Revisionist History 101

You may be looking at the illustration on the right and wondering whether this is another one of those Christmas frivolities that I wrote in early December and never posted. Well, yes and no. This is about something that happened on Christmas Eve, but the thought has stayed with me ever since. While my holiday cough may finally be gone for the most part, I'm still playing mental knock hockey with what I heard that night right up to February 1.

On Christmas Eve, the high winds blew out the power in both my neighborhood and the area surrounding my church. This precipitated the quick scheduling of a truly candlelight service, as the church was fully illuminated by about 100 carefully placed votifs. Seventy people showed up and it was quite nice. Until we heard from our guest soloist for the evening. She's one of those singers who projects a lot better than she can sing. She hits the rafters more frequently than she hits the right notes. But, nevertheless, she was to be our musical interlude for the evening.

This warbling kuncklehead sang "Let There Be Peace on Earth" and invited us to sing along with her. But, as I surveyed the lyrics, I noticed that she was changing the words as she went along. Every time the word "brother" was to be sung, she instead inserted the word "sister." The same thing happened when she ran across the word "man." It became "woman." I shook my head in a quick moment of disbelief. At the end of the service, I was surprised she didn't whip off her bra and burn it on one of the many candle displays stationed around the altar.

A few days later, I'm back in church and we are still singing Christmas carols. Our pastor makes a half-serious suggestion that the title of one such hymn should be "God Rest Ye Merry Gentle People." Disbelieving head shake #2. I have one more to add to my basket in the Great Screwball Harvest of 2008.

I'm thinking about whoever authored these tunes one or two centuries ago. They were creating something from their soul and probably would be humbled by the fact that we are still singing these words years and years later. But, because they no longer fit the politically correct landscape of this bizarre country, the lyrics can be freely altered. I wasn't offended by the notion that the songs should have encompassed the female gender as well as the males. I was appalled that the artwork of the people that wrote these time-honored classics was tampered with because of somebody's own agenda.

People look at music, films, and even TV from years ago and chastise them for being sexist and rascist. All of a sudden, these snippets of greatness should be downgraded because we are not allowed to infer that they might be now the slightest bit biased. I know one African-American TV writer here who vehemently refuses to see "Gone With the Wind." Why? Because he thinks the depiction of Blacks in the movie are stereotyped. For Pete's sake, it is set during the Civil War. Like it or not, there was slavery in the South. MGM did not make this up. It was indeed in all the papers. The "Our Gang" shorts from the 30s are not shown now as much as they were when I was a kid. Why? Because characters like Farina and Buckwheat are now considered degrading to both people and breakfast cereals. I even recently read an essay that inexplicably assailed Fred Astaire for dancing with an African-American shoe shine guy in "The Band Wagon." Are we to believe that there have never been African-American shoe shine men in our country?

Hollywood back then wasn't necessarily making fun at anybody by using these stereotypes. Unfortunately, whether the ultra-politically correct loonies in our nation like it or not, these stereotypes are closer to the truth than not. Blacks did primarily have jobs as maids and butlers and shoe shiners. There were "aw shucks" goofball kids like Farina and Buckwheat, because, admittedly, black children didn't always get the advantages of education enjoyed by others. Films and TV didn't make it up. They were simply reflections of the country at the time.

A couple of years ago, the Fox Movie Channel dug deep down into their film vaults to show some of the vintage Charlie Chan movies starring Warner Oland. I gobbled them up, especially since it was a huge memory rush for me as I used to watch these films with my grandmother ages ago. After a month or so, the Chan features disappeared from the Fox schedule. Why? Because Fox was "inundated" with complaints from Asian civic groups. Okay, as if there have never been Asians in this country who spoke like Charlie Chan. The terrific dry cleaner I have out here in LA still calls me "Mister Wren" and I half expect him to utter the same kind of fortune cookie sayings that Charlie used to. "Tolerance like stain on shirt. Must keep at it." Again, we are asked to totally deny what was simply, at one juncture, a fact of life.

I am half-German and I guess I should be angry that part of my ethnicity is always sinister in Hollywood movies crafted during the 40s. But I am not, because I know those films were a product of those times. We were at war. Germany was our enemy. Case closed. I got it.

So, now we are going to change Christmas songs written two centuries ago? At what point do they start looking at the New Testament of the Bible and make suitable alterations there? Come on, couldn't Jesus have also been a woman? After all, when you saw pictures from behind, the long hair... The Bible never specifically states the following: Jesus Christ, a 30 year-old lanky 5 foot, 10 inch male, and a graduate from Bethlehem Middle School... Hey, maybe, in the mind of our Christmas soloist, Jesus was really a woman. Yeah, let's change that, too.

And, just to show you that revision can go in all sort of different directions, I'm going to start my own campaign. I will now start espousing the idea that 11 of Jesus' disciples were married. Why else would a bunch of men spend all their time hanging out together? Because, at home, there was some nagging wife reminding him constantly to fix the hole in the fishing net and to clear the palm fronds from the front walk.

Of course, I'm not mentioning Judas Iscariot. Because, beyond the betrayal of Jesus, he was so tormented and suicidal that he just had to be gay.

If you think my notions are ridiculous, well, then, so probably are yours.

Dinner last night: Homemade minestrone soup.