035 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 035
Air Date: December 20, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (A Christmas Carol – 1984 film starring George C. Scott)

Fred: Merry Christmas, Bob Cratchit.

Bob Cratchit: And the same to you, Mr. Fred.

Fred: Merry Christmas, Uncle.

Scrooge: Humbug.

Fred: Christmas a humbug, Uncle? Surely you don’t mean that.

Scrooge: I do. What’s Christmas but a time for buying things for which we have no need, no money. Time for finding yourself a year older, not an hour richer. If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

Fred: Come now, Uncle.

Scrooge: Fred, you keep Christmas in your way and let me keep it in mine.

Fred: Keep it, but you don’t keep it.

Scrooge: Let me leave it alone then.

Bob Metz:

Good morning, London. It is Thursday, December the 20th, 2007.

I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM where we will be with you from now until noon. No, not right wing. Just right. And welcome to the show this morning. Here on CHRW you can call in at 519-661-3600 if you want to join in on our Christmas theme today. We don’t usually talk about Christmas that often when I’m on the air. Looking at a few basic areas of discussion. Mainly the whole peace on Earth concept that we hear promoted with a little extra vigor at this time of year.

Of course, the spirit of giving and altruism versus selfishness. And we also want to talk a little later about the tragedy of Ebenezer Scrooge who you just heard from in that opening clip from the 1984 production featuring George C. Scott as Scrooge, brilliantly played. Of course, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But first of all, buying things—humbug. I don’t know how you feel about Christmas.

Christmas is basically the icon of commercialism. As I heard Michael Coren call it on a talk show the other day. I don’t think he was being sarcastic. I think he was being quite serious. That’s one of the things it is. Now, I may be mistaken, but I believe this is only the second time ever I’ve discussed any issues related to Christmas or the holiday season on any sort of public broadcast.

I recall way back when Jim Chapman, Jeff Schlemmer and myself were still doing Left, Right and Center. We spent an hour on a Christmas show discussing the question, is Santa Claus a socialist? I argued that Santa’s red suit and his propensity to give stuff away pretty well painted him as a socialist. Jeff Schlemmer took the position that Santa was a greedy capitalist for forcing his elves to work in sweatshops and make toys. The debate went downhill from there. No, I’m just kidding. It was very interesting. You’d be quite surprised at the issues that can arise.

Some of them I think we’ll touch upon today. Now, I have to be honest with you. Despite anything you might hear me saying about Christmas and a lot of people’s traditions and beliefs, I generally like Christmas and the holiday season. I get that warm fuzzy feeling that a lot of people get. It’s not a great time for everyone. There’s stress and some people are depressed at this time of year. These are the vagaries of life. When Christmas hits, that’s what you’ve got to deal with. But for me, Christmas is mostly about getting together with family and friends during the holiday season and particularly on Christmas Day if you can do so. I actually have a Christmas tree up in my house this year, complete with traditional religious symbols as some decorations and some very untraditional non-religious symbols on it as well. I’m not offended by any particular traditions of any religion or culture at this time of year, per se, since I think there are many positive associations and even truths to be found within a lot of them. However, you’ll recall that last week I started the show briefly by talking about the distinction between truths and reality. A religious celebration of the season may have some truths or moral lessons in the stories behind the celebration, but it’d be hard to argue that there’s that much reality once you get the historians talking about the real history of Christmas. You can get some pretty good arguments going on all sides of the debate. But are the lessons and the implicit messages that we pick up during the season, those that we regard as being good, are they really that?

I think it’s worth an examination. Christmas and the holiday season do have other issues associated with them, issues that extend throughout the year. So for those of you who think Christmas should be all year long, you’ve already been getting your wish for quite some time now. If you understand what I mean as we get into this a little later. But if you think Ebenezer Scrooge has reserved the best humbug for the season, consider the following humbug offered by well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, author of the best-selling book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. His article appeared in the National Post December 5th, 2007, headlined “Bah, Hanukkah!” The subheading read, “The Festive-Seeming Holiday Actually Celebrates the Triumph of Tribal Jewish Backwardness.” There has already been some response to his comments in the same paper. The headline of that reads, “Bah, Hitchens.”

