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To stoke the baseless delusions of right-wing extremists, the Trumpster is now adding to his rants about a war on Christmas in the United States a rant about a war on Christians. Seeing his remarks reminded me of an op ed column that I wrote some years ago for a Fort Worth, Texas, independent newspaper. I dug it out, but I decided that it needed revising and expanding. This is the result:
CHRISTMAS THROUGH NON-CHRISTIAN EYES
Since the winter solstice with its density of holidays is here again, one can anticipate the annual explosions of righteous Christian indignation at institutions or persons who substitute a generic greeting like “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” for “Merry Christmas.” Such indignation is nothing more than bad manners and bigotry based on erroneous history masquerading as principle and on faux piety grounded in bogus tradition.
I do not say this on behalf of myself as an adult. In my mature apostasy—now of more than six decades duration, since the year after my Bar Mitzvah—I have become comfortable with a variety of religions and their expressions. In particular, I can relish the beauty of the Christian liturgy (especially the Catholic mass intoned in Latin) and the glories of Christian-inspired art (especially the music). I, even I, feel an awe and chill when I hear and (yes) sing along with traditional Christmas hymns and carols.
As an adult, I am comfortable both with my apostasy and with my appreciation of the sentiments of believers of many faiths.
However, the true root of my antipathy toward those religious bullies who violate the basic tenets of their own faith, the founding principles of the United States, and the ruling customs of common decency and etiquette is this. When I remember myself as a still-believing child raised Jewish, I cannot forget the discomfort that even the most benevolent public expressions of Christian belief caused me.
I recall the needless conflict ignited in me by the thoughtless imposition of Christian lore and practice on me. In my public schools, that lore and practice found expression in the implicitly mandatory singing of Christmas songs during holiday assemblies in the auditorium. My religion told me that I should sit silently during these exercises, but pedagogical authority and peer pressure told me that I must participate. However, when I succumbed to the social pressure and sang along, even enjoying the music as I did so, my enjoyment was poisoned by my inability to bring myself to utter the words “Jesus Christ” or “Christ the Lord.” Jesus was neither my Christos (anointed one, messiah) nor any part of my Lord. In Judaism, it is strictly forbidden to utter even the name of the genuine Lord of hosts. To exalt the name of what a believing Jew would regard as a false god was blasphemous idolatry.
Such feelings were not restricted to schools. As difficult as it may be for many Christians to grasp, one should try to understand the perplexity that the display of a crèche in a public space can cause in a Jewish child. A Christian who cannot understand—and feel compassion for—such a child is, to my mind, a questionable Christian.
After all, it is Judaism that—from its very founding—is the quintessentially militant and parochial religion, while Christianity is founded as the quintessentially pacifist and catholic (in the literal sense) religion. Jews are destined to live in a permanent state of circling the wagons, but Christians are meant to live in a radically open door and open-arms world.
The paradox of the Christian crusader in arms striving to eradicate non-Christian infidels may have been with humanity for a long time (for a variety of political and social, but not religious, reasons), but in a secular humanist society like the United States—a society colonized out of a quest for religious freedom and founded on principles of political enlightenment—there should be no place for such a crusader.
Hear the resounding words of Thomas Jefferson [from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII (on religion)]: After stating that neither "the operations of the mind" nor "the rights of conscience" are political concerns, Jefferson says unequivocally: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
