And after all these years, I finally found an Xmas album that I can really enjoy.
Christmas with The Vandals
Duck and cover Bill O'Reilly because here comes the War on Christmas! Bombs away!
Let's start with the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Up yours Tchaikovsky!
Here's a swift kick for Santa.
So far, I think this is my favorite, "A Gun For Christmas."
And here's what it's all about...
Let's end this with a little heat-warming fellowship:
"If God came down on Christmas Day, I know exactly what He'd say. He'd say Oi to the punks and Oi to the skins, but Oi to the world and everybody wins!"
The War on Christmas, Why We Fight
The annual Christmas treacle with the enforced good cheer (plus the memory of 6 long years in retail) brings out this side of me.
Enjoy.
EXTRA:
Here are the artists. Not exactly the Longine Symphonette.
A friendly acquaintance of mine died yesterday of cancer. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in June and died yesterday; in my experience, a swift cancer death. I visited him for the last time on Sunday in a hospice in Brooklyn. All the years that I knew him, he was a fairly robust looking man. When I saw him on Sunday, he was shrunken down to barely 100 pounds. He was almost blind. Even with a continuous morphine drip, he was in so much pain that he could hardly bear to be touched. I was told that 2 weeks before he was able to walk and join friends for lunch at a diner near the hospice. He deteriorated very fast. I'm reasonably sure that he greeted his end as a relief.
I've visited dying friends and family many times before, but each experience is always deeply painful. Dying is so horrible.
Mercifully, he died in the company of many old friends who visited him faithfully through the whole duration of his illness. One of his oldest friends took on the responsibility of caring for him, spending 8 to 10 hours daily at the hospice with him. I give credit to my parish priests who visited him daily while he was in the hospice, as he had requested. Not every church would do that for a parishoner. Not every church has the resources for that kind of care.
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And then there is the case ofJacob Rogers in Tennessee another teen who killed himself after constant bullying because he was perceived to be gay. His parents are so poor that they could not afford to bury him. Within 2 hours, the readers of JoeMyGod and 2 other blogs raised $5000 to pay for his funeral.
While my friend died an untimely death among old friends, Jacob Rogers died his untimely death in a terrible solitude.
Dying is so horrible.
And in the face of it, all we have is the love of family and friends, seen and unseen, and for many of us, a hope -- and only a hope, not a certainty -- that dying is not the end of the whole story, that old things shall be made new again.
When the party agenda is based on cherished prejudices instead of actual experience, then these are the sorts of folks you can expect to run on that agenda.
In light of President Obama's speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas on the centennial of a once famous speech by Theodore Roosevelt. It might be worth pondering some passages from Roosevelt's speech a century ago.
At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War. I ask that civil life be carried on according to the spirit in which the army was carried on. You never get perfect justice, but the effort in handling the army was to bring to the front the men who could do the job. Nobody grudged promotion to Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, because they earned it. The only complaint was when a man got promotion which he did not earn.
...
I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. And you men of the Grand Army, you want justice for the brave man who fought, and punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Is that not so?
Now, this means that our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice-full, fair, and complete-and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike, and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.
...
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
Instead of the usual film of the destruction of the Arizona, I want to remember the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor with this poster from World War II, a reminder of what that war was all about, and of what we still struggle for today.
I remember today my older cousin James Corey who was a Marine stationed on the Arizona when the bombs struck this morning 70 years ago, and survived to fight again in the Pacific. He was one of 13 survivors from that ship.
This is historic. Never in my younger years did I ever imagine that I would live to hear such a speech.
Eleanor Roosevelt of fond memory with what may be her greatest accomplishment. This document was belittled and ignored all through the Cold War, but now seems to be coming into its own as a major historical watershed.
Someone else who richly deserves credit for the UN Human Rights Declaration, Dag Hamarskjöld, who would have been particularly gratified by today's speech.
And this speech is a culmination of a long hard journey that began with these folks in 1969.
