Quasi
an outlet for young writers
December 20, 2002
Volume 1, Issue 16
Christmas Reading
Perhaps some of you have not found a book to read by the fire yet this holiday, and will be carried along by this short diversionary publication until you have seized upon something more substantive. Whatever the case, I hope you each have a wonderful Christmas, and a great new year.
It is unfortunate that the topic of war would come up at this time, but again, unfortunately, armed conflict with Iraq appears to be more and more inevitable. In this issue of Quasi I've included a piece on the reasons for going to war from the New York Times Magazine, written by Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Oxford and New York University.
I have read a good deal of material questioning the necessity of war with Iraq, but Ferguson's piece is the first cogent endorsement of possible reasons for war that I have seen. Ferguson draws upon his experience of writing about the reign of the British empire at the zenith of its power in helping us to realize that not all the red flags being raised about war with Iraq are legitimate.
Thirdly, Hannah Baker has written a poem about Christmas and about how the season has grown on her.
In "Mouthin' Off", I had a bit of fun with a certain radio station dj and his station's decision to play nonstop Christmas Carols from Nov. 23 to Christmas day.
Lastly, a recommendation. John Grisham is best known for his legal tomes, but I recently read his short novel "Skipping Christmas," which was released almost a year ago, and it's worth a two hour chunk of your time. It's extremely easy reading, and it's very, very funny. I recommend it with a cold, nasty afternoon and a mug of hot chocolate.
Again, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. May you and those you love be filled with good cheer, kept safe and blessed with the conquering love of God.
Jon Ward
...
War Names
December 15, 2002
By NIALL FERGUSON
In the most famous line of his masterwork ''On War,'' published in 1832, Carl von Clausewitz called war ''nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with the intermixing of other means.'' He went on (and it's always worth reading on after a famous quotation): ''Is not War merely another kind of writing and language for political thoughts? It has certainly a grammar of its own. . . . The Art of War in its highest point of view is policy, but no doubt, a policy which fights battles instead of writing notes. . . . War is an instrument of policy . . . is therefore policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of pen.''
Battles instead of notes? Swords instead of pens? Since 9/11 there has been an unmistakably Clausewitzian flavor to American foreign policy. War, it seems, has made a comeback this year as a legitimate tool for ''the continuation of political intercourse.'' At West Point in June, President Bush revived the traditional 19th-century doctrine of ''pre-emptive'' war, the argument for which was set forth more fully three months later by the White House in a 33-page document titled ''The National Security Strategy of the United States.'' Because ''deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator . . . constitute as grave a threat as can be imagined,'' the United States has claimed the right to initiate hostilities to forestall any ''mortal threat'' to its security. Repeatedly in 2002, key figures in the Bush administration have spoken of the desirability of ''regime change'' in Iraq, and war is the only plausible means of achieving such a change.
The question is, What kind of war? Clausewitz may be able to provide a rationale for war today, but the nature of war itself has changed profoundly since he wrote. During the Napoleonic wars, Clausewitz witnessed a transition from ''real,'' or limited, war, in which small armies fought skirmishes according to genteel laws of war, to what he called ''absolute'' war, in which nationalism enlarged and motivated European armies. But since then we have lived through the ages of total war (1914-1945), which did much to discredit Clausewitz, and cold war (1947-1987), which seemed to render him irrelevant, and his 19th-century categories bear little relation to the new forms of war that characterize the 21st century.
Lately it has become fashionable to make comparisons between American power today and the power wielded by the British Empire in its Victorian heyday. But those who resisted British imperialism had to resist it on the colonial periphery. The Sudanese Mahdi could not very well charter a steamship and ram it into the houses of Parliament. Likewise, the home-grown terrorists of the Victorian age were armed with mere revolvers and primitive bombs; lethal nerve gas was not an option. The biggest threats to Britain's global power came from other European armies. Today, by contrast, the threats come from shadows. We need new categories to understand the war they are waging against us and the war we have to wage against them.
