Globalization, Culture & Christmas

It's a new front in the Great War on Christmas (TM), the mythic narrative concocted by James Dobson and Bill O'Reilly a few years back during a slow news cycle, but this front is a bit different -- Austrians aren't fighting the "secularization" of Christmas because "He's the Reason for the Season," but because Santa Claus is displacing what protesters say is a more "authentic" and Austrian holiday mascot, Christkind -- who is generally portrayed either a Christmas Tree-bearing baby angel or simply a flash of light.  However, Christkind is not particularly "Christly" -- he's still all about the holiday swag.

Santa Claus and his British cousin, Father Christmas, are held by proponents of the Austrian front in the GWoC to be okay as far as they go, but where they go should be limited to the United Kingdom and United States: as Graz resident and Pro-Christkind leader Walter Kriwetz put it, "We are not against Santa. He is good for the British and Americans but he is not good for us."

So that's a nice little bit for Gobal Studies students to think about.  The globalization of Christmas symbolism and push-back by traditionalists / fundamentalists -- in the USA by Christian fundamentalists and in Austria by Christkind fundamentalists who want to preserve what they claim is a "true" Austrian tradition.

Naturally there's a globalization of markets (GS majors know this as Pillar II) story, as well -- Santa Claus is the beneficiary of his adoption by corporate holiday marketing campaigns, particularly that of Coca-Cola.  In fact, 21-year-old Kristina Scheuer told the BBC that she believes Santa Claus was invented by Coke, probably because of this very well-known advertising campaign:

Coke, of course, didn't invent Santa Claus -- it merely appropriated him.  This Santa Claus was the work of a Swedish-American commercial illustrator named Haddon Sundblom (ironically he was most influential as a creator of pin-up girls) who was hired by Coca-Cola in 1931 to help offset its flagging winter sales.  Santa was already well-known at that point, otherwise there would have been no sense in adopting him as a sales mascot.  For example, in 1920 Norman Rockwell did this Saturday Evening Post cover with a somewhat-less jolly and older-looking Good St. Nick:

And Clement Clarke Moore's poem, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (known more generally as "The Night Before Christmas"), dates to 1823 and is widely held to be the authoritative source for the modern Santa Claus:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,

And he whistled and shouted and called them by name:

"Now Dasher!  Now Dancer!  Now Prancer and Vixen!

On Comet!  On Cupid!  On Donder and Blitzen!

...

Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.

A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes - how they twinkled!  His dimples - how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

To the Pro-Christkind movement, though, the globalization of Santa Claus encroaches on a central element in Austrian identity.  The irony is that Christkind him/herself is not Austrian -- the Christkind symbol was brought into Catholic Austria via the influence of Protestant and German merchants in the 1870s -- again, a cultural effect produced by trade.  Prior to that, the "true" and "authentic" Austrian Christmas tradition was to make offerings to the spirits that inhabited one's home.

As for the GWoC here in the USA, though the wingnuttery continue to promote the idea that the godless liberals are taking Jesus out of the celebration; Bill O'Reilly, the "Santa Claus" of the GWoC, attacked an elementary school in Massachusetts for its anti-Xmas insurgency.  Apparently, however, those godless heathen are in quite godly company.

The Pilgrims -- those plucky pre- proto-Americans -- themselves waged War on Christmas.  On May 11, 1659, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony order that

whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.

What would O'Reilly say?

Ya Gonna Believe Us Or Yer Lyin' Eyes?

Spooks in the 'Hood II

In a blog post on plans by the city of Lancaster, California -- home of Edwards Air Force Base -- to deploy spy planes to monitor the city for possible criminal activity, I noted that law enforcement officials wave their hands at concerns expressed by civil libertarians and regular folks that there might be a potential for some, er, abuse of the system.

No fears, they are assured, spy plane imagery would only be used in "possible criminal investigations."  And since most of us don't break the law, the logic goes, we have no reason to fear bored deputies watching us sunbathing.

Hmmmmm.

Thanks to the work of an enterprising graduate student and the blog slight paranoia, we learn that the government has accessed GPS data held by Sprint on its cell phone customers -- you know, the data you transmit when your "location services" are on -- just about 8 million times in a 13-month period between September 2008 and this past October.

8 million times.

That's a lot of "possible criminal investigations."

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

St. Andrew's Day

At 8 a.m. that day in 1939, under cover of artillery bombardment, 21 Soviet divisions -- nearly a half-million troops -- crossed the Soviet-Finnish border on the Karelian isthmus.

Finland, formerly part of the wider Swedish empire, was captured by Imperial Russia early in the 19th-century to form a buffer zone between the Tsarist capital at St. Petersburg and the presumptive threat to Imperial Russia by its Western European rivals.  Over time, the Russians attempted first to subjugate and then Russify Finland: At the end of the 19th-century, Finland's legislature lost all autonomy; a decree by Tsar Nicholas II in 1900 made Russian Finland's official language, and in 1901 the Finnish Army was incorporated into the Russian armed forces.   The result, predictably, was the creation and spreading of an underground nationalist movement -- largely peaceful and heavily intellectual -- that adopted as its name an anti-Semitic slur in colloquial Russian, the Kagál.

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Global Studies 1: Agents of Influence

As you start studying for the final exam, one thing to keep in mind is the intersection (that word again!) between ideas and governance. I've spoken a couple times about literacy, especially in the developing world, and the contrast (and potential conflict) between a globalized culture that includes "ways of knowing" that are (often) distinctly "Western" and traditional culture/ways of knowing that are coherent, consistent, easily understandable, and firmly situated in tradition and the more-artifact-centered "culture" we mean when we talk about culture (roles, hierarchies, "things" generally).

