Richard Fernandez:
Has Christmas has become a kind of “micro-aggression”? It seems to be bringing out the worst in people.
France is on high alert following a string of inexplicable attacks [1] on civilian crowds. “Authorities said a driver crashed his van into a crowded Christmas market before stabbing himself several times. He is among five people hospitalized in serious condition. Local prosecutor Brigitte Lamy said the incident was an isolated incident and ‘not a terrorist act’, though police investigations were continuing late Monday.”
In Nantes, bystanders ran toward the attacker as he was stabbing himself, said Mohammed Bader Ghegate, one of the witnesses who ended up at the man’s side. Contrary to media reports, Ghegate said the attacker did not say `God is great’ in Arabic.
“I said that to myself: `Allahu Akbar, help us so there is no bloodshed,”‘ Ghegate told The Associated Press….
The Nantes attack came one day after another driver ran down 13 bystanders in the eastern city of Dijon, and two days after Bertrand Nzohabonayo, a 20-year-old recent convert to Islam, knifed two police officers outside the city of Tours before being killed by police.
The Guardian [2] quotes the French prime minister says the country will go on high alert. “Patrols by police and gendarmes will concentrate on areas where there are a lot of people: shopping areas, city and town centers, stations and transport networks.” It won’t be long before what used to be called Christmas will be too dangerous to celebrate. It might even be construed as a form of hate speech.
For one lady, it already is. Latham Hunter writing in the Hamilton Spectator [3] argues that it is almost impossible to escape offense because Christmas is about the ‘patriarchy’, she argues.
It’s impossible to “do” Christmas without running into one patriarchal construct after another. Aside from singing the praises of a man who rules over everything (there really are the most gorgeous choral renditions out there), even the secular Christmas songs are ubiquitous in their praise of male characters: “Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and of course, Santa Claus. Santa Claus, a white male who, by the way, gets all the credit for labor overwhelmingly done by women.
Hunter, a professor of communications and cultural studiess, explains it all. Things will never be the same again. Bet you thought “White Christmas” was an innocent tune. I’m sure you thought Santa’s “Ho ho ho” was a laugh. They’re “dog whistles” all of them.
If there are any gods left in today’s secular world, they all come from the Marvel Universe. Timothy Lee at Vox [4] asks “Did North Korea really hack Sony?”
One possible explanation is that North Korea only got involved in the attacks after the initial attack. Perhaps someone totally unconnected to Pyongyang compromised Sony’s network and then sold control and data to the North Korean government. Or perhaps the attack was carried out by a hacker group that sometimes does work for the North Korean government, but North Korea only became directly involved after the initial announcement. That would explain why they seemed to use some of the same tools and infrastructure.
The obvious answer is “no”. It’s common knowledge that a group calling itself the “Guardians of the Peace” really took down Sony. Fortunately according to the Daily Beast [6], today two hacktivist groups ”one, called Lizard Squad” and another called Gator League” took responsibility for North Korea’s Internet outage. Christian iconography is dead. Today Xmas means the X-men, women and transgenders. Ragnarok is the The Guardians of the Peace vs the Gator League and the Lizard Squad
Aaron Blake [7] notes that even the traditional virtue of generosity has been transformed. Vermont recently announced it would shelve plans to implement a Single-Payer health care system because it would cost as much as all the money the state already raises and spends. Sarah Kliff at Vox [8] consoles Vermont by noting that half of all countries which attempt single payer fail.