It is long overdue to banish the delusion that the Founders of the United States were Christians who founded the country on Christian principles (see Post Scriptum below).
Whether the children of Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, or any others feel the same discomfort that I did, I cannot say with certainty, but I suspect that they do.
Moreover, if they do, compassionate other humans need to allow them the youthful safety and warmth of their parochialism. The bellicosity of irascible Christians should not be allowed to trample the rights and feelings of non-Christians.
In the United States, all persons ideally should be co-equal citizens, free to be privately zealous in various idiosyncratic ways. On the other hand, public areas must be DRZs (de-religionized zones), or better, OMZs (omni-religionized zones). In public, a crèche should be neither more nor less welcome than a monk chanting “Hare Krishna.”
When the right-wing zealous fanatics mount their righteously belligerent steeds, one should remember that the steeds are nothing but hobby horses rocking on the quicksand of mindless hate.
In addition, if a retailer—out of business sense, if not out of courtesy—adopts a generically neutral and all-encompassing holiday salutation, one should applaud the act. Even more, one should hope that the day arrives when the act will go unnoticed.
Furthermore, one should remember that there are two Christmases, the religious celebration of the birth of a savior preaching peace and good will and the latter-day secular Saturnalia of gift-giving profligacy. To confuse the two demeans the former.
If one were honest, one would admit the true Lord of Christmas to be Mammon.
POST SCRIPTUM:
Most of the Founders were not believing Christians. Many of them (such as Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine) were proponents of a rationalistic civic religion rather than a fideistic revealed religion. Some prudently (one might even say, euphemistically) called their belief system “deism.”
In the Declaration of Independence, the word “God” appears only once, in the phrase “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” To an eighteenth-century thinker, this was a reference to the mathematician-deity of the Enlightenment philosophers, not to the object of worship of any revealed religion. In the statement that all humans “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” “their Creator” is sufficiently ambiguous that it could allude to one’s parent as much as to some supreme being. The invocation of “Divine Providence” in the Declaration’s final statement is vague enough to embrace all beliefs. The only use of the adjective “Christian” in the Declaration was in a paragraph, deleted by Congress, in which Jefferson spoke derisively of “the Christian king of Great Britain.”
Neither does the word “God” appear in the U. S. Constitution, nor does any word that evokes divinity (except the formulaic “year of our Lord”). In fact, according to the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Constitution embodies a thoroughgoing religious neutrality that involves a strict separation of what eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke called “politics and the pulpit.”
Alexander Hamilton was the author of sixty percent of the essays in The Federalist Papers (1787-1788) that were meant to defend and garner support for the Constitution, the other two authors being James Madison and John Jay. Hamilton chose the pseudonym “Publius” for the essays in the volume, which showed that the Founders were looking to pagan antiquity, particularly Republican Rome, for guidance, not to the Christian Bible, else he might have chosen for a pseudonym “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” or “John” (or tilting Judaically, “Moshe”). A story (probably apocryphal, but nonetheless apt) circulated about Hamilton: when Hamilton was asked why the authors of the Constitution made no mention of God, he replied, “We forgot.”
In the presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson’s opponents vigorously and frequently accused him of being an “atheist,” an “infidel,” and a “howling atheist” in an unsuccessful attempt to turn voters against him: he won the election.
To put it in a nutshell, the founding of the United States was not inspired or informed by looking toward monarchical Jerusalem; it was inspired and informed by looking toward democratic Athens and republican Rome.

