, but over the next few months the attacks should decline significantly.
but there are others tonight who are losing sleep over the content of Paul Bremer's exultant message today, and we know the name of the most important of these.
howard dean.
with a calm incumbent standing in the cabinet room in washington and announcing a major psychological and symbolic victory on the very issue that dean has gotten the most attention for opposing, howard's chances are not looking as bright as they had been. he can still loudly dispute bush's handling of the iraq war, he can still point out that americans are being killed, and he can complain about bush's reluctance to let the international community (much of which disagreed with our invasion of iraq and even those who offered saddam moral support) help rebuild iraq. but he can no longer say it is a failure. the symbol of the regime, the head man himself has been found hiding in a hole under a goat pen outside a small town in central iraq. humiliating footage of the unkempt and haggard deposed leader submitting to being poked and prodded by a young medic has been flashed on televisions all around the world. the symbol of the ba'ath party's rule in iraq that has come to be so known and loathed in america has been humbled.
tonight, saddam sits sleepless in his cell, pondering his fate.