Consider the war waged by the terrorists. Do they have political objectives in the Clausewitzian sense? Barely. The language of Al Qaeda is a garbled mishmash of Wahhabism and anti-Americanism, at once socially conservative and politically revolutionary. So broad are its aims -- the global triumph of Islam -- and so widespread its foes that it can wage its war wherever and whenever it likes: from Manhattan to Mombasa. And we are all targets -- ''soft'' targets, since the terrorists (not unlike the air forces of World War II) prefer to kill civilians. The front line now extends to the holiday resorts where we go precisely in order to drop our guard: no longer Beirut; now Bali. This, then, is Random War. It is almost impossible to predict where our enemies will strike next.
Random War is possible because it is also Low-Budget War. The cheapness and availability of military technology make it easier than ever in history to wage a war. All you need is a handful of violent youths, some small arms and some explosives. In the words of the new National Security Strategy, the new enemy consists of ''shadowy networks of individuals [who] can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank.'' This is the age of the shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missile and the box cutter that killed 3,000 people: Do-It-Yourself War, if you will.
There is no question that Western powers -- including the United States -- bear some of the blame for the ease with which terrorists and the rogue regimes that sponsor them can get their hands on state-of-the-art weaponry. There are firms currently operating in a number of NATO member countries that might as well be called Arms 'R' Us. But restrictions on arms exporters (or at least fewer subsidies for them) will not solve the problem. Just as the suicide bomber will always get through, so, too, will the explosives salesman. So how will the exponents of traditional war -- nation states like our own -- impose their will on the exponents of the new DIY war?
Up to a point, we can respond in ways Clausewitz would have recognized. Let's look again at that parallel between the U.S. and the British Empire. Terrorism is a global phenomenon and so, necessarily, is the war against it. One consequence of 9/11 was to shatter forever the illusion that Americans could retreat to enjoy the fruits of their productivity behind a missile defense shield. For terrorism breeds in precisely the rogue states and strife-torn war zones that some Republicans before 9/11 thought we could walk away from. Intervention to impose the rule of law on such seedbeds of terror is far from an unrealistic project. That was precisely what the Victorians excelled at.
Like the U.S. today, Britain led its world economically, technologically and militarily (or at least navally).
Moreover, it was not afraid to use its power to topple what it considered rogue regimes. Take just one example: the annihilation of the Sudanese Mahdists, Islamic fundamentalists whose killing of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1895 was a Victorian 9/11. In all, there were 72 separate British military campaigns in the course of Queen Victoria's reign -- more than one for every year of the so-called pax Britannica. Nearly all of these took place thousands of miles away from the British Isles. The essence of global policing was -- and remains -- Remote War.
Such constant interventions in faraway countries of which Americans know nothing might seem to hold limited appeal. Liberals, most prominently, will fret about the violation of national sovereignty, enshrined in the United Nations charter. But it worked for the British. After Napoleon, the 19th century saw fewer, shorter and smaller wars than the preceding three centuries, not to mention the one that followed. The existence of a military ''hyperpower'' that really means business -- i.e., that is able and willing to use its superior force -- may in fact be better for world peace than any number of international treaties. Threaten war, and suddenly weapons inspectors are back in Iraq. Carry out the threat, and the Taliban regime is history. That is the Clausewitzian ''continuation of politics'' with a vengeance.
Long before Clausewitz, the Roman writer Vegetius put it neatly: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The converse of this might seem even more paradoxical, not to say Orwellian: if you want war, then prepare for peace. In other words, the surest way to make war more frequent would be for the United States to follow the European example and disarm, or simply heed the old isolationist call to bring ''our boys'' back home. For the enemies of the United States know only too well that the Achilles' heel of American foreign policy is the habitual reluctance of the electorate to risk the lives of American servicemen in far-flung conflicts.
The new war we will wage is Remote War in another sense too. Not all the battles in this war can be watched on CNN. For the campaigns to penetrate and disrupt the terrorist networks are conducted covertly, using a combination of traditional espionage and high-tech surveillance. The battles in this campaign are mostly unspectacular -- an arrest at an airport or in a seedy Pakistani flophouse, perhaps the occasional C.I.A. or Mossad assassination. It is a little like having the espionage of the cold war without any of the front-of-house hardware: no serried ranks of missiles and tanks. Just cameras. Bugs. Spooks. But this, too, has its 19th-century character. In truth, it is the ''Great Game'' -- once played by Britain and her rivals in the Middle East, Central Asia and Afghanistan -- with gizmos.