In his historical look at some of the things that we celebrate this time of year—most people look at Christianity, I will be doing that too—but he talked about how the Seleucid Empire and inheritance of Alexander the Great had basically weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcision, the belief in a special relationship with God and other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith. Hitchens takes a shot at a certain rabbi, Lerner, who in calling for a restoration of what he actually calls old-time religion knows what he hates. Hitchens quotes the rabbi: “Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty, both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.” But away with all that, says Lerner, according to Hitchens, preferring fundamentalist thuggery to secularism and philosophy.

Hitchens argues that had it not been for the Roman annexation of Judea we would never have had to hear of anything about a Jesus of Nazareth or his sect, which he says is a plagiarism from fundamental Judaism. To celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism’s bastard child in the shape of Christianity. This guy doesn’t have any reservations in how he puts things. But here is the point. He says we are about to have the annual culture war about the display of crèches, mangers, conifers and other symbols on public land. Most of this argument is phony and tawdry and secondhand and has nothing whatever to do with faith as its protagonists understand it. The burning of a yule log or the display of a Scandinavian tree is nothing more than paganism and the observance of winter solstice. It makes no more acknowledgement of the Christian religion than I do. Everyone knows further that there was no moving star in the east, that Quirinius was not the governor of Syria at the time of King Herod, that no worldwide tax census was conducted in that period of the rule of Augustus, and that no stable is mentioned even in any of the mutually contradictory books of the New Testament. This is childish stuff, argues Hitchens, and if only for that reason should obviously not receive any public endorsement or financing.

The display of the menorah this season, however, has a precise meaning as an explicit celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason. He took it in the following days’ paper when a bunch of people wrote in to counter his point of view. Interestingly, most of them really didn’t touch on anything that Hitchens said. People really bring their prejudices to the table and often miss the point. However, one of the writers, Eric Lawley of York University, coordinator of Jewish studies, says Christopher Hitchens evinces no awareness of the ways in which religious traditions imbue past events and rituals with new meanings. That speaks to the fluidity of religions and the way they change over time. Things that were traditions in the past that had a particular meaning may today still be a tradition but have a completely different meaning. That’s really what happened to the whole pagan festival thing. All the other religions latched on to what people were already doing. It’s like the internet: if you want traffic you go to the site where everybody’s already at.

So that’s Hitchens letting loose on Hanukkah, though the timing of Christmas on December 25th has really nothing to do with Christ’s birthday, which seems to be the consensus among historians who generally agree that Christ would have been born in the spring, most likely in March. Though how they arrive at this conclusion I don’t know if it could be much more accurate than picking December 25th in the first place.

We do know about this time of year that it was a pagan festival date and a celebration of the harvest created by the minds and bodies of all those so-called pagans. Every year at this time we hear the usual crowd that insists: we must give to others instead of getting for ourselves; Christmas has become too commercial; Jesus is the reason for the season; put Christ back into Christmas; spiritualism not materialism. What’s eternally interesting to observe, however, is how those most identified as being secular tend to be far more tolerant of different interpretations of symbols of the Christmas season than do people who hold strong religious convictions. I heard someone use the term spiritual arrogance practiced at this time of year by some people when they want to put their meaning onto Christmas while somebody else has a different interpretation of it. That can create a lot of unnecessary conflict, which is not what Christmas is supposed to be all about in the first place.

For my part I say bah humbug to all those who condemn the commercialism of the Christmas season. I think most of them are being a little hypocritical when they do so since you can’t really separate commercialism from the whole spirit of giving and receiving. I see them as one and the same activity. When you give and you receive, what are you going to give if it’s a material thing? You’re either going to make it yourself or buy it. Even with the things we make we have to buy the material somewhere.

Human beings are commercial creatures. This is a major thing that separates us from the animals. Animals don’t trade in the sense that people do. I was looking at some statistics: the average person spends between 700 and 800 dollars each Christmas season for presents. We’re still really celebrating the pagan harvest in a way, which I see as the reality under the guise of many beliefs which I see as the symbol or the representation of the season. Everybody adopts their own symbol and belief but the reality is that we celebrate our life here on this planet. Just as other religions attach themselves to the pagan celebrations, there’s no reason why those same annual celebrations couldn’t be placed in the light of reason and a celebration of the material things that the power of science and reason and technology have brought to us. We take these things for granted and we think they’re somehow evil things.

Interestingly on this point, Freedom Party leader Paul McKeever has a fascinating YouTube presentation called Reason’s Harvest. It may interest and amuse those of you open to this point of view on the holiday season. Check it out. It’s not your usual YouTube type of presentation.