PANDEMIC HOMESCHOOLING REMEMBRANCE
As I shelved my books, I came across the ones that my grandson Max and I read together during the pandemic (some of which are pictured below). We started with a reading group of Max and some of his friends in the pre-fourth grade initial period in 2020. Then Max and I did fourth grade in the 2020-2021 school year, fifth grade in the 2021-2022 school year, and sixth grade in the 2022-2023 school year. [Logistics prevented his friends from continuing with us.]
Now, as I wait for the final pieces of the apartment puzzle, I have drawn up our complete pandemic homeschooling curricula in Literature and History. On the off chance that others might find it useful, I have placed them in the series of comment spaces below.
[PS: My daughter Cordelia covered mathematics, science, and art; my son-in-law Mike covered non-English language and music.]

THE-LIGHT-AT-THE-END-OF-THE-TUNNEL PROGRESS REPORT
My apartment is nearing full DocZ-ready habitation. Two more bookcases are due from IKEA today, and my trusty faz-tudo (factotum/handyperson) will be here tomorrow morning to assemble them. They will house my mystery books and film books/screenplays collections. This gallery is what my residence-in-progress looks like now.

If anyone is tempted to take weasels like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley seriously when they criticize the Trumpster, look at their reaction to the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court barring Trump from being on the primary election ballot because he had incited an insurrection. According to the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, section 3: “No person shall…hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath…as an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
That is the law. I do not wish to debate the parameters of its applicability. I wish only to stress that when the Colorado Court made its decision, the Republican Party as a whole, all candidates and office holders, alike and in lockstep, circled their wagons and protested the decision as partisan judicial overreach and weaponized judicial activism.
Such a charge is chillingly laughable from the party that used partisan judicial overreach and that nuclear-weaponized judicial activism (using Machiavellian means to fill the US Supreme Court with right-wing hacks, crooks, and zealots) in order to deprive women of their equality and autonomy, to disenfranchise voters with new versions of Jim Crow legislation, and to unleash the dogs of racism and xenophobia anew on the land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAYt6dpCgOI
{I shall translate the Yiddish for anyone who cannot figure out the gist of it, but the key line is "Los em gehen" / "Let them go." }
{PS: The true reason that the GOP pols are railing against this decision is that they know that every legally justified action against the Trumpster merely increases his support from the GOP: they are all craven opportunists and circumstantial political chameleons.}

Indian chief scene from Blazing Saddles The Indian chief scene from Blazing Saddles. Further support for the argument that some American Indian tribes may have descended from the 10 lost tribes of ...

MORE PROGRESS
One wall of books in what will be the library is now complete: it comprises books of antiquity [ancient Near East and Egypt (from Gilgamesh to The Book of the Dead)/ancient Greece (from Homer to Euclid) and Rome (from Terence and Plautus to Marcus Aurelius)]; medieval (Christian, Jewish, and Islamic) philosophy, through modern philosophy (Galileo to Kant) and nineteenth century philosophy (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Darwin, et al) to twentieth century philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, et al); British literature (from Beowulf to Burgess and beyond); and the beginning of American literature (from Cotton Mather). More cartons remain to be unpacked: those gray cabinets (whose doors I plan to have removed) contain already unpacked books, and the table is piled with partially sorted books. Several more cartons are in the adjoining room, where there is another bookcase waiting for them.
On the floor of the main room (sala) are the components of two more IKEA bookcases that my trusty handyperson is scheduled to assemble tomorrow morning.
Each block of books is a block of memories of the past and a promise of memories in the future.

ALERT
When I added this page to my personal page, it served a purpose related to my publications. That purpose is no longer operational. Therefore, I am going to close this page in approximately one week. If you are following this page, but you are not on my personal page Friends list, please send me a Friend request there: https://www.facebook.com/doczonline

Robert Zaslavsky

PROGRESS REPORT
The bookcases in the sala (main room) are nearly complete, the left housing my Shakespeare collection, the right housing (for now) a mixture of reference works, art theory and history, and some odds and ends there only temporarily. Atop these bookcases are (from left to right) a sexagenarian globe of the earth, a mini-Colosseum (with towering legionnaire, behind which is a Greek museum copy of an ancient jar), a bust of Shakespeare/a cardboard model of the Globe Theatre (that I constructed many years ago: it suffered some minor damage in the transatlantic crossing but still stands grandly, and Yoda continues to stand guard over it), the 2000 year old man’s national (cave) anthem button, Cordelia’s childhood robot constructed from my empty matchboxes from the days when I was in thrall to the sot w**d (the old name for to***co), and a tin of Shakespearean insult quotation Band-Aids.
My wall gallery continues to grow, with my Babylon 5 action figure collection in place, abutting a Greek saucer, transitioning to my western icons grouping. [Other Bab 5 memorabilia are freestanding and not yet in place.]
I am awaiting help to move heavy book cartons (too heavy for me because of my forthcoming minor abdominal surgery), so that I can place the other bookcases where they are meant to reside, empty the remaining cartons, and finally categorize and shelve the bulk of my library.

