History, Poetry, Security

Why Gift Giving for Christmas Was Invented

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The Grinch believed he could singularly ruin Christmas by targeting the families who stayed isolated at home among piles of private displays of wealth. He was foiled when it turned out actual large, welcoming and festive Christmas gatherings didn’t care much about such things.

A historian wrote in 2015 that wealthy Americans of the late 1800s pushed hard for the practice of staying home and giving gifts as a specific power play, a politically controlling act.

Christmas gift-giving, then, is the product of overlapping interests between elites who wanted to move raucous celebrations out of the streets and into homes, and families who simultaneously wanted to keep their children safe at home and expose them, in limited amounts, to commercial entertainment. Retailers certainly supported and benefited from this implicit alliance, but not until the turn of the 20th century did they assume a proactive role of marketing directly to children in the hopes that they might entice (or annoy) their parents into spending more money on what was already a well-established practice of Christmas gift-giving.

Shutting down public gatherings to focus on gifts only at home served to redirect attention away from pressing societal issues. It quelled public voices and excused the wealthy families from attending to any discontent or needs that would have been rising in the streets (e.g. civil rights of urban emancipated slaves, such as the 1866 systemic massacre of Blacks who had dared to gather and live among wealthy whites).

By the end of May 3, Memphis’s black community had been devastated. Forty-six blacks had been killed. Two whites died in the conflict, one as the result of an accident and another, a policeman, because of a self-inflicted gunshot. There were five rapes and 285 people were injured. Over one hundred houses and buildings burned down as a result of the riot and the neglect of the firemen. No arrests were made.

Despite strong traditional Christmas habits of large groups roaming outside in loud festivities (e.g. carolling) the American white Protestant leaders perceived such things as risk to their status, an open door to people collectively demanding civil rights.

Even before Christianity, it is thought that midwinter songs existed to keep up people’s spirits, along with dances, plays and feasts. …the carol with the most complicated history is ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. … lot of people have thought there’s a subversive, hidden message in the lyrics, rallying support for Bonnie Prince Charlie and his family.

What keeps spirits up more than subversive hidden messages in song, as General Tubman might have said?

What would an aspiring white elitist after losing the Civil War, facing the prospect of rapid growth and prosperity in mass mixed-race gatherings (shift in political power), do in response?

Apparently the answer was to shut it all down with a shrewdly enforced family-focus of private gift giving — expectations of “being present” only at home, with some fancy wrapping paper and a bow on top.

America at this time further emphasized the “stay home” edict through widespread racist state-sanctioned massacres of Blacks. Wherever too much growth in collective power and public presence was perceived (e.g. Elaine 1919, Tulsa 1921) white mobs launched multi-pronged attacks to prevent Black prosperity.

Elaine, Arkansas is a perfect example. Blacks had peacefully gathered in a Church to organize a protest about unfair payments for goods. White law enforcement showed up with guns demanding the Blacks stay home under penalty of death. Blacks stood ground and refused to disperse, which ended in President Woodrow Wilson authorizing federal troops to jail or kill them all.

Go ask any American if they know about U.S. troops ordered to kill Blacks who refused to stay home. That’s the context of redefining Christmas as primarily an isolating event emphasizing heavy private spend instead of public festivity.

A lot of ink has been spilled superficially describing English habits during this same period as privacy-centric, desiring time very far apart via emergent railroads. However, consider also an overt emphasis on societal kindness, a very diametric opposite approach to forced isolation in American Christmas. Brits encouraged huge public gatherings for taking care of those in need.

…Victorians felt that everyone was entitled to enjoy themselves at Christmas. In 1851 a marquee was set up in Leicester Square in London, to feed people who were homeless or struggling.

22,000 people were fed roast beef pie, porter, plum pudding, tea, coffee and more, surrounded by festive lights and flowers. Similar events took place in cities all across the country.

This arose from orientations outside the family, showing Christmas traditions as giving publicly.

