Po-mo-mo! The Herald's editorial writer deconstructs Christmas

Let us pay homage to the blessed Julian Assange and his prophet Foucault

Let us pay homage to the blessed Julian Assange and his prophet Foucault

The Sydney Morning Herald editorial last Friday:

WIKILEAKS made public tens of thousands of US embassy cables. Properly understood, the Christmas story is a similar kind of event in which each of us is the hapless subject of a kind of cosmic disclosure. Each Christmas, the veil is drawn back and those who dare to take a look glimpse a different reality governed by entirely different rules. What Christmas exposes is the underside of rock-hard assumptions about how the world works and the ultimate impacts of power and greed. In this way, the message of Christmas is far more subversive than WikiLeaks could ever hope to be: it shows that the status quo is not the necessary order of things but only one way social reality has been constructed to achieve certain ends. And for this same reason the story is also far more liberating because it shows that the way people live is not the only way that people can live.

The reindeer are lowing. Damon Young in The Age last Monday:

MY son was recently a reindeer in a kindergarten nativity play. Over dinner, in a cautious whisper, he told us that the baby's name was a "bad word". Welcome to the modern atheist household: so irreligious, my son thinks "Jesus" is a curse. Christmas is an ambivalent time: we recognise reverence and holy days but without the baggage of Christ and his hay-bale bed.

Christ-free zone. The Age publishes a 924-word Christmas editorial without mentioning Jesus once:

IT would be foolhardy to suggest that society has divested itself entirely of the "Bah! Humbug!" mentality. Remember the "greed is good" ideology, expressed by Scrooge's American descendant Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street? There are still too many true believers who put Mammon before generosity and whose Christmases are calibrated accordingly.

Biblical sexism. Leslie Cannold in The Sunday Age yesterday:

YEARS ago, I was watching a documentary series on ABC TV called Son of God. At one point we were told the names of all of Jesus' brothers. But whether Jesus had sisters and how many, the narration continued breezily, was something we could not know because all the references to sisters in the Gospels were unclear. I tried to forget the sisters. To abandon them to the dust of the unmarked past where I'd found them, but failed. To do so made me feel complicit in perpetuating what they'd already suffered, the terrible pain of being forgotten.

Wayne Swan's Christmas message in Fairfax newspapers:

I WOULD love to be able to sprinkle some Christmas magic and fix everything, but solving these problems is harder than that, and this Christmas will still be a difficult time for many.

Zionist shark? Mohamed Zaki, Reuters, December 6:

SHARK attacks on tourists in the Red Sea have triggered a flurry of speculation as to what could have caused them, with suggestions ranging from overfishing to an Israeli plot to harm Egyptian tourism.

Zionist pussy penetrates Gitmo? Interview with Walid Muhammad Hajj, a Sudanese released from Guantanamo prison, on Al-Jazeera TV, December 12:

HAJJ: Yes. The most common method to wear down the brothers was witchcraft.

Interviewer: How did they do this?

Hajj: There were, of course, Jews among the [staff of] the Guantanamo base and they would set traps for the guys.

Interviewer: Did they ever use witchcraft on you?

Hajj: There was one attempt.

Interviewer: How did they do it?

Hajj: Once, when I was sleeping -- on the floor, not on a bed -- I suddenly felt that a cat was trying to penetrate me. It tried to penetrate me again and again. I recited the Kursi verse again and again until the cat left.

Interviewer: But there wasn't really any cat there?

Hajj: Absolutely not.

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