Another great symbol of Christmas is the Charles Dickens character of Ebenezer Scrooge whose name has become almost synonymous with anyone who doesn’t like Christmas or who isn’t generous and whose greed is the cause of everybody else’s misery. Do you remember Scrooge McDuck from the Walt Disney characters? He had this vault full of cash and he’d flop around in it. He never shared a cent with Donald or even with his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie. It’s a caricature but it is deeply ingrained. That’s something else I want to talk about. But is it really true? I intend to challenge this view of Scrooge and with that in mind I will return after this excerpt from the 1984 production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott in the role of Scrooge.

Clip (A Christmas Carol – 1984 film starring George C. Scott)

Charity Collector 1: Are you seeking money from me then? Many thousands are in want of common necessaries. Hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts.

Scrooge: Are there no prisons?

Charity Collector 1: Plenty of prisons.

Scrooge: The workhouses—they’re still in operation?

Charity Collector 1: They are.

Scrooge: I wish I could say they were not.

Charity Collector 2: The treadmill and the poor law are in full vigour then?

Charity Collector 1: All very busy, sir.

Charity Collector 2: A few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the poor some meat and drink and means of warmth. What can we put you down for, sir?

Scrooge: Nothing.

Charity Collector 2: You wish to be anonymous?

Scrooge: I wish to be left alone. Since you asked me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. My taxes help to support the public institutions which I have mentioned and they cost enough. Those who are badly off must go there.

Charity Collector 1: Many can’t go there and many would rather die.

Scrooge: If they would rather die perhaps they had better do so and decrease the surplus population.

Charity Collector 1: Surely you don’t mean that, sir?

Scrooge: With all my heart. Now if you would go about your business, gentlemen, and allow me to go about mine.

Ghost of Christmas Present: If he is to die, then let him die and decrease the surplus population.

Scrooge: You use my own words against me.

Ghost of Christmas Present: So perhaps in the future you will hold your tongue until you have discovered what the surplus population is and where it is. It may well be that in the sight of heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.

Bob Metz:

Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz. This is CHRW 94.9 FM where you can call in at 519-661-3600 or email us at justright@chrw.ca.

To understand a little bit about Scrooge and the whole story behind that, you have to know a little bit about the author of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens. He was born in Portsmouth, England in 1812. His father and family spent much time in debtors’ prison, which probably characterized a lot of his perspective on life. He was himself employed in a warehouse. They went through this period of struggle. After this period of struggle Dickens attended a fairly respectable private academy and then was apprenticed to a solicitor, where he began doing reporting for various London newspapers. This eventually led to his pen pictures called Sketches by Boz, which were so popular that his publishers immediately demanded more of him. From that the Pickwick Papers was born. Dickens died in June 1870. A Christmas Carol was actually a short story written by Dickens in 1843 while he was on a sojourn in Italy. The author is well known and has achieved literary immortality with Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations—considered by many critics the best of his books from an artistic standpoint.

This was the period of England’s industrialization, a period when Newtonian science unleashed mechanization which increased production in a manner previously unknown in recorded human history. It was the birth of capitalism in a certain way. This era has been misrepresented by many historians. A lot of people have a romantic idea that the period before industrialization was idyllic and peaceful. In fact that’s not accurate. I refer to an essay written in the 1960s by Robert Hessen which appeared in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal titled “Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution.” He talks about how in the transition from the pre-capitalist era to the capitalist era England’s factory system led to a rise in the general standard of living, to rapidly falling urban death rates and decreasing infant mortality, and produced an unprecedented population explosion. In 1750 England’s population was six million. It was nine million in 1800 and twelve million in 1820—a rate of increase without precedent. The proportion of children and youths increased sharply. The proportion of those born in London dying before five years of age fell from 74.5 percent in 1730–1749 to 31.8 percent in 1810–1829.