The resignation of Elizabeth Magill as President of the University of Pennsylvania, follows hard upon the mindlessly hysterical reaction to her attempt and the attempt of her colleagues (Claudine Gay, President of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth, President of M.I.T) to be balanced and reasoned rather than rash and irrational in their responses to a deliberately inflammatory interrogation by Republican Congressperson Elise Stefanik, a born-again Trumpian, who asked the college Presidents the question of whether students’ calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment and should merit punishment.
The fact that this played out like a high-class cat fight should not obscure the noxious mix of Israelolatry, misogyny, and anti-intellectual-neutrality that infects our political universe of discourse (blatantly in the Republican Party entirely and subterraneanly in segments of the Democratic Party).
Too many of our legislators and citizens are blindered by slogans about statements whose intent is at least equivocal and at best merely rhetorical, i.e., they catch a quotation on the internet, more-often-than-not misattributed and decontextualized, and they react in a knee-jerk fashion without ever performing reasonable verification procedures to ensure that they are not acting out of ignorance and prejudice.
I wonder why the questioner did not ask whether students who called for the genocide of Palestinians would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment and should merit punishment. Or even more broadly, whether students who called for the genocide of any ethnic or cultural group or subgroup should be punished. The bias of another person, even when it agrees with one’s own bias, is still bias.
[PS: I wonder whether Congressperson Stefanik would deem the following statement deserving of punishment: "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."]

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOL—
—DRUM:
A BRIEF YET CIRCUITOUS COMMENTARY ON LAST NIGHT’S REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE DOG-AND-PONY SHOW*
In 1933, the Marx Brothers released their finest film, the politically panoramic Duck Soup, an account of the state of Freedonia. Freedonia is dependent on the deep pockets of the wealthy Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) who has come under the spell of the fast- and smooth-talking Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx). A national financial crisis has led Mrs. T. to blackmail the nation into installing Firefly as its ruler, and not a moment too soon, because the rival nation of Sylvania under the leadership of its ambassador Trentino (Louis Calhern) is threatening a Putinesque takeover of Freedonia, to forward which aim Trentino has sent the spies Chicolini (Chico Marx**) and Pinky (Harpo Marx). Firefly is warned of the treachery by his assistant Bob (Zeppo Marx). Chicolini is arrested and put on trial: the Prosecutor (Charles Middleton***) and the ensemble sing and dance their way through the judicial proceedings, after which Chicolini and Pinky defect to Freedonia, just in time to enlist with Firefly in going to war with Sylvania, a war that is cinematically portrayed as the exemplar of the insanity of all wars.
During the trial, Firefly turns to the judges/jurors and says about Chicolini, “Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you—he really is an idiot.”
This is also a succinct way of describing each candidate at last night’s GOP hoedown. Christie, for all his blustering attempt to stand alone in condemnation of Trump, wants us to forget that he endorsed Trump in Trump’s first run and helped him in his second run, having finally discovered what anyone with a modicum of sense would have known from the start, namely that Trump is unfit for any office, even for membership in the human species: expecting Christie to shed his opportunism is like expecting a leopard to change its spots. Haley is equally tainted by having served at the UN for Trump and for having sworn her allegiance to him at an earlier candidate show. DeSantis is limply trying to sell himself as a more effective Trump, while Trump fanboy Ramaswamy is doing his best unhinged Trump on steroids impersonation. Therefore, instead of Duck Soup, one has here Muck Soup.
*[I refuse, as I have said before, to dignify these fiascoes (Republican and Democratic alike) with the sobriquet “debate” lest I be guilty of linguistic and intellective malpractice: if you want to know what a true debate looks like, read accounts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.]
**[According to Groucho, who should know, the correct pronunciation of the name “Chico Marx” is “Chicko Marx,” not “Cheeko Marx.” His name was meant to signify his predilection for pursuing chicks (i.e., females).]
***[Charles Middleton would go on (three years later) to incarnate Emperor Ming the Merciless of the Planet Mongo in the Flash Gordon serials starring Buster Crabbe.]

