Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal: Understanding what we’re saying

And picking our battles

By James Knudsen

I like to think that, as an actor, I’ve gotten better. I’m no Laurence – Olivier or Joey – but I get the job done. It wasn’t always that way. I think about early productions and cringe. My performances were filled with the bush-league, amateur flaws that I see in many of the young actors I work with as a college professor of theatre. Chief among these flaws and the one that remains so prominent in my memory of my own work is that of comprehension. Me, them, the actor not comprehending or understanding what we’re saying or why we’re saying it. It’s one the most difficult concepts to communicate to my students. But it may be the most important. If the actor doesn’t understand what she is trying to convey to the audience or the other actor on stage, the meaning will be lost. Language without context is jibberish...or worse.

Merry Χmas! Yes, it is a bit late, but worse, I may have offended you. In that hale and holiday greeting you may have heard, “Repent, you Godless heathen! Behold the natal anniversary of Our Lord and Savior, χ the Lord, or you shall be cast into a lake of fire for your sins!!!! Amen.” But that’s not what I meant. My run of the mill “Merry Christmas” is meant to say “Hello, we’ve made it through another year and I hope you spend this season with those near and dear to you.” Given the benign nature of that statement, how have we arrived at this state of affairs where we find ourselves in the middle of a festive fire-fight over what constitutes acceptable speech, symbols, and song? Okay, I do know where to place the blame – Obamacare. What? Conservatives blame everything else on the Affordable Care Act, why can’t I blame SSS (Seasonal Sectarian Strife) on it as well? In truth, I think there’s plenty of blame to go around.
    The ways in which religion and its various adherents have abused their sacred trust are too numerous to mention. Everyone can produce a lengthy list of shortcomings, missteps, and evils that been committed, perpetrated, foisted, and forced upon people who did not believe – or did believe, but not precisely enough. Okay, we get it, Puritans are horrible people who fled religious persecution so they could religiously persecute others and they had terrible fashion sense and were lousy dancers – may still be for all I know. But, for the most part, the descendants of those funny-hatted fanatics are a fairly untroublesome bunch. Yes, their jingoistic patriotism can be annoying, but for the most part they are like most people, just trying to get through life. And in the course of doing that they or I might say “Merry Christmas” or “Have a joyous Easter.” That was the greeting a customer gave me years ago as he picked up his SUV from the service department where I worked. I’ve never forgotten the sincerity or the utter lack of proselytizing in his words. He just wanted me to know that he wanted me to be happy on Easter Sunday. True, I received those words having been raised Catholic, and Catholics pretty much invented Easter – with the help of the Romans. Still, some of my more stridently progressive brethren would insist that I should take exception to such blatantly religious exclamations.

Which brings us to the other side of the debate, the side I tend to vote with, dine with, and hang out with – progressives, liberals, tree-huggers, or whatever we’re going by these days. My greeting is “Happy Holidays and lighten up.” One of the skills to getting through life is learning how to pick one’s battles. Earlier this year conservatives were crowing loudly about what a schoolyard chump President Obama was in comparison to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, the schoolyard bully. Despite the domestic taunts, Obama retained his usual cool, kept his powder dry, and chose not to pick the battle that others (Napoleon and Hitler come to mind) had chosen. Putin left to his own devices will destroy his country without the help of our conventional forces. But dangle a shiny cross in front of a liberal and too often they lunge at it with single-mindedness of a large-mouth bass going after a plastic worm.

Seal used from March 1957
until September 2004

    Did you know that from 1957 until 2004 the seal for the County of Los Angeles contained a cross? Me neither, and I lived there from 1987-2010. But in all that time the various elements that make up the county seal weren’t on my radar, and it’s probably safe to assume that they didn’t create a blip for a majority of the 9 million residents who called Los Angeles County home in 2004. But the American Civil Liberties Union decided it was on their radar and filed suit to have it changed. Now there’s a Spanish Mission on the seal, with no cross on the roof. A lawsuit regarding the name of the city I called home can’t be far behind. Who can miss the obvious religious overtones of a place called The City of the Angels?

Current seal, adopted in September 2004

    Is the County’s current seal really better than the one it replaced?
    Violence, wars, and persecution fueled by religion is a real problem – is the real problem. So, why would we distract ourselves with plastic nativity scenes punctuated by plastic reindeer to make them secular enough? I would argue that we should encourage cute little religious displays. Follow my yellow brick road of reasoning to the emerald city of Bethelhem, ’neath the star with a tail as big as a kite. Religious people like to keep busy. Just look at a typical schedule – church on Sunday, Bible study Tuesday night, choir practice on Thursday night, and softball on Saturday. A properly done crèche can keep a Calvinist coffee klatch busy for months. Who has time for jihad?

Copyright © 2014 by James Knudsen