Both the rising population and the rising life expectancy prove that conditions for the labouring classes were getting better, not worse, as so many historians have portrayed. Hessen comments that one is both morally unjust and ignorant of history if one blames capitalism for the condition of children during the Industrial Revolution, since in fact capitalism brought an enormous improvement over their condition in the preceding age. The source of that injustice was ill-informed emotional novelists and poets like Charles Dickens, Mrs. Browning, fancy medievalists like Ruskin, political tract writers posturing as economic historians such as Engels and Marx, who all painted a vague rosy picture of a lost golden age of the working classes allegedly destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. Historians have not supported these assertions. Take a look at the history with common sense and it will de-glamorize that period pretty well. It’s harsh by today’s standards. In a period before that someone in the 1600s was suggesting that children should be put to work by three years of age because that’s how desperate things were. You carried your own weight or you didn’t make it.

Getting back to Scrooge, we see this image of Scrooge as a horrible person, worse than anybody on the face of the earth in the eyes of heaven. But for doing what exactly? When I was watching the movie with George C. Scott—I read the short story many years ago and the films are pretty faithful to it—Dickens was at least emotionally faithful to his character. He painted a picture of a real person. As we watch the story we learn that Scrooge’s father held him responsible for his mother’s death because she died in childbirth. Scrooge’s fiancée left him because she resented the sacrifices necessary for him to acquire and accumulate wealth. As she put it, he cares more about profit than about her. Despite the tragedies in his life he remained a profoundly moral man, expecting value for value and honoring his commitments in his business community. That he may have been lonely and withdrawn and unhappy is quite likely. But these were not the reasons he found himself subject to the moral judgments of the community and his family.

Consider the degree of his guilt in the nature of his crime. What did he really do? Why was everybody so upset with Scrooge? Because he had money, he had wealth. At no time were we led to believe that Scrooge ever defrauded anyone, failed to honor a business commitment, failed to pay his employees what was agreed, perpetrated violence on anyone, or made himself dependent on anyone else. He created his own wealth by acquiring the wisdom and habits that those who envied his wealth somewhat despised. Without his wealth Scrooge would have been of no concern to anyone. People would have left him alone, which is all he really wanted.

While that clip was playing Ira Timothy mentioned to me, sometimes I want to tell people I just want to be left alone. That’s exactly what Scrooge wanted. But for the crime of having money people would stop him in the street. This leads to the whole mentality of poverty and what causes poverty. There’s this mythology preached by socialism that people are poor because greedy capitalists have been exploiting them for untold centuries. This is just not true. For the most part most people are poor not because of what others have done to them but because of what they either have or haven’t done for themselves.

Poverty, if you’re talking about a lack of material wealth, is a natural state of existence because it requires no effort to achieve. Poverty is certainly not caused by those who choose to elevate themselves above it. However, poverty becomes visible when there is wealth created by someone with which to compare it. It is the visibility factor that causes perception-bound people to view the creation of wealth by some as the cause of poverty by others. Contrary to this dogma the elimination of poverty can only come about through the creation of wealth, which requires intelligence, initiative, risk, effort, hard work, and maybe a few more Scrooges in our society—not in the sense of his miserableness, which was cured by the end of the story. He became very generous because he got something personal out of it and broke through the barrier of his own misery, which had nothing to do with earning the money per se.

To illustrate that socialist mentality towards poverty, consider two castaways on a deserted island, Peter and Paul. While Paul chooses to wait to be saved, Peter plants a garden, builds a hut, saves his produce for harder times. Begrudgingly Peter shares some small percentage of his produce to keep Paul from starving but gives Paul no more than necessary. Paul has no hut, no stored food, no means of production. A socialist would view this situation and see economic disparity. Peter is wealthy while Paul exists in poverty. Poor Paul must rely on charity for his subsistence—a social injustice. Instead of properly condemning Paul for failing to take responsibility for his own survival, the socialist would morally condemn Peter for being productive and for not being concerned enough with the plight of Paul. Whenever you have to justify robbing somebody unjustly—if you want to rob Peter to pay Paul—it is important that you morally denigrate Peter. It is a prerequisite of socialism that productivity and the creation of wealth be viewed in a negative moral light. That’s so much what’s happening behind the Green Movement today. Anytime you want to breathe it’s becoming a sin because it creates CO₂. Is it any wonder with this kind of thinking that socialism is a failure both in theory and in practice?

We take a break and come back after this.

Clip (A Christmas Carol – 1984 film starring George C. Scott)

Scrooge: Don’t lock up a moment early.

Bob Cratchit: You want all day tomorrow, I suppose?

Scrooge: If it’s quite convenient, sir.

Bob Cratchit: It’s not convenient and it’s not fair. If I were to hold back half a crown from your pay for it you’d think yourself ill-used, I’ll be bound. But you don’t think me ill-used when I pay a day’s wages for no work.

