Welcome to Holiday Desolation

We may not be even two weeks into the new year, but for those of you who haven't noticed it, we are firmly into the season of Holiday Desolation.  It's not really fair when you come to think of it, especially when you consider that we end each year with four of the biggest holidays.  

Halloween in October is fast becoming the biggest holiday of the year in terms of the decorations that we buy (especially when you add in the personal decorations, better known as costumes).  Add in what we spend on candy for the rug rats, and it's likewise becoming one of the most expensive holidays of the year.

Thanksgiving follows just four weeks later (depending on the vagaries of the calendar and the municipal trick-or-treat rules); and earns its credentials not only through sheer caloric intake, but through bringing families together once a year long enough to remind them of why they don't do so any other time of the year.  Having spent the past couple of weeks gorging ourselves on chocolate confections left over from the previous holiday (mostly because we again forgot to turn the porch light on and let the little beggars know we were open for business), we can now look forward to tryptophan induced somnolence while likewise over-indulging in parades and football games.

Following again just four weeks later is the grandaddy of them all, Christmas.  It's that one that Lucy defines all too aptly in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as:  "You know, Santa Claus and ho-ho-ho, and mistletoe and presents to pretty girls."  It's the holiday upon which greedy capitalism reaches its excessive real-life realization, not through the necessity of buying Lucy her hearts desire; but through those, "He went to Jared's" efforts that a man makes on his way home from the Lexus dealership.  After all, what way is there to celebrate a pagan, religious, and secular holiday than through automobiles and coal (wait, I thought only bad people got that) which gets put through enormous pressure and temperature (kind of like the credit card payments afterwards).  

Lest we think that rest is ahead, exactly one week later we're joined by an old guy thinking he's at a college toga party and a baby wearing a diaper, black tie, and a top hat informing us that it's last call and extolling us to have just one more cocktail in the hopes that we can spend the first day of the new year trying to get someone to bail us out of jail.  Then what?    

After celebrating for the last three months straight, what do we get in January?  Well there's Inauguration Day, but it's a politician's holiday celebrated only by the people who voted for the guy being inaugurated.  The only people who get the day off are politicians in Washington DC; with exception of incoming president, who has to take an oath and give a speech.  Martin Luther King Jr Day makes an appearance on the day after this year (which is curiously also celebrated as Robert E Lee's Birthday in AL, AR, GA, and MS), but as of yet this holiday barely rates a mattress sale.  (It's not a real holiday if there's not a mattress sale.)   But that's it for the month .... nothin'.

It picks up slightly in February with a ridiculous holiday about a weather-predicting rodent in a town in PA that 98% of Americans couldn't spell without looking it up.  If it weren't for Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell effort (and my son's coming nuptials), few if any would care about it now.  Then along comes yet another New Year, the Chinese New Year (after Jan 1 and the Orthodox New Year); followed by Lincoln's Birthday, which was so important that we've recently dropped it like a bad habit to combine it with Washington's birthday in some meaningless thing called 'President's Day'.  Of course there's always Mardi Gras, but only if you happen to be in the right part of the South. over-serve yourself, and trade the beads that we used to be able to buy entire islands for (like Manhattan) for the glandular exposure that we used to see in National Geographic. (Who may have been the same people we bought the islands from.)

Of course there is one possible holiday entrant in February, Valentine's Day.  Originally named for one of the two Catholic saints of the same name (nobody's sure which),  it has now become little more than a 'Hallmark Holiday" of love and romance in which cards, candy, and of course vast quantities of jewelry are purchased by men for women to make up for the really crappy things that they will undoubtedly do the to them rest of the year.  In a rather twisted association, this day of amorous behavior is also remembered for the 1929 massacre of seven mob guys, allegedly by members of Al Capone's social circle who were apparently not all that fond of them.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must point out that I married my first wife on a Valentines Day.  I deny the conjecture that has since arisen that I did so in order to avoid having to purchase both a Valentine and Anniversary gift annually; and wish to state that I did so only because a was young, innocent, and a sentimental slob at the time.  I can further state for the record that I am no longer .... young.

With that, February has nothing further to contribute.  Neither does March for that matter.  Oh sure some of the more favored celebrate my granddaughters birthday on the same day that they let everybody dress up in green on the 17th to celebrate an Irish saint that was actually English (Ireland was too poor at the time to afford its own saints).  In a twisted US observance, green Budweiser and Miller is consumed in practices which would in fact considered sacrilege on Emerald Isle. (Drinking Budweiser and Miller is only a venal sin, but dying it green in a misguided effort to make it sacramental or palatable in some way however makes such a sin a mortal one indeed.)  It's not until the end of the month when another pagan holiday that's been co-opted by a religious holiday is celebrated as a secular holiday (confusing, isn't it?) that we get our first real break in the month's of long monotony.  It's the end of May however before we once more resume normal holiday observances (I refuse to accept Cinco de Mayo, Arbor Day, or April 15th's Tax Day). 

Personally, I find the whole concept ridiculous.  What better time to reward citizens and improve their state of mind than with holidays during the gray days of winter.  When are breaks from the mindless tedium of everyday existence required more than during the time of year when we are weary from shoveling snow, depressed from the lack of daylight, and all but suicidal from having filled out our income tax forms.  But no, in typically misguided government fashion, we get far more mandated days off when the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the weather is warm.  

You know, perhaps we could get Congress to pass a law mandating a holiday during this period of holiday desolation.  Who better than they to pass something truly pointless for no better reason than to win approval from voters that who think less favorably of them than of head lice (understandable, when you consider that you can get rid of head lice).  How about the:  Half-assed Ordinance to Lighten Individual Drudgery Arbitrarily and Yearly Act?


