Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, built before St. Louis became a city of shmoos

ALAN writes:

It is now customary at this time of year to bemoan the latest examples of the War on Christmas.  It is important to do that, but it is more important to remember the larger cultural context and not to be preoccupied with concretes.

Lawrence Auster wrote that the America in which he and his generation were born is being erased.

For me, one of the decisive proofs that that judgment is correct was not the fact that agitators were launching numerous attacks on traditional American cultural celebrations of Christmas, but the way that most Americans responded to those attacks:  In silence or outright capitulation.

That, I thought to myself, is not the reaction of people who are confident in who and what they are.  Americans in 1955 would have laughed at anyone who launched an attack on their cultural celebrations of Christmas, or would have advised them to take a long walk off a short pier.  The mayor and businessmen in St. Louis were just such men in the 1950s.

In December in downtown St. Louis in the 1950s, you could:

 1. See streets alive with the spirit and sounds and sights and colors of Christmas, good cheer, and crowds of shoppers, families, diners, and theatergoers.

2. See a city with enough residents to support three large department stores whose craftsmen took meticulous care in decorating their windows with Christmas themes, both traditional and modern, religious and secular.

3. See a Christmas tree seven stories high and made entirely of white lights on the exterior of one of those department stores.

4. See lights in seven floors of windows in the Civil Courts building turned on at night to make a cruciform pattern.

5. See a large, beautifully-decorated Christmas tree and groups of Christmas carolers at the central St. Louis Public Library.  (In December 1947, forty thousand Christmas carolers walked throughout St. Louis and St. Louis County.)

6. Walk along a three-block long display of giant illuminated Christmas cards and decorations in the Memorial Plaza area across from City Hall.

7. See white women walking with children in hand after dark with no fear for their safety.  My mother and a friend of hers were two such women when they took me and my first-grade classmate downtown one evening in December 1956.

8. See a life-sized Nativity scene outside the Soldiers Memorial building, midway between City Hall and the Library.

9. Receive a Christmas card featuring that Nativity scene from the Mayor of St. Louis.

10. Step aboard a red Public Service Company bus for an “Around the Town at Christmas” tour of neighborhoods with outstanding lighting displays, the Christmas poinsettia display at the Jewel Box in Forest Park, and the Christmas decorations downtown, and at the end of the tour you would be offered complimentary coffee, hot chocolate, and Christmas cookies.

Today you would look long and hard for that kind of civic spirit and pride and confidence in American traditions for a national and religious holiday.  In their place, Americans today practice the Triple-A principle of social relations:  Accommodate, Appease, and Apologize.

You cannot see, hear, or do any of those things in downtown St. Louis today.  What you will see instead are dark, deserted streets, vacant buildings and storefronts, crumbling sidewalks, trendy young loft-dwellers walking their dogs, men loitering in parks and around churches, and aggressive bums looking for handouts.

It would be bad enough if a tyrannical government outlawed Christmas trees, music, and celebrations.  Communist governments did that.  But it is worse than that here, because Americans now do that to themselves.  It proves that they are morally and culturally bankrupt.  In effect, they are putty in the hands of their enemies when they react to attacks on their own traditions not with anger, resentment, and an adamantine determination to resist those agitators, but with silence or capitulation to those agitators’ demands.

The edict announced by the 33-year-old Korean woman principal of the school in Brooklyn is of course contemptible and indefensible.  But what is worse is the response of parents and teachers:  “We can’t have….” this, that, or any other another symbol of Christmas, they report in a spirit of abject surrender—as if what Leftist Thought Police tell them is acceptable and not acceptable is carved in granite; as if what a foreign principal of an American school asserts as policy is ordained in the eternal constitution of things;  as if  they are too dull-witted to imagine any alternative;  as if they have no moral or intellectual substance and no knowledge of moral and political philosophy by which to oppose those policies and the anti-American agitators who promote them;  as if they lack the courage to remove their children from public schools, abolish government power over schools, and advise the Leftists who run those schools to take that long walk.

Many opponents of the Korean principal’s policy will nonetheless fail to see that people like her are not the problem.  She is simply doing a job.  She is properly credentialed—according to current American standards for being properly credentialed (consisting mostly of bombast and pseudo-learning).  She is acting with the moral and political authority that Americans have given to her or have made it possible for her to acquire, in perfect, bureaucratic, pro forma fashion.  The fault does not lie in her or people like her.  The fault lies in modern Americans:  Trendy, stupid, semi-literate, pretentious, profoundly ignorant of morality and history, and endlessly gullible.  If she is banning American traditions in an American school, as she is, it is because they have made such abominations possible.

Sixty years ago, American teachers in American schools had no difficulty teaching effectively, leading children daily in the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and celebrating Christmas in their schools.  And there was not a peep of protest.  Why?  Because Americans had not yet been dumbed down and softened up enough to allow trained agitators and provocateurs to take over their culture.

Our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations were not so stupid or spineless.  But they were confident in who and what they were:  They were American patriots, not apologists.

“We can’t have…” means:  “We agree to be intimidated, we agree to bury and renounce our traditions, we agree to genuflect at the altar of the great pagan gods Tolerant and Inclusive.”  

I challenge any readers of The Thinking Housewife to name a worse example of people who act like a nation of shmoos.  (A tip of the hat here to cartoonist Al Capp.)

I challenge them to name worse examples of moral and intellectual cowardice than that shown by Americans’ spineless response to the demand that they make their cultural celebrations of Christmas more “inclusive”.  And precisely what does “more inclusive” mean?  It means “inclusive enough” to include garden-variety socialists and communists, militant Feminists, militant Communists, Fabian Socialists, Anarchists, One-Worlders, Globalists, Marxists, and all other groups of collectivists animated by hatred of America, Christianity, and Western Civilization.

In light of how Americans celebrated Christmas sixty years ago and how they agree not to celebrate it today, can there be any doubt that we are witness to the sorriest spectacle of capitulation in living memory?

Four years ago I wrote about the moral and cultural standards reflected in a Christmas advertisement from 1945.  (A Vintage Ad Portrays a Different Universe, Dec. 13, 2011)

The movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” was released the next year.  It is not among my favorite films, but it depicts life in a small American town called Bedford Falls.  Imagine the citizens of any such American town or city in 1946 having erected a large Christmas tree in their town square and then being told by some group of malcontents that that Christmas tree hurt their feelings and would they please take it down immediately and please not say “Merry Christmas” to anyone and not celebrate Christmas in schools?

Imagine the reaction of American men in such a town, one year after World War II ended:

Yes, they might have said to those malcontents, we will be happy to take that tree down—and then we will erect a Christmas tree twice as large, with the letters “Merry Christmas” twice as large, and with twice as many celebrations of our national and religious holiday of Christmas in our public spaces and our schools, and we will say “Merry Christmas” whenever and wherever we choose.  

That would be a proper response to anti-American agitators and provocateurs—not apologies and appeasement.

Lawrence Auster hit the nail on the head when he wrote in 2004 that Christmas in American public spaces is doomed unless there is a Counterrevolution.  But there will be no Counterrevolution within the lifetime of anyone reading these words.  It takes men to build a Counterrevolution.  But feminized boy-men and apologists are not men.  They are shmoos.

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