So Clausewitz -- and, indeed, the imperialism that flourished in the century after his death -- can teach us how to match Random War with Remote War. Liberals should be more relaxed about this. The bottom line of ''On War'' is, after all, a perfectly acceptable liberal axiom: namely, the primacy of political decision-making over military expertise. ''The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be contrary to common sense,'' Clausewitz writes, ''for policy has declared the War; it is the intelligent faculty, War only the instrument.'' (To his credit, Clausewitz had no illusions about the nature of that instrument: its violence, its unpredictability, its emotiveness.)
True, the war against terrorism has a novel character -- it is remote both geographically and technologically. It will nonetheless be Clausewitzian in principle, the wholehearted pursuit of a legitimate political objective by, regrettably but necessarily, violent means.
Niall Ferguson is a historian at Oxford University and, starting next year, at New York University. His book ''Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power'' will be published in the spring by Basic Books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15WWLN.html?ex=1041057185&ei=1&
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
...
Slam This! Poet's Forum
O Christmas Tree
by Hannah Baker
The thing is when you're happy,
you're just so thankful to be alive-
why think about it?
Like a kid jumping up and down
on the verge of wetting himself
because he's flying to Disney World,
Like David dancing before the Lord, making a fool out of himself,
Christmas celebrations make about as much sense:
I mean you decorate a tree.
I thought I was above that- until we couldn't afford a tree.
Even my brother, who we call the Big Bruiser, was all emotional.
My mom sent him to the basement to pray for one.
2 minutes later, a friend calls, then dumps a tree out of her truck- for us!
Ever since, I really get into "O Christmas Tree."
Not because pine leaves are ever-faithful to me personally.
I stopped feeling superior to the family whose lawn is covered with plastic figurines
because happiness makes us lose our minds:
White, blue, red, green lights outlining thousands of windows, doors,
People pulling up in cars beside homes
to stare at lights like moths- I can't help it!
It's okay to be happy and artless.
I look at the ornaments I made my parents and it kills me:
the dangling picture frame with nothing in it,
made out of torn up Christmas cards glued onto random puzzle pieces.
We have something to be happy about
that story we read every Christmas
the kind of joy and confused awe of homely shepherds
hearing angel's voices in the sky- is ours.
Hannah's email is onebananapeel@earthlink.net
...
Mouthin' Off
Jon Ward
Caroling Allll the Way
"WASH-FM (Radio 97.1) disc jockeys are skipping Thanksgiving and are going directly to Christmas. The local radio station began playing Christmas carols around the clock Friday and will continue to do so through Dec. 25.
"'It's Christmas music on demand. It gives you a source of all Christmas music all the time when you want it,' said WASH-FM program director Steve Allan. 'When you want Christmas music, you know where to turn.'"
-- The Washington Times, Sunday, November 24, 2002, p. A11
That was then. This is now. And what follows is a peek inside the head of the beloved night time dj Glenn Hollis, he of the frouf frouf, way too nice soft voice that makes you want to punch something really, really hard.
Dear Diary,
It's almost Christmas. That used to mean something good to me. I used to love Christmas. What has happened to me?!! I hate Christmas.
I know what's happened to me! Steve Allan, that's what! He's the jack ass (I know, it's rough language but THAT'S how angry I am) that decided that us dj's were going to play Christmas music for 35 straight days! 35 straight days of hell, pure freaking hell!
I've heard more renditions of "Jingle Bell Rock" than I thought were in existence, more times than I had thoughts about what it would be like to win the award for best interior decorations from the county fair.
The Stevenator (as he so ARROGANTLY insists that I call him) doesn't even have to listen to our station's music. He's out eating lunch with all the office bigwigs half the time, and when he is in his stupid office he certainly doesn't listen to the radio--he's too busy picking out which new cd's he's been sent for free he wants to listen to. What a jerk!
Here is what I would write to Steve Allan if I had the guts and didn't want to lose my cush position as the DC area's best loved and most sensitive disc jockey.
Dear Stupidinator,
I hate you, and now, because of your ridiculously stupid decision to play Christmas carols until my sense of time and place completely slipped away into a blizzard of chestnuts and drummer boys, I hate Christmas too. That is so mean!!!
