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Christmas! Christmas Christmas Christmas! She loved Christmas, did Sister Peggy Noonan of the Order of the Eggnog Bender. Especially here in New York, with its grand holiday traditions. The windows at the great Fifth Avenue department stores turned into top-drawer theatrical mise-en-scènes, the mannequins and papier-mâché reindeer clothed in garments that none of the people gawking at them could ever afford. The tree in Rockefeller Plaza, towering above the ice rink where so many movie romances had been coyly giggled into filmic existence. The policemen wearing festive Santa hats as they rousted bums rolling in the gutters.
She smiled as she leaned on the railing above the rink, watching the skaters wobble and circle. Around her, the people rushed to and fro, holiday cheer on their red cheeks, arms weighed down by packages as they participated with their wallets in this annual orgiastic gluttony of capitalism. The city streets had been cleansed of the rivers of vomit left over from that one December weekend when all those bridge-and-tunnel yahoos dressed up as Santa and descended on the city’s pubs and taverns like a horde of rough-accented locusts. Even the pervasive marijuana cloud that had hung over the city since legalization seemed to have dissipated a bit.
All was as it should be in this season of giving. The Jews had had their little holiday and then cleared off the field. Fortune held so much that she had not even heard the word Kwanza this year. The world had properly oriented itself around the birthday of our Lord and Savior, and she felt herself, perhaps helped by the schnapps in her pocket flask, sinking deeper and deeper into a fugue state of gratitude.
“And the Lord is grateful for thine provenance,” a voice boomed in her ear. “He’ll be even more grateful if you don’t bogart that schnapps.”
She jerked up. A man next to her was leaning on the rail where she had just been resting her forehead. A strange-looking man wearing an unseasonal white cotton robe and sandals that would have been more appropriate for a summer cookout in Vermont. Long, flowing hair. Neatly trimmed moustache and wispy beard. It couldn’t be … could it …?
“Yes, it is I, Jesus Christ, son of God, defender and protector, blah blah blah.” The man extended his hands and stared at them. “Good God, am I white. Peggy, I know this is your delirium tremens and historical accuracy is beside the point, but I’m whiter than that ice rink. Nobody from the Middle East is this pale. I look like I bathed in Wite-Out.”
“Look,” Jesus continued. “I can’t stay long. Lots of people to see. Thou knowest how the holidays are. Lot of people who need refreshers on the tale of the Pharisees. Like that Republican, Ziegler, down in Florida, and his wife, the Mouth That Ate Sarasota. If anyone needs to be reminded this season of the difference between appearing righteous and actually being righteous, it’s those two. Assuming I can peel them both off whatever middle-aged Jimmy Buffet fan they’re currently glued to.”
Maybe you’re a nice and earnest public-school librarian eager to show identification with and sympathy for the marginalized. You are part of a sector, public education, that has grown more culturally progressive, and culturally insistent.
“I can’t even begin to figure out what this means. ‘Culturally insistent’? As opposed to what, culturally negligible? Congrats, you’ve stumped the Son of God. I’ll tell Santa to leave an extra pair of socks for you.”
So you order and put in your school library, to show your identification with and sympathy for the marginalized and different and lonely, some books highly focused on questions of sexuality, including one that’s a sort of LGBTQ how-to manual. The parents will find out, feel honest indignation – “I need my 14-year-old son to be taught math, not how to have oral sex!”
“Ha! Peggy, ask thyself, which of those skills dost thou think a 14-year-old will have more use for as an adult? The women he dates later — or hell, even the men, I don’t judge no matter what the priests tell you — will be impressed by exactly one of those educational accomplishments, and it isn’t that he aced algebra.”
He burst out laughing. “What dost thou think Mary Magdalene and I were doing in her house, anyway? She wasn’t asking me to solve quadratic equations, I can promise you that. Oh Lord, that’s funny. Thou shouldst probably leave thy schnapps flask in thy pocket for another minute, thou hast had enough.”
It’s long because they have no confidence in the good faith of the school board and know it will sneak some through. And on the list is not only “Gender Queer” but “To Kill a Mockingbird,” because it sounds unpleasant, and “Crime and Punishment,” because it sounds like something funded by George Soros.
“’To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Crime and Punishment’ have been in school libraries for literally decades. Some of the parents complaining about them probably read them in school! Ask yourself, why are they upset now? What has gone on in the last three or four years that has ginned up this particular moral panic? I assure you, it’s not really that school boards and big-city reporters have suddenly started treating them like dumb yahoos, though that narrative is very convenient for some people, especially those who are uncomfortable with the concept of personal agency.”
“Like the Zieglers!” he said, his own eyes widening with abrupt understanding or possibly the chest-searing pleasure of a nip of schnapps. “The ones I have to go yell at when I’m done here. Thou shouldst google them, and thou shouldst google that group she founded, Moms for Liberty, and when she founded it, and the crusades it has since launched. You might learn something about all those school board protests.”
“Well, probably not,” he reflected. “But no one can say I didn’t try.”
American Continuance 101: Don’t troll the foe.
“What did I just say?”
I wish we didn’t focus on the word insurrection. All the evidence presented of the events in and around 1/6 leaves me convinced that Mr. Trump attempted to overturn a democratic election outcome to hold on to power; that he deliberately and repeatedly lied to the country in furtherance of this aim; that he either directed or egged on a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol to halt the constitutionally mandated vote-counting process[.]
“That is the functional definition of an insurrection! What word wouldst thou prefer? Southerners spent decades referring to the Civil War as the Late Unpleasantness, would something like that satisfy thine urge to nitpick? Christ on a cracker. I mean, Me on a cracker. I think I should hold onto this flask for thee.”
If Colorado is able to ban Mr. Trump from the ballot over charges of insurrection, can Texas ban Joe Biden from the ballot on grounds he has defied his constitutional responsibility to defend the country by securing its borders? There are politicians in Texas already promising to do just that.
“Margaret Ellen Noonan, if you cannot see the difference between an attempted illegal usurpation of election results and a policy failure, then I suggest you say a few extra prayers to Me at Mass this weekend. By thine own standard, Reagan should have been kicked off ballots in 1984 for not stopping the smuggling of all that cocaine his voters were snorting.”
The justices take a lot of battering, some legitimate, some ideological and political. But I respect them, not only as an institution but individually, as serious human beings.
“Okay, that’s it. I can’t take any more.” Jesus straightened up and stretched. “Oy. If there’s anything my disciples left out of the Gospels that I would have wanted them to add, it’s a commandment that everyone, no matter where they go or what they do in life, make sure they have sufficient lumbar support. On second thought, I suppose that would be more advice than commandment, but trust me. You think the back pain is annoying in your forties? Oh, my sweet summer children.”
Then he was gone in a flash of white light. Peggy found herself sitting on the ground, back propped against a wall, staring up at the top of the Rockefeller Plaza tree. Someone had placed a cup of coffee and several dollar bills at her feet. Such a nice gesture! Truly this was the Lord’s season, though he could have been a bit nicer about her column. Even Jesus, she reflected, got stressed around the holidays.
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