           

Fiscal Cliff ... Phoooey

(Please be aware that the occasional use of sarcasm is likely in this effort.  While I can promise you that it's there, I feel no obligation to specifically point out its use.)

The end of 2012 is almost upon us, and quite frankly there's not much to look forward to. After all, we're just about to see the last date with the same numbers that we're ever going to in our lifetimes (12-12-12).  And if that weren't depressing enough, I just discovered that we won't actually have Dick Clark this year to host "Dick Clark's New Years Rockin' Eve" from Times Square.  I mean sure, he's got a great excuse and all, having achieved room temperature in April; but I'm not sure that gives him the right to mess up a show that still has his name on it.  Now there's nothing to look forward from this mostly awful 'Made-for-TV' event than Ryan Seacrest and a bunch of mostly talentless performers (which actually sounds like an episode of American Idol, but that's another story).

So what do have we got to look forward to.  New Year's Eve is a Monday (not one of your prime drinking days), which probably leads to a mid-week hangover for those who insist on over-indulging despite the poor timing. Then there's a couple of weeks of screwed up checks (at least for those of us who don't pay all of our bills electronically), with the scribbled out corrections of the date, shrugs, and occasional apologies to clerks and grocery check out people who don't give a crap anyway.  Oh yeah, and then there's this pesky Fiscal Cliff thing.  I mean wow, what a fuss!

I suppose I don't want to give more to the government in taxes than the next guy (well, maybe except for that Warren Buffet character), but I figure that if any of us has to pay more, all of us should.  I mean hell, Democrats have been telling us for years that things haven't been the same since Bill Clinton was president anyway (and certainly they wouldn't lie about such a thing).  So being a big fan of "The Good Old Days", I say that we all ought to climb in the 'Wayback Machine' and take a trip back to the Magical tax rates of the 90's.  Of course I'd like to take government spending levels back to the same period as those tax rates, but that's just the kind of nostalgia fan I am.

I'm also a realist however, so I know that the government needs to take more of my money.  After all, without it how could they afford all the hiring that they've been up to again lately? (How else are they going to get the unemployment rate down?)  If not for government, who else could be counted to funnel money into solar energy companies that, when they're not shifting their manufacturing to China, are going bankrupt and sticking us for the money they the got from the feds?  How else could the government afford to pay farmers for crops they aren't growing?  Who else could continue to pay ethanol producers to make a fuel that still isn't affordable (even with the federal subsidies), causes more pollution in its production than the gasoline it replaces, wrecks the cars that attempt to use it, and drives up the price of the crops that the farmers do plant since they're being put in a gas tank instead of someone's pie hole.  Hell, they've got the system so well rigged that they can drive up the price of the fuel by forcing the mandatory use of ethanol, drive up the price of groceries being made with whatever's left; and ignore what it does to the cost of living, since neither fuel nor food count when the government calculates this rather vital number.   

But let's get past the nonsense of government's sad attempts to pick winners and losers in the game of capitalism. (Not that with their record, winners comes up often or that anyone's going to let them pick horses at the track because of their past performance ).  The US government has long sponsored pure science as well as commercial opportunities.  Oh sure, we've abandoned spending most of cash we once put in our space program, and NASA with it; but there's still a lot going on in important pure research.  For example, how else than by spending $3 million would we know how far a shrimp can run on a treadmill, or through a $300K grant learn how humans ride bikes?  (Personally, will all those legs I'd like to see a study with the shrimp on the bikes, but that's just how an inquiring mind like mine works.)  How about the $3 million given to the University of CA at Irvine to play video games, the $700K in government grants the University of New Hampshire is using to study methane emissions from dairy cows, or the $615K in taxpayer funding the University of CA at Santa Cruz got to digitize Grateful Dead T-shirts, tickets, and T-shirts?  Oh but there's more!  There's the $1 million in federal funds used to create poetry to raise environment awareness at the Little Rock, New Orleans, Milwaukee, and Chicago Zoos, or the $442K that the NIH is using to study male prostitutes in Viet Nam to name of few of the thousands in recent budgets.

And of course the government needs money to pay the 535 legislators that approve all of this money being spent on such worthy efforts in the first place.  House Speaker John Boehner's making $223K, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's right behind by pulling down a little over $193K, and all the rank (pun intended) and file legislators are knocking back $174K.  (And boy, they're worth it, aren't they?)  How can we expect to be able to afford such high-priced talent if we all don't redistribute a little wealth to those that are making far more than the rest of us (but just under the $250K line used to designate 'the two percent')?  And now that so many of them are retiring because of the toxic atmosphere they've created in Washington DC, there's some pretty fat pensions that have to paid to those who've made millions trading on the inside legislative and regulatory information they've gathered while in office.

So I say Phoooey to the current nonsense and worry being spewed about driving off the Fiscal Cliff in 2013.  I say that when we see that cliff, let's punch the gas and make a Dukes of Hazard, General Lee effort at the jump!  It's time to stand up and be counted for a government that's doesn't appear to be doing so well in the polls and fro some reason seems a bit short of cash. This is the Christmas season after all and our government needs us.  (Oops, did I just violate Jefferson's principle of the 'Separation of Church and State' by mentioning a religious holiday and government in the same sentence?  Sorry ....)  I say we all show the spirit of giving that Americans are famous for (even evil Republicans) and put some of that money we were going to use for holiday charitable donations (no doubt for no better reason than so we could write them off our taxes) and presents for the kids and put it instead where it can do the most good; in the hands of our trusted and respected politicians.  After all, who better than they would know what's best for us.  Besides, with just a little bit of luck, they might give a little bit of it back to us.