Here’s my take on the Christmas/Holidays issue: Bah, humbug.

And it is humbug, an artificial, entitled aggrievement of the right, a dangerous division put about by people who want to take what should be a gentle wish of good cheer and turn it into a partisan battering ram.

I make it my personal business not to be offended by other people’s religious beliefs. If someone were to wish me Happy Hannukah or Blessed Kwanzaa or even Super Solstice, that’s great. The more good wishes coming my way, the better, I say.

However, Mr. Bill O’Reilly (the one they call the big, fat liar) has decided to bolster his sagging ratings by inventing some kind of bogus liberal war on Christmas. Rally the troops, he cries, and boycott any business that doesn’t acknowledge this nation’s Christian founding by wishing you a Merry Christmas, damn it.

And there you have it. Shouldn’t he be advising you to avoid churches that refuse to use the C word? No, it’s the businesses who are at fault for not recognizing your deeply held belief in Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.

This is crazy talk. Businesses are in business, and their business is to make money from customers who may or may not be Christian. The crazies cry that anyone who might be offended by a Christian greeting is free to shop elsewhere, but folks, that’s not what this country is about. Separate economic, political, and educational systems for different religious sects is what you get in places like Iraq.

If you want to cling to the idea that this nation was founded by Christians as a Christian nation, you will want to follow that idea to its very roots: the Puritans did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, they outlawed it. They saw no connection between the birth of Jesus Christ and the licentious feasts and gift-giving of the homeland.

And you know what? They were right. There is no connection. We celebrate two entirely separate holidays on December 25. One is a religious commemoration of deep significance to a majority of believers in this country. The other is a great social festival that has become vital to the economy of retailers everywhere. They happen to have the same name, but they have nothing to do with each other, unless you count the tenuous connection of “peace” and “good will.”

So the next time you manage to get yourself all offended because a place of commerce hasn’t acknowledged your religious beliefs, you need to ask yourself: exactly where are you worshipping?

Merry Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago I was stuck at home with pneumonia, and one afternoon, after one part or other of the Lord of the Rings trilogy finished, I found myself face to face with Maury Povich. Merciful heavens. I have never seen a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, and I ran a community theatre for over twenty years.

It was almost enough to make one abandon one’s belief in Intelligent Design. I mean, really, who could think that an intelligent force would design creatures capable of those kinds of choices? In one sitting, I saw a woman fail a lie detector test and thus be proven a multiple adulterer; a woman confess to her fiancé that she was having an affair with her female neighbor; and a woman dying of colon cancer confess to her boyfriend that she’d been unfaithful more than 100 times and couldn’t be sure that their two children were his. I missed the segment where a man confessed to his wife that he made pocket money as a male prostitute, but that’s probably just as well.

There ain’t nothing intelligent in the incredibly untidy lives these people have lived, nor in their insane compulsion to confess their missteps, nor to do so on national television. If one were looking for patterns that betrayed the presence of an Intelligent Designer, one would not find it on Maury Povich. Quite the contrary.

I suppose that if one examines the tenets of Intelligent Design, no one is making the claim that this Force (whoever she is) is necessarily benevolent, and I know there will be those who take refuge in the old shibboleth of Free Will, but if I’m going to invent an all-powerful Intelligence who can operate outside the laws of the physical universe, I would hope I at least had the sense to make sure that He/She/It had our best interests at heart.

That got me thinking, in my fevered, antibiotic-induced way, about other particular shibboleths of the IDers. One of their favorites is the eye: how remarkable, how complex it is; surely it couldn’t have just evolved, could it?

Oddly, I remember thinking in 4th grade, as we studied the structure of the eye, that something was screwy with its design. I mean, the cones and rods are backwards, aren’t they? Shouldn’t they face toward the incoming light in order to be most efficient? And what’s up with the blind spot? Why would you run all your cabling out through the middle of your CRT?

And then I thought… testicles. Testicles. If there were ever any fleshy bit that just screams out “random selection,” surely it’s testicles. What kind of Intelligence would design something as stupid as testicles? Let’s face it, guys, any one of us could come up with better ideas on how to stow those puppies in a better place.

For one thing, we might have decided to make sperm a little tougher so that they could survive at 98.6° instead of having to be stored in little dangly pouches outside the body. We could have snuggled them up there somewhere and encased them in protective cartilage or something. Could have made that a pretty useful kind of thing, too, sort of a built-in implant kind of thingie.