Scrooge: Christmas comes but once a year, sir.

Bob Cratchit: A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December. No, I suppose you must have it.

Clip (Stand-up comedy routine)

Comedian: I hate the shops, especially holidays when you have to get gifts. I never get good gifts. I think the best gift I ever gave—and Dad’s getting up there, getting older, you never know—so the kids all got together. We said this year let’s do something special for Dad, something he wouldn’t do for himself. So we put him in the home. See, that’s a gift that keeps on giving. My dad was so happy I never saw him cry like that.

Bob Metz:

That sort of leads into the theme of our next section: altruism versus selfishness. Is it really better to give than to receive? It’s a premise we accept without even thinking about it.

Welcome back. I’m Bob Metz, Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM. We will still be with you for another 25 minutes or so till noon. 519-661-3600 is the number to call if you want to join us. This question actually came up when we were talking with Jeff Schlemmer in that show on whether Santa Claus was a socialist. The issue was brought up: is it better to give than to receive? We always hear this basic axiom as though it’s better to give than to receive. It’s almost the mark of the season. But consider what that might mean. There’s a lot of use of altruism in giving. You have to be careful you don’t use it as a weapon or as a symbol of status or power, which is often what a lot of giving is about, or doing something for yourself, as was humorously illustrated in that little clip.

When you say it’s better to give than to receive, if by better you’re referring to some kind of higher moral plane, then clearly the person on the receiving end of the gift would be on a lower moral plane. If it’s better to give than to receive that means the giver is better than the receiver. If by better we’re referring to the giver having greater wealth, then again the recipient is the person of lesser wealth. Either way there’s a humiliation theory behind giving, which is something author Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle talked about, especially when governments do foreign aid. They can often be doing a lot of damage in terms of relationships with countries because it may not be the compassionate gesture it appears. Often giving gifts, especially when governments do it, has conditions attached and usually the giver gets a little bit more than he’s giving.

Another person that talked about altruism on a much more personal level is writer John Macmurray. One of the commonest ways of being self-centered is to put other people in your debt by doing things for them. This refers to a lot of people who live very unreally. They have an unreality quite compatible with what is ordinarily called unselfishness or altruism. However good they may appear on the surface, in a lot of ways they’re turned in upon themselves. He refers to this kind of thinking—of always doing things for others—as the voice of social morality.

The voice of social morality always talks about service, self-devotion, self-sacrifice. Our duty to serve others, to serve our country, to serve humanity. It tells us to think of ourselves always as members of the community and of the community as developing towards a higher type of human life sometime in the future. It is a morality of service and he calls it a false morality. That’s what you always hear when governments and politicians and tyrants have asked citizens to sacrifice—it was always for something that would pay off in the future that very rarely did. It’s always that future thing that you never get. You don’t get to live life for itself. Macmurray asks why the ideal of social service and self-devotion to the progress of humanity is a false ideal.

Because we can’t be unselfish if no one is prepared to be selfish. If you want to make the service of others an ideal of good conduct then you’re going to have to insist upon a lot of people being selfish enough to let others serve them. Normally that’s not a problem. We all want someone to serve us and we normally do that on a free market through trade. This morality of service and self-sacrifice to the community is a denial of human reality because it treats people as a means to an end. If men are at their best when they are servants then slavery is the proper condition of human life. If this purpose is not their own but the purpose of society or government or some other agency then that’s even worse still.

Now we come to more current time talking about giving and altruism. I ran into this fascinating article from The Economist under the Science and Technology section: “Blatant Benevolence and Conspicuous Consumption.” Charity is just as selfish as self-indulgence. Altruism, according to the textbooks, has two forms. One is kin selection or nepotism. The second is reciprocal altruism—you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. It relies on trust and good memory for favors but is otherwise not much different from simultaneous collaboration in that the benefit exceeds the cost for all parties.

They identify a third sort of altruism peculiar to humans: altruism towards strangers, for example charity. At first sight helping charities looks to be at the opposite end of the selfishness spectrum from conspicuous consumption. In a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Dr. Geoffrey Miller has studied altruism towards strangers and discovered that this type of altruism has a lot to do with human mating rituals. Men and women express this sort of altruism quite differently—men in the form of profligate spending, women in the form of being very helpful and volunteering. In the experiments only when it counts sexually are men profligate and women helpful. These studies support the idea that what women want in a partner is material support while men require what they refer to as self-sacrifice. Conspicuous consumption allows men to demonstrate the former. Blatant benevolence allows women to demonstrate the latter.