Some undertook these obligations perfectly cheerfully – the Norfolk clergyman James Woodforde noting in 1788 that he paid sixpence each to 56 “poor people” in his parish, entertained some to dinner, and those who were too lame to come in person had their dinners sent to them.

Anthropologists explain how a rapid shift from public welfare to entirely private gifting is symptomatic of deeper issues in American perceptions of power.

…gifts are also symbolic representations of power and relationships. All gifts, no matter how small, carry with them a responsibility and an obligation. And while we may try to mitigate those responsibilities and obligations with social codes of our own devising, we can’t truly escape them.

The effect of American elites driving hard towards isolating and home-centered over-commercialized practices as a national holiday had such a dramatic power shift away from public traditions, it clearly was reflected into another religion now stuck at home too.

Hanukkah is now one of the two most widely observed holidays for Jewish Americans, Creditor says, and it’s perhaps no surprise that this big rise in its popularity came soon after gift-giving made its way into the picture as part of the quintessential Christmas experience. In the late 1800s, Creditor explains, gift-giving became a “commercialized way of expressing Christmas, and Christmas became a national holiday.”

So, by the early 20th century, American Jews had become accustomed to seeing Christmas gifts abound. Parents didn’t want their children to feel left out as their peers received presents every December.

It seems that without the isolationist push of late 1800s wealthy Americans, emergent in the politics of post Civil War urbanization and industrialization, the pressure on Americans to stay home for excessive gift giving on Christmas/Hanukkah wouldn’t have happened.

Honestly, it sounds nefarious how a group of wealthy Protestants in America swayed their whole country to stay apart and attend only to their own family instead of others’ needs, let alone large societal issues.

Indeed, here’s another arguable byproduct of that targeted sway, which suggests design and intent of modern American Christmas habits has been intentionally preventing the mindfulness and healing the country needs.

Kwanzaa was created by Karenga out of the turbulent times of the 1960’s in Los Angeles, following the 1965 Watts riots, when a young African-American was pulled over on suspicions of drunk driving, resulting in an outbreak of violence.

Here’s an especially apt analysis of the oxygen-starving effect of the American Christmas traditions.

…no single moment or event made her drop Kwanzaa cold turkey. She thinks the momentum fizzled out after Cousin Olivia stopped throwing public parties through church, instead hosting them at her home.

An isolation from others, at an isolating time of year.

The American shift in Christmas to a wealthy white family focus on gift giving unfolded from turbulent times of the 1860s… so is it any wonder that Kwanzaa was invented in the 1960s for those expressing “separate but equal” visions?

Affirmation of a community to bring people together probably seemed a more achievable and healing outcome than trying to undo decades of powerful anti-social elitist commercialization for Christmas. Yet Kwanzaa, like Hanukkah, hasn’t escaped the sparkling allure of expensive and ostentatious displays of isolationism (competition to stay apart).

The best way to foil this Grinch-like situation remains the same, celebrating Christmas in large public gatherings to be festive together and help serve public needs. Be together in festivity with strangers, with a shared humanitarian purpose.

Nast [January 3rd, 1863] depicted Santa Claus decked out in stars and stripes handing out gifts to Union soldiers. If you look closely, you can see Union Santa clutching a puppet resembling the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, with a rope around its neck.

Source: Harpers, 1863
An alleged variation of lyrics for the popular Battle Hymn of the Republic sung by crowds, which centered on “John Brown’s Body“.

If you really want to celebrate Christmas, take care of each other with kindness.

Ho ho ho.

Poetry, Security

Analysis of Palestinian Poetry

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“…the importance of [the 1950 Book] Canto General is that it ‘shows us the history of the Americas … [from] the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors.'” Source: “What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance”, Mark Eisner, Paris Review 26 March 2018

I couldn’t help but think there is inconsistency in The Atlantic article just posted about power and poetry of Palestinians.

First, we are told poetry is NOT a medium for resolution.

Poetry can communicate confusion and suffering because it isn’t a medium for resolving problems.

Second, we are told it IS for generating real change.