But no. There they are, all wrinkly and silly, just waiting to be whacked by a teammate or opponent, or a lover, or even an excited 18-month-old. What’s intelligent about that? Not much, in my opinion.

Discernible purpose in the design? I suppose you could make a case for pleasure, that they’re awfully fun to play with, if not to look at, but I don’t imagine that’s the kind of case that most Intelligent Designers are willing to make in public. So what kind of Intelligent Force would design such a thing?

And then it occurred to me, in a flash of inspiration. If one is willing, as that President Bush has recently said, to explore all sides of the controversy, then the answer is pretty obvious: testicles are clearly the product of the fiendish Intelligence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Isn’t it obvious, guys? We were made in his image, right down to the noodly appendage. This is the only possible explanation that fits in with the agenda of the IDers: Testicles are a testament to the FSM’s almighty power, not to mention his sense of humor, and are a daily reminder to half the population of his presence, or at least of his impetus.

So there you have it: either we can think that testicles are the result of one too many random switches being thrown, an evolutionary path that hung a right instead of a left (sorry…) a long time ago, or we can recognize the overwhelming Intelligence behind their design. Seems an easy choice to me.

Last night I had dinner with some people with whom I don’t want to dine again for a very long time. I don’t see them on a regular basis, but I’ve known them for many years.

Our dinner conversation turned, of course, to the Katrina disaster, New Orleans in particular, and for the next ten minutes I heard nothing but abuse of the city and its inhabitants. One person who had grown up there flatly said it should not be rebuilt, that it was a hell-hole. Others repeated right-wing half-truths that clearly had already taken root after being planted by that President’s team of spinners. No one expressed any sympathy for the people who had lost everything. No one expressed horror at the terrible catastrophe that overtaken fellow Americans. No one mentioned the failure of our national government to provide the kind of assistance before and after the disaster that is clearly its function.

Here are phrases I heard last night: “New Orleans has more public housing than anywhere else”; “Why would they go back? They were all renting anyway”; “The oil companies wouldn’t locate their refineries there because the cost of the bribery was too high”; “Everybody knew you bought your drugs from the cop. He got it free from people he busted”; “It was just a dirty place”; “You can’t tell me they couldn’t have gotten out.”

The last few times I’ve gotten together with these people I have had uncomfortable experiences because it’s been clear that they’ve drifted farther and farther to the right, but last night I was repulsed. Unable to think of anything to say without absolutely losing it or without embarrassing my hostess, I maintained a stony silence and left the table as soon as I had finished eating. This has gnawed at me; I should have rebuked them and left entirely.

These are people who are extremely active in their church. You would call them religious. The empty Baptist phrases spill out of their mouths with the ease given to the true believers. But last night, I strained to hear even an echo of “whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me,” and I failed.

I’ll tell you what I did hear, however. I heard that if some other person or group of persons is different from you, i.e., not middle class, white, and sanctimonious, if those persons are poor, or lazy, or criminal, it is appropriate and just to wish them misery, destruction, and death. If they do not fit within the narrow parameters of your narrow faith/vision, then let them die.

And what I want to know is, how is this different from those faithful who drove the planes into skyscrapers?

Here’s an amusing story from the New York Times, today, May 5, 2005, p.A11:

“American officials rushing to start small building projects in a large swath of Iraq in 2003 and 2004 did not keep required records on the spending of some $89.3 million in cash and cannot account at all for another $7.2 million, a federal watchdog reported yesterday.”

Well.

You might think that I, liberal as I am, might choose to rant and rave about this. After all, can you imagine the wingnut echo chamber’s rant if Head Start couldn’t account for $96.6 million? What would Rush and Sean and Anne say? I think we can agree that they’d be apoplectic.

But I’m not.

It’s not that much money, is it?

See, here’s a $100 million. (I’m going to round up for tidiness’ sake.)

It takes ten of those to make a billion dollars.

And what has Iraq cost us so far? Can we be charitable and agree on about $190 billion? I mean, that’s not even $200 billion. Then we’d be talking real money.

So here’s that amount. See if you can find our $96.6 million.

See, $96.6 million is just not that much to get excited about, is it?