There is one confounding observation: the most blatant benevolence of all—that of billionaires giving away fortunes or heroes risking their lives—is an almost entirely male phenomenon. I once remember an author—might have been Robert Ringer—asking should you buy your friends? Is buying your friends the right thing to do? He would argue yes, it’s exactly what you do. That’s what makes them your friend. We’re not always talking about money when we’re talking about values.

We’re going to continue with our theme on Christmas and get to the big one—peace on Earth—right after this break.

Clip (Stand-up comedy routine)

Comedian 1: I’ve had weird Christmases. Our first Christmas together, kind of bizarre—my new wife and I had Christmas in Millet, Alberta. Yeah, obviously you guys do not know where that is. Oh man, Millet, Alberta—swimmin’ pools, movie stars. The oddest gift that I got—I could have a vasectomy for Christmas. Kind of the gift that stops the giving, really.

Clip (Comedy sketch)

Speaker 1: Good morning, Martin’s Laugh, and salutes the spirit of Christmas. It’s a great time of the year to do that. It sure looks strange seeing a Christmas show on spring reruns. Well, never mind about that. The whole point is Christmas shouldn’t just be in December but it should be all year long.

Speaker 2: Wow, we couldn’t afford that.

Speaker 1: Well now you see, too many people forget what Christmas spirit is really all about.

Speaker 2: Oh, tell me about it, won’t you?

Speaker 1: Well I’m not sure but I fully intend to.

Speaker 2: I thought you would.

Speaker 1: Yes. Now it all started in a little town in Bethlehem.

Speaker 2: It all started in a little town in Bethlehem.

Speaker 1: A little town in Bethlehem—a good name for a song. Now many years ago the world was troubled with many pressing problems.

Speaker 2: Well no wonder they didn’t have drip-dry suits then.

Speaker 1: Now this is serious. The people were rioting in the streets, there was civil disorder, injustice, oppression of minority groups.

Speaker 2: Well I’m certainly glad they cleared all that up.

Speaker 1: Yeah, we should have cleared all that up, eh?

Bob Metz:

You’re listening to Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM. Thanks for joining us. We’ll be here for another few minutes—ten or eleven minutes or so. Christmas should be all year long and peace on Earth. These are themes we hear at this time of year.

I clipped an article—Michael Coren, November 3rd, London Free Press. “Brit Leftists Go Bonkers.” They’re ready to ditch Christmas to improve race relations. A new report from the think tank of the governing Labour Party in Britain states that Britain is no longer a Christian nation and Christmas should be downgraded in favour of festivals from other religions to improve race relations. If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas the report says public organisations should mark other religious festivals too—which means more government spending and more paid holidays. That’s the real reason we see that spirit of giving coming from that group. Coren says the pre-enlightened Ebenezer Scrooge has told us what Britain should become. But unlike the products of Charles Dickens’ generous and compassionate imagination the spirits behind this report are nasty, intolerant and crude. So what of Canada? There might still be time to save Canada the great but only if we jettison the humbug.

Here’s a little bit of politics about giving. Dana Knight of Gannett News Service, London Free Press December 10th: greeting cards at holiday time can offend. Sending a religious card with good intentions that ends up offending a client could damage or even destroy a client relationship. It could be a sign that you don’t know the client as well as you should—if you send a Hanukkah card to a Christian or a Christmas card to someone of the Jewish faith. The purpose of greeting cards in the workplace is about strengthening relationships. Same day’s Free Press, another heading: ethics attached to receiving and giving gifts. Accepting gifts that are over the top or ones that may force you to move your personal integrity meter in the wrong direction may eventually come back to harm your career. Giving also raises ethical questions. A gift should be something that deepens the connection, something meaningful and isn’t meant to take advantage of or influence another person. One of the rules is that you should give a gift to a person that they could afford on their own—unless it’s a close relationship. In an arm’s-length distance you can see the danger. Giving and receiving is not as simple as it seems. That might be part of what we hear in that Christmas tension that goes around in the season.

