Like many of us that speak forthrightly, Naomi Wolf has been cancelled. Like many of us, she has turned to Substack to keep speaking, to keep countering the propaganda that inundates us inexorably, giving us solid ground to stand on when the constant rain on the parade of truth wears us down, grinding lesser truths into a mush we can't rely on. She's just as obdurate as diamond, just as clear, her observations sparkle with insights, that I, sadly, have lost sight of in the haze of pronouns, of micro-oppressions, aggressions, and obsessions that have routed the tingle of Kris Kringle, the schtick of St. Nick, of the Joy of Christmas.
IMG source - naomiwolf.substack.com
Christmas hasn't fared as well as Naomi, hasn't held up since her minting in 1962 amidst the fantastic surge of Christmas spirit that bouy'd Western Civilization ubiquitously from the Pacific to the Atlantic, as she describes so vividly in her Substack.
She puts a pin in the specific event, the suit by the ACLU, that popped Christmas and let the joy out of it. I remember that Christmas spirit that used to energize and brighten the slushy streets that folks dutifully trudged seeking special presents for the special people in their lives, their family, friends, and neighbors, that would let them know they were special to them. She captures well the truth that spirit came from within the people, that it wasn't a decree by city fathers, or regional councils, mandated by government and overlords, but the earnest wishes of peace and joy from people struck by the tale of a baby come to save us all from ourselves, that mighty kings knelt before and honored.
"When I was a child, I never felt that the overt, uncensored, exuberant celebration of Christmas, by the Christians around me, diminished Jewish little me, one bit.
"I felt enriched by it.
"I knew I was a Jewish child, and that this was not our holiday. So what?
"I got to have the happiness and wonder of watching it all, and of sharing in the warmth of it; we did not need to be Christian — we did not need to to have a tree at home or to open Christmas presents — to get joy from the religious expression of others.
"I got to learn about a story of hope and redemption; about a society that was changed when mortal kings bowed down to a baby; kings who had visited a poor woman who herself could find no room in an inn.
"Those were not just Christian values. They were Western values. They thus included me, and I knew it. That story was part of my story, as a Western child, and I got to inherit pride in those values too."
That was something shared across the West, something I felt too, and something that I tried to share with my kids, but seem to have lost along the way, now that my nest is empty but for me and the cat I inherited by being neighborly. Sadly it's not just me. The creches and nativity displays that were once ubiquitous across America are gone, gone as the Christmas plays that elementary schools used to stage every year about this time. The feed store stubbornly puts one up every year, but you can feel it's age, the reality of it's uniqueness, even in our rural region.
Today war between Christians and Jews is just as real in Gaza as between Muslims and Jews. More than a third of Gazan Palestinians are Christians, and more than half of them children, but many of the Protestants that proclaim Zionist tendencies are unaware of it. They don't realize that by backing the Zionist genocide of Palestine they're supporting genociding Christian children, that the destruction of Gaza and the West Bank is the destruction not of Muslims, but of the very birthplace of Jesus Christmas nativity scenes show. Zionism is the antithesis of Christianity.
Jesus is the reason for the season - not Israel. Not government, war, tanks and bombs, but babies, lights, peace and joy. What do them terrorized into childlessness know of this? Every father knows that service to their infants that brings them to their knees, like the kings that came to the manger bearing gifts.
Zionism is the opposite of Christmas, of festering, raging, hatred ethnically cleansing little babies from their cradles today, where there is no room, no rooms left at all, after all the bombs and JDAMS have blasted them to smithereens. I don't call myself Christian anymore, and that Zionism so many Christians affect is part of the reason why. What infants would Jesus bomb? The destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the West, of the very animating spirit that called kings to kneel before the infant Christ, as fathers toil for their children until they are exhausted. The spirit of Christmas.
We stand on the brink of war. Israel is scrubbing the gas fields of Gaza clean of humanity, as if it were mildew on grout that tainted the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas below it. The USA just declared war on the Yemeni Houthis, the honey badgers of the Middle East, that nip the ankles of whatever shambling giants intrude on their sovereignty, and threaten to topple the imperial giant depending on the oil fields and shipping lanes they overwatch. Lebanon is in the crosshairs, and Iran is gilded like a prize, even as the mighty shrink and slink from the battlefields in the Ukraine, abandoning them to Russians armed with shovels. Yesterday's fever dreams of indoctrinated hallucinatory victories forgotten as the NPC's plaster their Twatters with Remphanian stars to replace the blue and gold of Ukrainian Zionazism.
I'm going to put up my little Christmas tree, that I skipped last year, and put a new string of lights on it, as the old ones went out, and try to emote that Christmas spirit Naomi talks about. That peace and joy, that power of an infant over kings, is really the only thing that can save us now. It's all that ever could.
