Good Tidings & Great Pain – Ch. 5, You are Bad

It’s still Christmas.

9 Ladies Dancing Day. I still have a few days to finish blogging Sarah Palin’s book.

I took a little intermission, but the 12 drummers loom, and it’s time to git ‘er done.

The title of Chapter 5  is “Bad News, Good News.” The last three words are unnecessary.

The chapter begins with an inspirational quote.

“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

This particular quote is taken from his famous “I have a dream” speech in 1963. Because when Dr. King addressed the multitudes on the national mall, and said we could not rest in the fight for civil liberties, he might as well have been talking about the “Happy Holidays” signs plastered all over Target. It’s pretty much the same thing.

Despite the warning, I know before I even get further than this first sentence that it is, in fact, time to take a tranquilizing drug. My apologies to Dr. King, but if he were still with us, and if he were heading into the home stretch of Sarah Palin’s Christmas tome, I believe he’d understand. My tranquilizing drug of choice for Chapter 5 is red wine.

Chapter 5 isn’t really new material for Palin, and much of it doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas. I think of this as the Promisekeeper Chapter – she promised her publisher that she’d have more than 200 pages in her miniature 6″x8″ book and had to figure out how to make good. Well, imagine if you had a little stack of index cards and each one had upon it a right wing talking point – like the ones she used to cram information before her debate with Joe Biden. And then imagine Sarah Palin eating those index cards one by one, chasing them with a giant cinnamon roll, and some hot cocoa, and then throwing up on her laptop.

Voilà. Welcome to Chapter 5.

The first several pages contain a miasma of dog-whistly buzz words. Imagine someone in the throes of a high fever, muttering in a semi-conscious delusional state while the doctor is sent for:

“Liberty… righteousness… God’s protection… preserving our republic… The Constitution… moral character… survival of liberty… Freedom is our culture… Muslim Brotherhood, No!… tyranny of the majority… freedom is the only answer…”

I think it’s some speech she gave at a school. I don’t even know at this point. My grey matter is black and blue after the relentless assault from these words masquerading as “ideas” and “sentences.”

Eventually, the fever breaks, and some kind of theme coagulates out of the fog. Remember Joe McScrooge, the angry liberal atheist who shows up in the hard-working town of Bethlehem, PA to look down his nose and sneer at people who celebrate Christmas? The only thing saving him from the annoying  joy and merriment is his iPhone app that inures his brain to NPR which prevents aneurism every time someone wishes him “Merry Christmas.”

Well, now in Chapter 5, we have “Joe the Student” as our new imaginary friend. He is here to deliver a very important message in the spirit of Christmas.

Public Schools Suck, and Should be Christian Schools Instead

Joe is a brilliant lad, raised in a fine Christian home. He comes home with a 95% on his English paper about what he did on winter break.

“What did you miss?” Mom asks, with concern, noting that little Joey did not get a perfect score. “She counted off because I called it ‘Christmas Break’ instead of ‘Winter Break.'” Joey’s faith has been stigmatized. Joey has been persecuted. Joey’s spiritual connection with his personal Lord and Savior has been devalued. Joey’s teacher may as well throw Joey to the lions herself.

“Through their word choices, our educators relentlessly tell us that some religions are worth honoring while others must be suppressed, mentioned mainly in the home.”

It’s not just a lack of Christianity in school that’s a problem. All sorts of other religions that aren’t Christianity are “worth honoring,” like um… Well, there’s…  And, uh… Didn’t we have a song about a dreidel in the program somewhere? I dunno.

As long as they’re suppressing Christians, our public school educators and their union thug bosses are happy. Mission accomplished.

“Over the course of his life in school, his teachers may not necessarily make sure he knows how to spell or do arithmetic (and if some strong-armed, union-dominated public schools don’t change, his chances to learn basic math diminish by the year), but they will certainly try to shape his views of Christianity.”

See, it isn’t just that Joey’s teachers are trying to be all “pee cee,” it’s that they (and the unions) want to make sure that Joey and his unsuspecting classmates don’t learn anything. The goal of the public school system is to make sure that Christian children have their faith ridiculed. Not learning anything is an added bonus. There are many examples of this:

Joey is not allowed to play The Little Drummer Boy on his instrument because “not everyone here believes in God.” So he has to choose some Godless pagan anthem like “Let it Snow.”

Joey is openly mocked when he says “one nation, under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance.

And all this is horribly wrong because “left to our own devices, without God in our lives, we drift toward evil.”