This Means War! - Duck Soup (9/10) Movie CLIP (1933) HD Duck Soup movie clips: http://j.mp/1xG3OERBUY THE MOVIE: http://amzn.to/rCYHpQDon't miss the HOTTEST NEW TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u2y6prCLIP DESCRIPTION:Just...

A LOGIC LESSON
(prompted by the hyperbolic rhetoric spewed by politicians and commentators and regular civilians about the Israeli-Palestinian morass, but more broadly applicable)
[Note: For now, I put aside the uncomfortable issue of the acceptance and bruiting to bolster preformed policy commitments of unverified accounts that confirm one’s prefabricated, knee-jerk view of the situation (accounts accepted and bruited without sober investigation to determine whether such accounts are demonstrably accurate or propagandistically hyped).]
In the catalogue of twenty logical fallacies that I used to distribute to students in my Logic class, there are two that have been committed egregiously by Chicken Littles on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian chasm. They are two sides of a logically fallacious coin:
(1) Accident: the misapplication of a generalization to inappropriate individual cases, i.e., moving too carelessly from a general statement to a possible example of it.
For example, the naïve leap among left-wing extremists from the assertion that Palestinians per se are victims of systematic oppression and brutality at the hands of the Israeli right-wing berserkers to the assertion that Hamasians qua Palestinians somehow are justified in their barbaric and inhumane retribution.
(2) Converse accident: the misapplication of an individual case to an inappropriate generalization, i.e., moving too carelessly to a general statement from a possible example of it.
For example (a), the calculated Netanyahuian leap from the assertion that the Palestinian cabal known as Hamas is a venomous terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel to the assertion that all Palestinians are de facto terrorists by association equally bent on the destruction of Israel. (This is a fallacy shared—however much they try to hide it—by a significant portion of American political leaders, from the President and Democratic Party regulars on down to GOP legislators like Pence and the rest of the evangelical Christian right-wing crowd who are terrorist pots calling the terrorist kettle black.)
For example (b), the accusation against those who criticize Israeli policy (those who are anti-Israeli-political-action) that they are ipso facto criticizing Jews as such and hence are anti-Semitic.{Note: These are the mechanisms at work in the social construction of stereotypes.]
I proffer this lesson (perhaps a bit oversimplified but not inaccurately so) as my waiy of issuing a call for sanity in public discourse rather than hysteria, a call that I am certain will go unheeded.

BOOKCASE UPDATE
All seven bookcases now are constructed. (Todas as sete estantes agora estão construidas).
Five are placed in the rooms (quartos) of their destined abiding but not yet in their exact abodes in those rooms. I am awaiting help to move cartons and clear space to accommodate them.
Two are in their proper abode in the main room (sala). One of those is now nigh unto being filled with its contents. Therefore, I am able to say, “Shakespeare is in the house.” The First Folio facsimile (1623) opens that ensemble, followed by as many of the classic New Variorum editions by H.H. Furness as were released by Dover in paperback, followed in turn by the complete oeuvre in the Arden edition, followed in re-turn by the beginnings of my gathered and kept secondary sources and criticism (to be completed as soon as Shakespeare carton 2 makes an appearance).
Finally, two items of my daughter’s artistic juvenilia were ensconced with Bill and are now on display (in a tentative setting until the whole apartment space takes more determinate shape).

BOOKCASE PROGRESS REPORT
At last, my bookcases arrived from IKEA’s bounteous domain last Friday. Now, my trusty hired trabalhador, a genuine faz-tudo, is assembling them (quatro estantes grandes e três estantes pequenas). Two of the small bookcases have been deployed to their destined place in my sala, one of them to support on its roof minha impressura. The final small bookcase and one of the big bookcases are in the bullpen awaiting deployment until the construction process is over and I can begin emptying cartons to make room for them. Behold the interim documentary record in the photographs below.