Words have influence, and poetry’s words, dense with meaning and softened by emotion, can generate real change.

Certainly, a shift towards genuine resolution might be a meaningful change. Otherwise, what kind of change is being sought in relation to a path leading away from resolution? That sounds very bad. Or is there a third dimension, a change that doesn’t mean… moving towards or away?

Here’s an example of the analysis that ensues.

Tuffaha’s poem is told from the perspective of a parent preparing to flee her house after receiving a warning call.

A parent gets a warning call.

There seems to be an inherent recognition of value, acknowledgement of agency, in the act of being warned of danger. Who was warned and why? Who wasn’t warned, and why not?

I find an important point about being warned casually glossed over in this essay, even as it says emotive response comes from varied expressions of loss.

Loss is definitely pain. Being warned of loss, when seen through a risk management lens, is a different kind of pain. Loss without warning and decision time doesn’t read like this.

It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

The NYT took a different approach from feelings evoked by “doesn’t matter what you had planned” poetry, when they wrote a dry perspective called “What should my ‘go bag’ contain?”

Perhaps most telling is the author suggests everyone read Palestinian poetry to relate to their human condition, instead of suggesting we read any poetry that expresses human pain of loss and suffering for us to understand the Palestinian condition.

Everyone Should Be Reading Palestinian Poetry: Poetry at its best can stun readers into silence, but also give the silenced a voice.

I agree we must honor Palestinian words and voices, but the author seems to mean we should do so exclusively. Why not bring in Israeli, Syrian, Sudanese or Ukranian voices, just for some obvious counter examples of what everyone needs to undo a silence?

Sudan has what voice at all, if we look at the coverage and access?

Is the point of claimed change possible from reading Palestinian poetry to see just one inhumanity, a unique spot in a particular place and time, or is it to be able recognize and relate to inhumanity at all and anywhere?

It seems a connection from the former to the latter is very weak if not completely absent from the article and its analysis. I’m left wondering why we are not encouraged more to apply the human voice towards humanity, which perhaps means less explaining and more to offer in terms of lasting change. It could be here less a question of whose voice rises holier in opposition, when instead there would be the wider appeal for us to define and demand kindness.

History, Security

“Dukes of Hazard” Actor Tweets That the U.S. President Should be Lynched

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In case you ever had doubts about a TV show that featured a car decorated with inflammatory domestic terrorism propaganda (celebrating the blood-thirsty treasonous “monster” General Lee and the Confederate battle flag)… here is the guy on December 20 who became famous only by being paid to promote that car:

Source: Twitter

Lynching. Plain to see.

Here’s how Lincoln described such sentiments back in 1838.

Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

Lynching sentiments defined much of the pre and post-Civil War periods, where horrible people sounding like this Schneider guy went about demanding hangings as a means for censoring and murdering huge numbers of Americans they disagreed with.

“[The organized terror movement after Civil War] stock-in-trade was violence – intimidation and violence. People were beaten, people were flogged, people were lynched, people were shot. People’s homes were raided, they were dragged outdoors and flogged in the streets.”

And, he says, the violence often included “truly horrifying sadism”.

“It liberated the absolute worst impulses among” its members, Bordewich says, adding: “You can see this in today’s terrorist movements in other parts of the world – al-Qaida, IS. These are the organizations the Klan should be compared to. We think of terrorism today as something happening in other countries. It happened here in the 1870s.”

Intimidation and violence. They hung John Brown, they cancelled and assassinated Elijah Lovejoy, and then they lost a Civil War, before going right back to more lynchings.

That’s the real thread, that is the problem the tweet represents, as if some in America (e.g. Speaker of the House) still haven’t given up affinity for the centuries long nativist “America First” Klan threat to democracy expressed as… lynchings.

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)

Let’s go back and ask again why did a TV show in America decide to center itself around a “monster” like General Lee and blast his treasonous, toxic Confederate hate symbol into everyone’s eyeballs as massive scale?

