Season’s Greetings (and up yours)

 

Merry Christmas from San Diego

I got this via e-mail and on first consideration put it in the category of a coincidence. Kinda like this:

This is a matter of being in the right place at the right time. No further manipulation of the environment is necessary.

I have lived in the south for over forty years. The Norman Rockwell ideal for Christmas, snow, fires, harvesting maple syrup, sleigh rides are just a little to removed from the southern experience. So, in the south, we substitute; Santa with a surfboard or a palm tree decked out like a Christmas tree. Today, can look across the street and see a Cactus with a cowboy hat lit up. We have the advantage over the Yankees when it comes to live manger scenes because the livestock is more available and nobody has to stand in minus temperatures.

Can you feel Christmas coming at you in waves from the San Diego photo? I see a cultural appropriation as a line of twenty plus feet white phallic symbols march down the palisade. Who ever saw something that white stand that erect? Then there is the shape. I don’t recall seeing palm trees trimmed in such a manner, usually they widen at the top to support what little canopy that they provide. That leads to the canopy either the canopy was cut back severely or lights were used sparingly to achieve the effect.

Course anybody who draws the same conclusion stands to be labeled homophobic, it’s not nice to make fun of their icons, but put a manger scene up in this park and there will be hell to pay.

Years ago, right around Christmas time, I received a call from a clerk lurking within the depths of DPS, Austin. She had a problem with one of my reports. DPS supplied a piss poor example of report writing software to the task forces. However they didn’t have final report approval. Simply put this means reports would be forwarded to the prosecutors and courts and then later reviewed by DPS.

This minimum wage clerk decided that I had violated the DPS ban on pronouns, and I neglected to refer to the defendant by his family, given and middle name all in caps each and everytime that the defendant was mentioned. Since she was located in the basement she could hear the foundations of DPS creaking and groaning and the whole edifice that is DPS was fixing to crumble into dust, because I used a pronoun. It was imperative that I rewrite my reports removing offending pronouns and writing names backward.

I communicated rather forcibly that I would not make the current changes and planned to make no changes in the future. She was unhappy.

So, at the conclusion of the conversation,  in the spirit of the season I said to her, “You have a Merry Christmas.”

Her reply, (why did I know this?) Was an immediate and irate response, “I find that remark offensive!”

Oh, social faux pas, what was I to do? I responded with the only meaningful response possible, in that situation, “Oh yeah? How do you feel about Fuck You!” If you dig down deep enough you can find the Christmas spirit.