In terms of peace on Earth I refer again to Howard Bloom from The Lucifer Principle. There’s a real flaw behind our belief that by eliminating hunger and elevating the income of the Third World peace will descend upon the earth, or that by eradicating starvation and poverty at home muggings and murders will melt away. History indicates that a rising standard of living and a bigger plate of food may be the very catalyst that unleashes a storm of violence. War and dreams of conquest are fueled less by poverty than by the heavy whiff of new riches. In other words, one nation may be relatively poor to another. They notice another nation getting riches—there’s a reason to go and attack them because we can get some booty.

He says this about foreign aid as well. Our gifts are development funds designed to bring peace by uprooting the very causes of discontent and war. We call this new form of aid foreign aid. In many cultures, however, giving things to people is a way of humiliating them—a sneaky technique for drawing attention to the recipients’ lowliness on the hierarchical ladder. Compassionate gestures often have a purpose we seldom admit: they confirm our feeling of superiority, gratifying us with the certainty that those who receive our help are indeed below us. This often makes the recipients loathe us. They gladly exchange the food and blankets we send for the opportunity to look down upon their benefactors. The fathers of our foreign policy feel that by alleviating hunger, poverty and disease we can pull the pins out from under the urge to shed blood and make the Third World love us. This philosophy has not worked. Humiliation and the insidious force of the giveaway can trigger superorganistic cataclysm.

So I guess this Christmas you better make sure you don’t trigger a cataclysm by giving the wrong kind of gift this year. I’ve only got a couple of minutes left in the show and I haven’t really talked about too much.

First of all, if I’m correct—Ira, you can correct me if I’m incorrect—I understand that this will be our last live show for a couple of weeks and there will be the best of Just Right for the next two weeks. Then I’ll be back live January the 10th.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to discuss a little bit about the show itself. I’d certainly like to say a heartfelt thank you and Merry Christmas not only to you folks who are listening but to CHRW, the station, and to the staff—to Ira Timothy who’s been operating the show for quite a while, to Zoltan Horcsok who was the program director when I came on and invited me to come on board as a volunteer broadcaster, to Alex G who operated a couple of my shows—my very first one I called her by the wrong name on the air—to Michael Brown the current program director, Grant Stein the station manager. They’ve allowed me to get my weekly venting fix here on the radio station.

The show was an unexpected opportunity for me when it arose right after finishing up with Jim Chapman early in the year with Left, Right and Center. I had no idea when I started what shape the show would take. It kind of evolved very much into what it is. I think it’s going to evolve a little bit more in the coming year. I’m completely dependent upon the people around me who look after all the other issues. I just walk in, sit down, yak, and walk right back out.

In upcoming shows in the new year I’ve been trying not to repeat issues too often. There are certain themes that come up—global warming was one of them—but I generally like to get at differing angles even on the same subject matter. I only do the show once a week so I cannot be commenting on every daily happening. I have to pick larger issues that interest me. If I don’t find it interesting or significant I really can’t talk about it too much. Another thing the show has been for me is a brush-up on a lot of the things I talk about. I don’t memorize all this stuff. Sometimes I have to do a lot of research and it refreshes my mind on a lot of the basics. If you think back a couple weeks I did a show on Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. You know these things and they’re part of your being if you’re aware of them but you don’t remember the details of everything. This show is really a lot about philosophy more than anything else. We’ve talked about television shows, politics, art—a lot of things—but they’re all related because it’s all part of the human condition. I try to look at it from a philosophic point of view, which is something I can offer that I don’t hear too many other people in the community doing.

Certainly over the next year I’ve got a lot of issues we haven’t even touched upon. We haven’t touched upon some of the big ones—even the death penalty or abortion, those life-and-death issues. I’m getting into a concept where in talking about left and right—the name of this show is Just Right and we’ve talked about defining left and right in slightly different parameters—but I also thought of looking at politics in a sense of colors. Liberal is red, conservative is blue, there’s green, black and white. You can almost identify ideas by colors once they become associated with them. Certainly a lot of issues we want to talk about will be about economics. We’ll continue talking about drug laws and religion and faith—all those kinds of things not talked about that often in normal radio media. One theme I want to get into next year, perhaps over a few shows, is the whole concept of majority rule versus democracy.

Ira’s given me the signal. It’s time for me to say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, have a great time, folks, and join us again next week.

Clip (Laugh In)

Comedian: I think they should move Christmas to July. Then the stores aren’t so crowded.