Is Best Buy’s tacky Santa Ad worth a blog rant?

 

Maybe a small rant. Mostly because I already detest Best Buy and really have no interest in purchasing their over-priced electronics. I’m also pretty done with the poor customer service and the general obnoxiousness of Christmas shopping. To wit, the absurdity of the Black Friday insanity. Disgusting displays of man’s inhumanity to man.

It started when we stopped wishing each other Merry Christmas.

I’m only half-serious about that statement. The serious half wants to know…when did this happen? Look, I’m not even going to make this about religion.  Christ has always been in my Christmas, although I admit there were sad years when he wasn’t getting the attention he deserved.

But this rant is about Santa…we’ve already effectively taken Christ out of Christmas. In fact, we’ve taken God out of just about everything. Marriage. School. Thanksgiving. Our currency.

Why wouldn’t a snarky ad campaign dissing Santa be game?

There’s a lot to criticize. There’s the whole treatment of Santa, for one. As a cultural icon, he’s representative of a number of virtues. We could get into the whole origins story with St. Nicholas, but let’s keep it simple. Santa, he of the reindeer and North Pole and friendly elves. He’s a good guy. He works tirelessly to spread joy.

And those good guys… They get picked on. Discredited. Ridiculed. Crucified. (oops. I forgot I was keeping this about Santa)

It’s open season in our culture to laugh at and ridicule the very values that have made this society great. It’s shameful, especially when it happens from the top, down. Did you happen to see the mockery our president made of the annual turkey pardon on Thanksgiving? Oh sure, it was edgy and funny. It’s only a turkey. Or is it?

Here’s the thing. I really don’t care about Santa. Not really. And I don’t care about a turkey getting pardoned or not. But I do care about the bigger picture, whether it’s a myth about goodness and generosity or a symbol of the nation. When both of those can come under fire, we’re doing it wrong as a culture.

 

put your head down and kiss your ass goodbye

It’s been nice knowing all of you. Tomorrow, scientists in Switzerland will attempt to recreate the Big Bang. It turns out they’ve been searching for the “God particle” and hope this experiment will shed some light (no pun intended) on the the whole creation thing.

As usual, I didn’t know God was missing, but hey, you know how that goes.

Amazingly, the CERN was the featured plot point in Dan Brown’s underwhelming but far more scandalous novel, Angels and Demons (don’t waste your money–it is even more offensive and possibly even stupider than the Da Vinci Code, which I enjoyed reading for the chase and promptly forgot all the bad history and poorly researched information. Kind of like the Chinese I had for lunch today).

I digress. Anyway, alarmists are screaming that this will herald the end of the world, as it will create black holes and suck the earth into it and snuff out creation. Um. I say it serves us right for trying to play God. The hubris of some scientists astounds me. This reminds me of the time I pissed off the Methuselah Foundation and their members flamed me for months.

my Stephen Hawking action figure is spinning madly
my Stephen Hawking action figure is spinning madly

Nevertheless, Stephen Hawking presents a far more measured and fascinating look at this whole thing.

The article states that the “God particle” is all around us, but elusive. Ha! Don’t they see the obvious?

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