The Sunday before
Christmas, I could have tried to find a solution to the fiscal cliff
situation and emailed it to Washington, D.C., or I could watch “The
Sound of Music,” a four-hour special on ABC.
The movie came out the
year after my son was born. I added the record album to my
collection of show tunes: “Oklahoma,” “Carousel,” “The Desert Song,”
“West Side Story” and others.
Someone was saying last
week that our best Christmas memories aren’t about material things,
but about the pleasure of being with family, singing carols, baking
cookies. Those are all nice, but my favorite Christmas memory was
getting a hi-fi, which I should probably explain to younger readers
was the music-playing machine between a simple one-record — at a
time player and a stereo, which we later created by attaching the
hi-fi to a radio with a speaker so that sound came from two
directions.
I was in high school,
but not too old to get up before dawn to just see what Santa had put
under the tree. There, unwrapped: My own hi-fidelity record player
and “Oklahoma,” the first of my musicals! I hadn’t even asked for
it, didn’t dream such a gift was possible.
After opening presents,
we left to spend the day with relatives; I could hardly wait to get
home to my hi-fi. Didn’t know then, of course, how I would miss my
parents and aunts someday at Christmas. But I do still have my
musicals, the latest being “Wicked,” which has displaced “Les
Miserables” as my favorite: It had displaced “Hair” when I moved
from my hippie to my political revolutionary phase.
The message of “Wicked”
is to get out of Oz and live a happy, uninvolved life elsewhere. I
am trying, just for Christmas week, but politics is intruding more
than it usually does during the holidays. Washington is finally
admitting what most normal people have known for years: that it is
hopelessly out of touch with reality, and therefore unable to
function rationally by attempting to actually balance its budget.
The most normal person
there in the past few weeks was Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell, who laughed when President Obama proposed that he be
allowed to increase the debt limit all by himself, without Congress.
I laughed, too; until on Christmas Eve, The Boston Globe lead
editorial advocated that “Congress limit its own power by abolishing
the debt limit entirely as part of any fiscal-cliff deal.” Of
course. Who needs a debt limit? And by the way, who needs a
Congress? Obama won the election, and now he can borrow any amount
he wants — $20 trillion, $50 trillion, what’s the difference? Just
electronically transfer the money from the Federal Reserve to the
wheelbarrows ...
I feel this allows me
to mention another
Mayan apocalypse cartoon. Two Mayans are looking at the stone
calendar. One asks, “So how come it ends in 2012?” The other says,
“Those idiots re-elect Obama.”
Sorry. But why be
filled with Christmas spirit, good will to men? Others don’t feel
the need. All over America, anti-gun zealots are tweeting that NRA
leaders like Wayne LaPierre should be shot. On Dec. 14, author Joyce
Carol Oates tweeted, “If sizable numbers of NRA members become
gun-victims themselves, maybe hope for legislation of firearms?”
I’d call the FBI to
suggest they arrest her for inciting to violence, but a calm agent
would probably tell me that the kind of people she was tweeting to
probably wouldn’t have guns with which to shoot anyone, and wouldn’t
be able to get close enough to stab LaPierre because, of course, he
is armed.
Back to “The Sound of
Music.” Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. ... And look,
the Nazis have just taken over Austria, though so many Austrians had
believed that it could never happen there. The Trapp family is
escaping over the Alps to the West, where Winston Churchill will be
vowing in 1940, “We shall fight on the beaches ... we shall fight in
the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” England
prides itself on its gun control, which began in 1937; one wonders
what Mr. Churchill thought they were going to fight the Germans
WITH, on the beaches and in the streets. Fortunately, a well-armed
America saved them.
I know I’m not the only
one imagining how it would feel to be the parents and grandparents
of the children slaughtered in Connecticut. But am I the only one
imagining grandchildren living in a country that had lost its right
to defend itself against a too-powerful government? I think not,
which is why this week there are more “assault weapons” in homes
across America than there were last month, as people who had no real
desire to own one ran out to buy them before they are banned by
politicians grabbing the opportunity afforded by tragedy.
I got myself a
membership in the Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League for
Christmas and am thinking about joining the NRA. I’ll let you know
what I decide next week, when I start the new year with a column on
the Second Amendment.
