Kia ora Comrades, Merry Christmas to you and your whanau.
Good will and peace to all.
Remember- It’s not Christmas until you have a huge argument defending Fairytale of New York, Love Actually and eating anything that casts a shadow.
Today Joseph and Mary would have to pass through 15 checkpoints to get from Nazareth to Bethlehem, but seeing as most of Gaza has been flattened by a war crime level response by Israel, plus the ethnic cleansing, you could make it a round trip within 30 minutes now.
The realistic nativity scene looks like this…
…how soul disturbingly sad.
Radio 1 to air censored version of Pogues’ Fairytale of New York
Offensive words in the Christmas song to be removed or altered for Radio 1, but remain unchanged on Radio 2
For many Christmas is a Season of Good Will, family, friends, whanau. A time to sit in each others company and celebrate the shared harvest of the year. It is joyful, it is welcoming, it is us at our best as a species.
For some however, it is a season of estrangement, a bitter cold loneliness whose each passing hour gnaws relentlessly into bone marrow that never heals. A 24 hour carnival of wounds made mockingly humiliating by the the cheer of the vast majority.
For those some, Christmas is a struggle of bruises with gift wrapped injury. For them, the bitter sweet working class lament ‘Fairytale of New York‘ sums up all the wasted hope of Christmas and allows pain to sit at the table in an exhausted detente with our more damaged angels.
Micro aggression policing Millennials decry this song for its hate speech language of ‘Slut’ and ‘Faggot’ and demand with all the nuance of Mao’s cultural revolution that this relic of pre-woke be burned at the virtual signalling stake.
When those some sing the insults with such ferocious gusto, it’s not aimed at homosexuals or women, those are insults being screamed at themselves once the distance between what was hoped and what was delivered is measured from heaven to the gutter.
Those some will not stop singing this pain, because this pain is the only guest at the table.
Finally, a NZ poem for Christmas.
A Christmas Wish
‘Not mistletoe and holly
To ward off melancholy
Carols in the chapel
Plum pudding and crabapple.
But to camp for a week
By a mountain creek
With fresh taken trout
And tinned pears to eat
With tea boiled in a billy
And the morepork in the gully.’
James K Baxter
A sardonic and depressed festival of late stage capitalism consumerism on a burning planet to you all!
A toast to your good health and peace on earth and good will to all.
Season’s Greetings Comrades!
TDB 2024
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“Bigger Economy Everyone”
How many people killed this year due to religion? A million? Two? And now we’re all supposed to come together in love and hope and spirit magic? Please
But which religion? And did the number killed outweigh that of atheist/secularist killings?
Bah, humbug.
Happy Yulefest.
Didja know Mary was going to call him Basil until she stubbed her toe on the manger?
Thanks for the Year Martyn
Ha. I like that,definitely will be added to my list of quotable qoutes
Wishing all a time of togetherness with people you want to be with, conviviality and food and some home-made cordials, music and singing would be nice . Cheers all.
TDB A very touching post. All the best balance for 2025. The balance between
shock at the evidence of continuing giant strides of technology and armoury and obsessive gathering of assets to one’s chest (Gollum and my precious), plus a wariness of letting the poison of constant negativities and hates etch their way into one’s soul; and a desire to avoid it all with trivialities and self-centredness, having yet a realisation that some trivialities and joy and a bit of naughtiness are essential to balance, along with compassion and amusement at oneself and of others, a will to acquire skills and create, will likely make for a full, vital, enjoyable, lovable and loved human being.
It is a mighty task, and I wish us all well as we try it, comparable to the tightrope feats between buildings high above ground, or across Niagara Falls. Maybe we all need to be Houdinis, slipping out of the wretched ideas of the past, but still wearing tight fitting garments of reason and humanity, crafted over centuries, that never wear away.
Blah blah serious stuff always seems so overblown even turgid. But for Christmas I offer a present of two words – opposites, on google. Each has a trail of other words in different levels of intensity. (It’s amazing how we have all these words and still can’t build the framework of a rational and enjoyable world using them effectively and maturely.) The words are boring and pretentious, with their comet trail of synonyms. I think when these come to mind about someone or thing we need to check what habitual path our minds are taking. We need to go differently now* and examine what is right and best and need a majority of serious thinkers to balance the convention-followers, who Know and are set in their ways and beliefs; more than 51% majority also as this is important stuff. our lives and the future, our humanity, our finer intellectual side.
*‘THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY there. ‘ The immortal first line to L. P. Hartley’s [1953 novel] ‘The Go-Between’ wistfully condenses the problems inherent to memory and history.
The Past is a Foreign Country – The White Review
The White Review
https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/the-past-is-a-foreign-country/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Between
Compare with AI overview on google.
The full saying is “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” which is a line from L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between,” meaning that the past is so different from the present that it feels like a completely different place with different customs and ways of doing things….
That was a nice poem of James K Baxter’s. I was reading about Peter Cape, songwriter and much more who died in 1979. his is something from him that is an indication of how we have to be if we are going to survive the depredations of technology and the destabilisation of the democratic culture when the emphasis is upon acquiring money as riches, instead of seeing each other’s wonderful persona as the true or potential riches shown up in their creativity.
In one of these books, ‘Artists and Craftsmen in NZ’ (1968), he wrote that…
“As we grow from the simplicities of post-pioneer living into a more complex society, and as we grow more aware of our national identity, we will become more willing to accept the expression of these things in the arts.”
Peter was writing about potters and painters, but I think his words apply to us song-writers as well…https://folksong.org.nz/petrcape.html
Try – Taumata,,,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQMhmMnZXrs
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