I hate you so much, and I wish you had to be a dj for the month of December, when every single woman with no prospects on the Eastern sea board calls and requests in an annoyingly perky voice (one which has not been troubled by constant Christmas music every day for weeks, but has listened to very little Christmas music), "Oh, I haven't heard Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" in over ten months!! Could you please play it? Thank you so much Glenn!! I'm going to sit by the fire with my cat and drink hot cocoa."
Meanwhile, Steve, I'm about to throw up, and the only thing I'm dreaming of is not a white Christmas, but rather, on the contrary Stevo, I'm dreaming of punching you, and really hard.
I hope you realize what you've done. You've taken your best on air talent and twisted it into a shell of what he once was.
More than that, you've destroyed my once dearly held sentimental emotions about Christmas. You've made me a pessimist!! No longer will my soothing reassurances to callers and my silky smooth overtures to women who sound cute when they call be fully heartfelt. For the clutches of the demon pessimism have gained hold of my heart! And I don't think I will ever recover.
You know what I'm going to do for Christmas? I'm going to spend the day doing crossword puzzles and listening to Elton John! And not to any of his Christmas carols!! I plan on never again listening to Christmas music as long as I can help it, and believe me, in this coming year I will make it my mission in life to show corporate how hairebrained of a scheme it is to play nothing but Christmas music.
Have a horrible new year.
Glenn
Well, that is what I would love to write. Ha, it makes me laugh just writing that down. It's pretty good, don't you think so diary? That would be so funny if Steve could read it and not know it was from me.
He called it Christmas music on demand. Well, I've got a demand. Die Steve!! Die!!
I have to leave for work in an hour. Better cut this short so I can go refill my prozac prescription from CVS. They're pills aren't as strong as Giant's, but hey, I'll take anything I can get to make it through another night of listening about Santa Claus kiss mom for five straight hours.
I'll try to make it back soon diary. You're my only solace sometimes. At the very least I can wish you a happy new year. Yeah! That's what I have to look forward to! The new year, which will be new for me in a much more meaningful way than for most. I will be free from my prison, free to play "Wind Beneath My Wings" for that poor sap who's lost his girifriend, so I can go back to making a difference in this world.
Yeah! Well, at least there's a ray of hope in all this.
Until next time Diary. Over and out.
Glenn
...
an outlet for young writers
December 20, 2002
Volume 1, Issue 16
Christmas Reading
Perhaps some of you have not found a book to read by the fire yet this holiday, and will be carried along by this short diversionary publication until you have seized upon something more substantive. Whatever the case, I hope you each have a wonderful Christmas, and a great new year.
It is unfortunate that the topic of war would come up at this time, but again, unfortunately, armed conflict with Iraq appears to be more and more inevitable. In this issue of Quasi I've included a piece on the reasons for going to war from the New York Times Magazine, written by Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Oxford and New York University.
I have read a good deal of material questioning the necessity of war with Iraq, but Ferguson's piece is the first cogent endorsement of possible reasons for war that I have seen. Ferguson draws upon his experience of writing about the reign of the British empire at the zenith of its power in helping us to realize that not all the red flags being raised about war with Iraq are legitimate.
Thirdly, Hannah Baker has written a poem about Christmas and about how the season has grown on her.
In "Mouthin' Off", I had a bit of fun with a certain radio station dj and his station's decision to play nonstop Christmas Carols from Nov. 23 to Christmas day.
Lastly, a recommendation. John Grisham is best known for his legal tomes, but I recently read his short novel "Skipping Christmas," which was released almost a year ago, and it's worth a two hour chunk of your time. It's extremely easy reading, and it's very, very funny. I recommend it with a cold, nasty afternoon and a mug of hot chocolate.
Again, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. May you and those you love be filled with good cheer, kept safe and blessed with the conquering love of God.
Jon Ward
...
War Names
December 15, 2002
By NIALL FERGUSON
In the most famous line of his masterwork ''On War,'' published in 1832, Carl von Clausewitz called war ''nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with the intermixing of other means.'' He went on (and it's always worth reading on after a famous quotation): ''Is not War merely another kind of writing and language for political thoughts? It has certainly a grammar of its own. . . . The Art of War in its highest point of view is policy, but no doubt, a policy which fights battles instead of writing notes. . . . War is an instrument of policy . . . is therefore policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of pen.''