Ask also what kind of actor signs up to animate a mechanized General Lee as if it doesn’t mean exactly what everyone must recognize as divisive and cruel, including General Lee himself (given he asked that nobody use his name or image like this)?

It was propaganda of the worst kind. A racist mysoginyst “rebellion” designed as subtle saccharin to undermine democracy, while repudiating their own acts as both innocent and above the law.

According to the researchers, this experiment demonstrated that just seeing the Confederate flag, even subliminally, made White participants less likely to vote for a Black person. […] In their report, published in the journal Political Psychology, the research team concluded that just being exposed to the Confederate flag triggers racially biased attitudes, even among Whites who are not consciously prejudiced. Clearly, even if the Confederate flag is a symbol of pride for those who honor it, it also carries a message of racial bias that can affect people at an unconscious level.

Defenders of the show will trot out people who say they loved watching it, enjoyed seeing a fun and helpful side to some racist whites, as if to boast how successfully fascist propaganda on widespread TV could run without detection. It’s like saying “did you see the show where the Nazi in uniform held the door open for someone, cracked jokes and rescued a kitten from a tree?”

This stuff shouldn’t be hard to dismiss as fluff obscuring reality, as a new Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” explores.

The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, the father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), goes to and from work; the mother, Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), tends to her garden; and their children, a rambunctious bunch, play with their toys. In the movie you hear, however, there’s intermittent gunfire, bursts of screams, and an ever-present industrial cacophony. Along with snatches of dialogue and glimpses of details—the costuming, the barbed wire, the smoke—the film makes clear what’s going on: Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and this is a portrait of how he and his Nazi family actually lived, going about their days adjacent to the death camp he ran.

And you’ll never guess what this anti-democratic “rebel” actor said next, as if he forgot to put his pointy white hood on before claiming nothing to see here or claiming to be invisible.

“Seriously, folks?,” Schneider said in a statement to Deadline. “I said no such thing. Despite headlines claiming otherwise, I absolutely did not call for an act of violence or threaten a U.S. president.”

Absolutely did not? That seems very confident for something that is so easily proven to be the opposite.

This gaslighting attempt is so sloppy it seems based in delusion. Perhaps it stems from decades of being drunk with privilege and power, profiting heavily from the glorification and promotion of General Lee’s domestic terrorism for so long, enjoying zero accountability.

General Lee was quite clearly a weak leader, and even more a treasonous monster of the worst cruelty, who led a Civil War to expand state-sanctioned rape of black women. His monuments have been proven to be directly correlated with lynchings, erected by racist mobs in the 1920s to threaten any American families and governments who dared to desire the protection of law and order.

His name is a threat, whether on street signs or schools; a precursor and warning to racist violence. Robert E. Lee, like an Osama bin Laden Avenue or Timothy McVeigh Park is the detestable name of terrorism.

Now the actor known best for gladly celebrating and spreading this evil monster’s racist hate, using a “fun loving” TV show for personal profit, has been caught on Twitter more clearly than ever doing what he always did.

Accountability finally?

Is it any wonder lynching was top of mind for the actor when he disagreed with anyone? Is him driving around waving a Confederate flag, which stands for lynching, really that different than him saying he stands for lynching? In this Twitter case he directed his words towards the President, but it’s not like the “Dukes of Hazard” hadn’t consciously preserved racist lynching sentiment the whole time on multiple communication channels from underwear to children toys.

This is the General Grant toy car, honoring the greatest military leader in American history who brilliantly and decisively ended slavery by winning the Civil War. The inverse toy car to this, a bright orange one under a Confederate flag named for the pro-slavery treasonous General Lee, was marketed using a “Dukes of Hazard” TV show to put a smile on doing harm to democracy (undermining Black Americans)… a domestic terror propaganda tactic that finally ended only in 2015, 150 years after the Civil War was won by Grant.
Poetry, Security

Tesla Crash More Than Any Other Brand

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So many people have sent me this story from Forbes with a “OMG you’ve been validated” note that I have to repost it here just to acknowledge that I have seen it.