Don’t tell the Zen Buddhists because I don’t think those Godless heathens got the memo, and if someone tells them, they might stop meditating on compassion, and the elimination of human suffering, and go all postal or something.

Sure, they look all innocent and pacifistic-like…

“As I’ve noted, the world’s most murderous regimes – from Nazi Germany, to Stalin’s Russia, to Mao’s China – shared either a ruthless atheism, or an explicit rejection of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs (or both).”

You remember in Nazi Germany when all those Jews kinda went a little crazy and started gassing all the Christians, and heterosexuals, right? They were nothing like those nice Crusaders who explained the good news of the Prince of Peace to the eager and uninformed Muslims.

Or when the Christians settled the American West, and were greeted as liberators with candy and flowers, and they gave those nice soft blankies to the heathens in the Christian spirit of good will toward their fellow man.

Or when those irrepressible and enthusiastic Spanish gentlemen came across a whole ocean and provided free Sunday School classes for all those poor Godless Incas and Aztecs, and gave them a market for all their pretty gold stuff.

But sadly Joey’s parents don’t realize that the evil teachers are poisoning his mind because they are busy and tired. “They don’t even realize that their boy has been contaminated by this seemingly innocuous message.”

Unless people stop trying to be inclusive, and start calling it a Christmas concert, and play Onward Christian Soldiers, and speak in tongues after the Pledge of Allegiance, Joey’s little brain will be poisoned with self-loathing, and moral corruption. It’s only a matter of time before he, like Joe McScrooge before him, will learn to hate twinkling lights, and purchase a pedigreed dog with a sweater, and slam doors in the faces of innocent carolers because they are interrupting his Garrison Keillor time.

San Francisco is the most Liberal City in America, and They Suck

Someone in San Francisco was going to kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Commuters were annoyed, and someone yelled, “Just jump!” San Franciscans think Christians are hate-filled bigots, but they themselves are worse, because – an anecdote. They care more about the convenience of their commute than they do about a man’s life. And they are “the birthplace of the Summer of Love for crying out loud.” And you know what that means. Since San Francisco leans left in its politics, and since someone yelled something awful that time, then he’s probably a liberal, and that means all liberals are bad, and also hypocrites.

“But, we don’t have to go all the way to California for examples of moral decay,” Palin assures us. It’s everywhere you look. And “sexual morality? Those two words don’t even seem to go together any more.”

Sexual morality? Well, before you start doing the math with the Palins’ wedding day and the birth of their first child, or think back to her daughter’s big news during the 2008 election season, that’s as far as the whole sexual morality thing goes. One sentence. Shockingly, she does not delve into the sexual morality of anyone in particular, but just hurls that pronouncement like a stone headed right for the glass front of some house on Lake Lucille in Wasilla.

Abortion. Because it wouldn’t be Christmas without talking about abortion.

Back in the day, during the French Revolution, the radical atheist Jacobins took the name of Saints off the street signs. And was the result utopia? No, it was not. The result was the guillotine, and the mass murder and imprisonment of nuns and priests who wouldn’t become puppets of the state.

That is not happening here. We are not killing priests and nuns. But we ARE killing babies right and left for our personal convenience. And the government just allows us to do it. In her first book, Going Rogue, she talked about when she “decided” whether to have her son Trig. And she talked about allowing her daughter to “decide” what to do about her unwanted pregnancy. But the government should not allow that decision.

More wine.

The Bad News, and the difference between liberals and conservatives

Liberals believe people are good. That’s why liberals are bad. If people are left to their own devices, they are not good at all.  And anyone who believes people are good should have some sense beat into them.

Conservatives rightly believe people are bad, and without religion they will get even worse. So, as long as God and Jesus, and his army of representatives on earth are cracking the whip, telling us what to do, and knowing that we can’t be trusted the second they look away, then we’ll be OK.

People who believe people are good are bad.

People who believe people are bad are good.

Got it? Good.

Part 1 – The purchase and Introduction

Part 2 – Ch. 1  The Angry Atheist Goes to Bethlehem

Part 3 – Ch. 2 Creepy Christmas Teddy

Part 4 – Ch. 3 Wasilla nativity scene and its defense against a hypothetical threat from an imaginary person

Part 5 – Ch. 3 Part 2 (Because it’s that bad) In Praise of Offensiveness

Part 6 – Ch. 4 and the Top 10 Atrocities (Recommended by Dan Savage)

Part 7 – Intermission, and my Christmas night road trip to the nativity scene in Wasilla

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