Battles instead of notes? Swords instead of pens? Since 9/11 there has been an unmistakably Clausewitzian flavor to American foreign policy. War, it seems, has made a comeback this year as a legitimate tool for ''the continuation of political intercourse.'' At West Point in June, President Bush revived the traditional 19th-century doctrine of ''pre-emptive'' war, the argument for which was set forth more fully three months later by the White House in a 33-page document titled ''The National Security Strategy of the United States.'' Because ''deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator . . . constitute as grave a threat as can be imagined,'' the United States has claimed the right to initiate hostilities to forestall any ''mortal threat'' to its security. Repeatedly in 2002, key figures in the Bush administration have spoken of the desirability of ''regime change'' in Iraq, and war is the only plausible means of achieving such a change.
The question is, What kind of war? Clausewitz may be able to provide a rationale for war today, but the nature of war itself has changed profoundly since he wrote. During the Napoleonic wars, Clausewitz witnessed a transition from ''real,'' or limited, war, in which small armies fought skirmishes according to genteel laws of war, to what he called ''absolute'' war, in which nationalism enlarged and motivated European armies. But since then we have lived through the ages of total war (1914-1945), which did much to discredit Clausewitz, and cold war (1947-1987), which seemed to render him irrelevant, and his 19th-century categories bear little relation to the new forms of war that characterize the 21st century.
Lately it has become fashionable to make comparisons between American power today and the power wielded by the British Empire in its Victorian heyday. But those who resisted British imperialism had to resist it on the colonial periphery. The Sudanese Mahdi could not very well charter a steamship and ram it into the houses of Parliament. Likewise, the home-grown terrorists of the Victorian age were armed with mere revolvers and primitive bombs; lethal nerve gas was not an option. The biggest threats to Britain's global power came from other European armies. Today, by contrast, the threats come from shadows. We need new categories to understand the war they are waging against us and the war we have to wage against them.
Consider the war waged by the terrorists. Do they have political objectives in the Clausewitzian sense? Barely. The language of Al Qaeda is a garbled mishmash of Wahhabism and anti-Americanism, at once socially conservative and politically revolutionary. So broad are its aims -- the global triumph of Islam -- and so widespread its foes that it can wage its war wherever and whenever it likes: from Manhattan to Mombasa. And we are all targets -- ''soft'' targets, since the terrorists (not unlike the air forces of World War II) prefer to kill civilians. The front line now extends to the holiday resorts where we go precisely in order to drop our guard: no longer Beirut; now Bali. This, then, is Random War. It is almost impossible to predict where our enemies will strike next.
Random War is possible because it is also Low-Budget War. The cheapness and availability of military technology make it easier than ever in history to wage a war. All you need is a handful of violent youths, some small arms and some explosives. In the words of the new National Security Strategy, the new enemy consists of ''shadowy networks of individuals [who] can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank.'' This is the age of the shoulder-mounted antiaircraft missile and the box cutter that killed 3,000 people: Do-It-Yourself War, if you will.
There is no question that Western powers -- including the United States -- bear some of the blame for the ease with which terrorists and the rogue regimes that sponsor them can get their hands on state-of-the-art weaponry. There are firms currently operating in a number of NATO member countries that might as well be called Arms 'R' Us. But restrictions on arms exporters (or at least fewer subsidies for them) will not solve the problem. Just as the suicide bomber will always get through, so, too, will the explosives salesman. So how will the exponents of traditional war -- nation states like our own -- impose their will on the exponents of the new DIY war?
Up to a point, we can respond in ways Clausewitz would have recognized. Let's look again at that parallel between the U.S. and the British Empire. Terrorism is a global phenomenon and so, necessarily, is the war against it. One consequence of 9/11 was to shatter forever the illusion that Americans could retreat to enjoy the fruits of their productivity behind a missile defense shield. For terrorism breeds in precisely the rogue states and strife-torn war zones that some Republicans before 9/11 thought we could walk away from. Intervention to impose the rule of law on such seedbeds of terror is far from an unrealistic project. That was precisely what the Victorians excelled at.
Like the U.S. today, Britain led its world economically, technologically and militarily (or at least navally).
Moreover, it was not afraid to use its power to topple what it considered rogue regimes. Take just one example: the annihilation of the Sudanese Mahdists, Islamic fundamentalists whose killing of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1895 was a Victorian 9/11. In all, there were 72 separate British military campaigns in the course of Queen Victoria's reign -- more than one for every year of the so-called pax Britannica. Nearly all of these took place thousands of miles away from the British Isles. The essence of global policing was -- and remains -- Remote War.