Tesla drivers are the most accident-prone, according to a LendingTree analysis of 30 car brands. It found that Tesla drivers are involved in more accidents than drivers of any other brand. Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers. Ram (22.76) and Subaru (20.90) were the only other brands with more than 20 accidents per 1,000 drivers for every brand.

The truth, as I’ve tried to post here for at least seven years, is finally seeing attention it deserves. In a nutshell, Tesla falsely claims a 40% reduction in crashes when their engineering actually increases crashes more than 10%, an incredibly dangerous 50 point spread!

The more Tesla the more tragic death. Without fraud there would be no Tesla. Source: Tesladeaths.com

Driving a Tesla is significantly less safe than other far better engineered brands, if not the most unsafe of them all.

A poem by me:

Electric cars were the future in 1981.
- Reagan shut it all down.
Electric cars were the future in 2001.
- Bush shut it all down.
Electric cars were the future in 2021.
- Tesla is a dumpster fire run by a killer clown.

The sad part is electric cars are far, far safer than combustion engines. There’s no question Reagan and Bush were horribly corrupt and counter-productive, delaying a safer future at the cost of untold lives from pollution and worse. How did America end up here? Why is it taking so long for the public to see the threat to society is NOT the electric vehicle, but one man behind a particular brand being horribly corrupt and counter-productive?

Consider how the Tesla CEO has been obsessed with aggressively censoring and falsely shaming all critics, spinning out egregious lies that put millions in harms way even as his toxic management culture has obviously led to the death of hundreds.

Source: My presentation at MindTheSec 2021

The CEO saying openly that he is ok with killing people while recklessly chasing science fiction dreams of a child is, arguably, him simply admitting he doesn’t care if he’s going to kill a lot of people. The more dead, the more I expect him to say it was worth it because… he decided killing people was the price he was willing to make others pay.

Wouter Basson, known as “Doctor Death”, led the Apartheid government clandestine chemical and biological warfare program to capture and assassinate people who had anti-apartheid thoughts: Project Coast. He did not apologize, did not show any remorse and after 13 years of fighting in court was found guilty of unethical conduct.

I’ve written extensively about such double-bind propaganda, that should be familiar to anyone who is aware of Elon Musk’s affinity for Nazism and Apartheid; “Autopilot” was loudly promoted on social media as passively preventing crashes even when actively disabled, despite evidence that neither having the software enabled nor disabled would prevent an alarming rise in fatal Tesla crashes because they are caused by overconfidence in Elon Musk.

It’s been a long road for those of us calling out the many, many gross and pernicious Tesla safety lies. With any luck we also might soon see some real bans on Tesla for its negligence and design failures, or even see the CEO go to jail.

“Over the course of many months, you used your considerable social media skills to tout your company in ways that were materially false,” said Judge Edgardo Ramos.

“What you said over and over on different media outlets was wrong,” the judge added.

No kidding, Judge Ramos is right. Look at the chart above of deaths from Tesla, then the quote from Elon Musk in 2021 telling the press that Autopilot is “not great”, and then this provably false advertisement.

Source: Twitter

Materially false. What Tesla said over and over was predatory, anti-competitive and wrong.

Tesla deaths compared to all other EVs shows the obvious problem. It’s about accountability for lies, all about the Tesla CEO who regularly lies. Source: Tesladeaths.com

Let’s give that poem another try:

In '81, dreams 'lektrified the air,
A promise of brilliance beyond compare.
Yet Reagan's hand, a chilling storm,
Snuffed out tales, left hearts forlorn.

In 2001, hopes danced anew,
Electric whispers kissed morning dew.
But Bush's reign, a sorrowful frown,
Quelled the dreams, brought them crashing down.

Enter 2021, a scene so bright,
Electric whispers in soft twilight.
Yet Elon Musk's tale, a murky shroud,
A strange reputation, a foreboding cloud.

A jester with a sinister grin,
In this electric quest, discord within.
Nature weeps, Tesla's spirit sighs,
Racist demagogue, cruelly destroying lives.