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Spooks in the 'Hood

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

In today's Los Angeles Times, news that the desert community of Lancaster, California, intends to deploy a spy plane for 16 hours a day over the town, to monitor for IEDs... insurgents... Taliban... possible criminal activity.

The local gentry seem to have latched right on to the necessity of bureaucratic bullsh*t to justify it:  rather than "eye in the sky," which has that nasty, Big Brotherish-sound to it, it ought to be known as the "Sky Sentinel," says Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Captain Axel Anderson (yeah, I know, you can't help but bust out that Harold Faltermeyer song from "Beverly Hills Cop" when you read that, though I think the Crazy Frog version is more appropriate for this Axel).

"Sky Sentinel" also sounds vaguely -- and somewhat disturbingly -- like "Skynet" which, if you are a science fiction fan, you know was the computer system that destroyed the Earth, and to protect which Der Herr Governator was sent back in time to "türmenayte" Sarah Connor in "The Terminator."

For certain of my colleagues, this Lancaster-based Skynet will also remind them of a certain system which they operated in a certain zone of combat operations, the capabilities of which they are very familiar with and, therefore, should concern them greatly.  In fact, the airplane's designer -- Dick Rutan, who also happens to be the personal pilot for Lancaster's mayor -- has been pursuing this line of research for a long time.

In 1984, he sought a contract from the U.S. Army for an airborne surveillance version of this airplane, his LONG-EZ design; the Army's Aviation Engineering Flight Test Evaluation Center at Edwards Air Force Base -- surprise! located in Lancaster, California -- designated it as the Combat Surveillance Airborne Test Bed. 

While the law-and-order minded (I'm not doing anything wrong, so why should I care?) seem to think it's swell, those of us who actually believe in things like civil liberties aren't so sanguine (after all, if I accept the premises and logic of the law-and-order-I-do-no-wrong argument, then why not go the whole Magilla and say, "Well, I don't own a gun, and I don't intend to own a gun, so why would I care if President Barack Hussein X takes them all away?").

Lancaster's mayor, R. Rex Parris (did Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy come up with these names?  Axel?  R. Rex Parris?), assures the public that "the Sheriff's Department would operate the system and determine who and what should be monitored...Designated deputies would be the only personnel allowed to view the recordings."

Have no fear, citizen: "I'm not going to be looking in people's backyards," Parris said.  The real problem is that there's no evidence that this sort of thing is a deterrent to crime -- studies at the University of California and the University of Southern California show no statistically significant reduction in crime in areas monitored by cameras, except within 100-feet of the camera -- which is considerably less distance than an aircraft flies from the ground.

And as far as Parris' "fear no spyplane 'cause I won't look at anyone who doesn't deserve it" goes, the funny thing is, it seems like I've heard that before.  Oh yeah -- that Bush Administration wiretapping program that didn't target anyone who wasn't a terrorist?  Yeah, not so much.  Surveillance on regular old Americans, journalists, and just about anyone else on the administration's Enemies List.

Basic rule is this: Give the government power, it's going to use the power.  When Republicans whine about how much power the Obama administration has, I laugh -- well, you gave it to him!  You can't whine about complaints that you're obstructing by filibustering, when you whined for years about Democrats "obstructing by filibustering."  And you can't whine that the rules are being structured against the minority party, when you spent years structuring the rules against the minority party.

So tolerate airborne surveillance of neighborhoods "just for criminals," and you're inviting -- indeed, demanding -- airborne surveillance of neighborhoods for everyone, all the time.  And, as "aviation pioneer" Dick Rutan points out, this system is qualitatively different from the familiar LAPD helicopter orbiting around a crime scene -- it will fly 5 miles above the Earth, making it invisible to those of us on the ground below.

At a time when the U.S. is struggling to define future courses-of-action in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's well to consider just how delicate the balance of power in a democracy can be.  We would consider an Iraqi state that surveilled its citizens with remote sensors to be something of a failure, for example, in grand strategic terms -- what kind of democracy did all of our troops die for? we'd ask.  But here, we appear to have taken liberty so for granted, and we spend so much time listening to the fear-mongers like Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck, that we're willing to sacrifice the intangible -- freedom -- for the chimera of security.

Sad.

Just In Time for the War on Christmas!

Fundamentalists of a Feather

Quiz: Which well-known populist political figure was recently described thus?

"...frequent speeches before large crowds all across the country.. full of obtuse circular arguments about good and evil, and in interviews and small gatherings, ...answers questions with questions, ending with a joyous smile that reads as a distinct putdown. [The] logic is seldom convincing...cares little about what elites and experts think...knows that the...masses like ...folksy style. Though...may seem comical, to many...comes across as daring and confident. They like [the] audacity, and especially the way ...stands up to the elites, belittling their education, their wealth and their blue blood."

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Michele Bachmann: Republican. Pro-Choice.

I don't know how I missed this one.  It might simply be quantity -- no one Brings Teh Crazy like Michele Bachmann.  But I didn't realize she'd declared herself a pro-choice Republican -- and on Sean Hannity's show to boot:

"That's why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress, and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions." 

These young women are apparently now part of the Minnesota Republican's coalition, and good for her!


But I do wonder how her new political convictions are going to play with the Republican Chastity, Purity, Litmus Test, Loyalty Test -- Oath-Thingie the nuttery is circulating.