Immigrants refuse to eat our children

Merry Christmas and Hanukkah to all Judeo-Christians, and new year’s greetings to all 5 million Muslims living in the USA. Now let’s talk about Christmas songs.

First off, I am glad that Dec. 26 might put the kibosh on the cruel and inhuman repetition of Christmas songs that our radio and TV and gas stations and shopping malls and elevators and, for all I know, whorehouses, submit us to every year.

Please, Lord, make it stop. It’s not that I hate Christmas. I do not. I hate Christmas songs. So does every musician I have ever known. You know why?

It’s not just the lame lyrics, it’s the syrup, the dead tempos, the endless treacle.

Imagine a pleasant TV show, such as the inoffensive 1960s “Leave it to Beaver,” or “The Andy Griffith Show.” I have no complaint about these shows. I would complain, however, if for two weeks every year, some Prince of Darkness decreed that endless reruns of these shows appear before me and assail my ears every time I step out the house.

Why should I have to hear songs about virginity while I’m in a body shop looking for the latest issue of Motor Trend?

Here I shall pause to apologize and try to say something constructive.

My original conception of this column was not immaculate. I intended to rip and roar for 20 column inches about the tender atrocity of forcing hundreds of millions of unoffending people, and even offending ones, to have sugar poured into their ears around the clock for two weeks, with no access to earplugs or insulin.

But after I made that joke about whorehouses, I stopped and thought for a while. (Yes, I can do that.) I thought that vitriol against songwriters who didn’t know any better is not appropriate for the Christmas season. Surely, Bob, my brain informed me, you can do better than that.

So, returning to the alleged spirit of the season, I thought about three Greek words for love.

Agape, roughly translated, means love of God and God’s love for us, a spiritual love

Philia is brotherly love — so a feminine noun in Greek is translated as ‘brotherly’ in English

Eros of course is the old do-wacka-do-wacka-do.

But my retreat from my petulant, adolescent rampage against Christmas songs, sitting here at my desk, set me off on another tirade: That love has nothing to do with our increasingly political, increasingly powerful White Christian nationalists, who spend far more energy revving up hatred of all kinds, and very little, that I’ve seen, on agape or philia.

Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote an excellent essay on this in this week’s New York Times.

Into my philosophical muddle dropped a few remarkable short videos of James Talarico, a Democratic member of the Texas Legislature, seeking his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate.

This one starts with Talarico asking: “What would Jesus do if he visited the United States Senate? I think he would say, ‘Depart from me, for I was hungry, and you cut my food assistance. I was sick, and you kicked me off Medicaid. I was a stranger, and you deported me and my family.’ And then I think he would flip over those fancy desks and demand that we take care of all our neighbors, especially ‘the least of these.’ Matthew 25 tells us exactly how we will be judged, and how we will be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger, by visiting the prisoner. Nothing about going to church, nothing about reading the Bible, nothing about being a Christian, just helping others. Just loving.”

Here’s another one, even better.

“Do you know people who say they love Jesus, and don’t seem to love anyone else? That kind of religion, that says you can treat other people however you want, as long as you have a personal relationship with Jesus, is an abomination. It is a cancer upon the body of Christ. Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people. You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. We spend so much time looking for God, out there, that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us.”

James Talarico is a 36-year-old member of the Texas House of Representatives, a graduate of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. And in the first video link above, this young White boy rocked and socked the congregation of a Black church.

They say that in politics, you have to meet voters where they are.