Such constant interventions in faraway countries of which Americans know nothing might seem to hold limited appeal. Liberals, most prominently, will fret about the violation of national sovereignty, enshrined in the United Nations charter. But it worked for the British. After Napoleon, the 19th century saw fewer, shorter and smaller wars than the preceding three centuries, not to mention the one that followed. The existence of a military ''hyperpower'' that really means business -- i.e., that is able and willing to use its superior force -- may in fact be better for world peace than any number of international treaties. Threaten war, and suddenly weapons inspectors are back in Iraq. Carry out the threat, and the Taliban regime is history. That is the Clausewitzian ''continuation of politics'' with a vengeance.
Long before Clausewitz, the Roman writer Vegetius put it neatly: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The converse of this might seem even more paradoxical, not to say Orwellian: if you want war, then prepare for peace. In other words, the surest way to make war more frequent would be for the United States to follow the European example and disarm, or simply heed the old isolationist call to bring ''our boys'' back home. For the enemies of the United States know only too well that the Achilles' heel of American foreign policy is the habitual reluctance of the electorate to risk the lives of American servicemen in far-flung conflicts.
The new war we will wage is Remote War in another sense too. Not all the battles in this war can be watched on CNN. For the campaigns to penetrate and disrupt the terrorist networks are conducted covertly, using a combination of traditional espionage and high-tech surveillance. The battles in this campaign are mostly unspectacular -- an arrest at an airport or in a seedy Pakistani flophouse, perhaps the occasional C.I.A. or Mossad assassination. It is a little like having the espionage of the cold war without any of the front-of-house hardware: no serried ranks of missiles and tanks. Just cameras. Bugs. Spooks. But this, too, has its 19th-century character. In truth, it is the ''Great Game'' -- once played by Britain and her rivals in the Middle East, Central Asia and Afghanistan -- with gizmos.
So Clausewitz -- and, indeed, the imperialism that flourished in the century after his death -- can teach us how to match Random War with Remote War. Liberals should be more relaxed about this. The bottom line of ''On War'' is, after all, a perfectly acceptable liberal axiom: namely, the primacy of political decision-making over military expertise. ''The subordination of the political point of view to the military would be contrary to common sense,'' Clausewitz writes, ''for policy has declared the War; it is the intelligent faculty, War only the instrument.'' (To his credit, Clausewitz had no illusions about the nature of that instrument: its violence, its unpredictability, its emotiveness.)
True, the war against terrorism has a novel character -- it is remote both geographically and technologically. It will nonetheless be Clausewitzian in principle, the wholehearted pursuit of a legitimate political objective by, regrettably but necessarily, violent means.
Niall Ferguson is a historian at Oxford University and, starting next year, at New York University. His book ''Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power'' will be published in the spring by Basic Books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15WWLN.html?ex=1041057185&ei=1&
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
...
Slam This! Poet's Forum
O Christmas Tree
by Hannah Baker
The thing is when you're happy,
you're just so thankful to be alive-
why think about it?
Like a kid jumping up and down
on the verge of wetting himself
because he's flying to Disney World,
Like David dancing before the Lord, making a fool out of himself,
Christmas celebrations make about as much sense:
I mean you decorate a tree.
I thought I was above that- until we couldn't afford a tree.
Even my brother, who we call the Big Bruiser, was all emotional.
My mom sent him to the basement to pray for one.
2 minutes later, a friend calls, then dumps a tree out of her truck- for us!
Ever since, I really get into "O Christmas Tree."
Not because pine leaves are ever-faithful to me personally.
I stopped feeling superior to the family whose lawn is covered with plastic figurines
because happiness makes us lose our minds:
White, blue, red, green lights outlining thousands of windows, doors,
People pulling up in cars beside homes
to stare at lights like moths- I can't help it!
It's okay to be happy and artless.
I look at the ornaments I made my parents and it kills me:
the dangling picture frame with nothing in it,
made out of torn up Christmas cards glued onto random puzzle pieces.
We have something to be happy about
that story we read every Christmas
the kind of joy and confused awe of homely shepherds
hearing angel's voices in the sky- is ours.
Hannah's email is onebananapeel@earthlink.net
...
Mouthin' Off
Jon Ward
Caroling Allll the Way
"WASH-FM (Radio 97.1) disc jockeys are skipping Thanksgiving and are going directly to Christmas. The local radio station began playing Christmas carols around the clock Friday and will continue to do so through Dec. 25.
"'It's Christmas music on demand. It gives you a source of all Christmas music all the time when you want it,' said WASH-FM program director Steve Allan. 'When you want Christmas music, you know where to turn.'"
-- The Washington Times, Sunday, November 24, 2002, p. A11
That was then. This is now. And what follows is a peek inside the head of the beloved night time dj Glenn Hollis, he of the frouf frouf, way too nice soft voice that makes you want to punch something really, really hard.
Dear Diary,
It's almost Christmas. That used to mean something good to me. I used to love Christmas. What has happened to me?!! I hate Christmas.
I know what's happened to me! Steve Allan, that's what! He's the jack ass (I know, it's rough language but THAT'S how angry I am) that decided that us dj's were going to play Christmas music for 35 straight days! 35 straight days of hell, pure freaking hell!
I've heard more renditions of "Jingle Bell Rock" than I thought were in existence, more times than I had thoughts about what it would be like to win the award for best interior decorations from the county fair.
The Stevenator (as he so ARROGANTLY insists that I call him) doesn't even have to listen to our station's music. He's out eating lunch with all the office bigwigs half the time, and when he is in his stupid office he certainly doesn't listen to the radio--he's too busy picking out which new cd's he's been sent for free he wants to listen to. What a jerk!
Here is what I would write to Steve Allan if I had the guts and didn't want to lose my cush position as the DC area's best loved and most sensitive disc jockey.
Dear Stupidinator,
I hate you, and now, because of your ridiculously stupid decision to play Christmas carols until my sense of time and place completely slipped away into a blizzard of chestnuts and drummer boys, I hate Christmas too. That is so mean!!!
I hate you so much, and I wish you had to be a dj for the month of December, when every single woman with no prospects on the Eastern sea board calls and requests in an annoyingly perky voice (one which has not been troubled by constant Christmas music every day for weeks, but has listened to very little Christmas music), "Oh, I haven't heard Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" in over ten months!! Could you please play it? Thank you so much Glenn!! I'm going to sit by the fire with my cat and drink hot cocoa."
Meanwhile, Steve, I'm about to throw up, and the only thing I'm dreaming of is not a white Christmas, but rather, on the contrary Stevo, I'm dreaming of punching you, and really hard.
I hope you realize what you've done. You've taken your best on air talent and twisted it into a shell of what he once was.
More than that, you've destroyed my once dearly held sentimental emotions about Christmas. You've made me a pessimist!! No longer will my soothing reassurances to callers and my silky smooth overtures to women who sound cute when they call be fully heartfelt. For the clutches of the demon pessimism have gained hold of my heart! And I don't think I will ever recover.
You know what I'm going to do for Christmas? I'm going to spend the day doing crossword puzzles and listening to Elton John! And not to any of his Christmas carols!! I plan on never again listening to Christmas music as long as I can help it, and believe me, in this coming year I will make it my mission in life to show corporate how hairebrained of a scheme it is to play nothing but Christmas music.
Have a horrible new year.
Glenn
Well, that is what I would love to write. Ha, it makes me laugh just writing that down. It's pretty good, don't you think so diary? That would be so funny if Steve could read it and not know it was from me.
He called it Christmas music on demand. Well, I've got a demand. Die Steve!! Die!!
I have to leave for work in an hour. Better cut this short so I can go refill my prozac prescription from CVS. They're pills aren't as strong as Giant's, but hey, I'll take anything I can get to make it through another night of listening about Santa Claus kiss mom for five straight hours.
I'll try to make it back soon diary. You're my only solace sometimes. At the very least I can wish you a happy new year. Yeah! That's what I have to look forward to! The new year, which will be new for me in a much more meaningful way than for most. I will be free from my prison, free to play "Wind Beneath My Wings" for that poor sap who's lost his girifriend, so I can go back to making a difference in this world.
Yeah! Well, at least there's a ray of hope in all this.
Until next time Diary. Over and out.
Glenn
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posted by Jon at
5:28 PM
