From the Archives: TV star Tina Fey argues for importance of the arts at University of Virginia

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 14, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

TV star Tina Fey argues for importance of the arts at University of Virginia

Award-winning actress, writer, and producer Tina Fey was the inaugural speaker at the University of Virginia's President’s Speaker Series for the Arts on September 14. Fey, a 1992 graduate of the University, was introduced by UVA president Teresa Sullivan and, following her lecture, engaged in a Q&A with drama professor Robert Chapel. Virginia Film Festival director Jody Kielbasa opened the evening's proceedings.

In a wide-ranging, hour-long address that drew on her experiences on stage in high school and college, in television on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, and as a mother of two young daughters, Fey discussed the importance of the arts – including music, theatre, film, and graphic arts – to society and human fulfillment.

Fey singled out three artists that she particularly admires and views as role models: British feminist playwright Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Mad Forest); stand-up comedian Chris Rock; and Broadway composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Into the Woods, Follies).

These three artists, she explained, “meant a lot to me,” saying that, although she had often acknowledged the influence of comediennes like Mary Tyler Moore, Gilda Radner, and Carol Burnett, “I've never really talked about these particular people whose work really thrills me and really inspires me, which is the way I think art should make you feel.”

Caryl Churchill

Churchill's work, she said, is “so fascinating to me because it really made you think about what you think is normal and what is deviant and what is societally acceptable. It didn't tell you what to think, but it made you think about it.”

The things she “loves most about Caryl Churchill's writing,” Fey explained, are that she writes “spare dialogue,” that she plays around with theatrical conventions, and that “she inspires me to write politically, to try to write about something, to write about things that are important.”

On that latter point, Fey gave the example of her film Mean Girls, costarring Lindsay Lohan.

That movie, she said, was a high school comedy but also “intended to be a jumping-off point for a conversation about what they call 'relational aggression' among girls."

"And we fixed it; the movie fixed it,” she added sarcastically.

The TV series 30 Rock, she explained, was meant to explore gender, class, and racial differences among the main characters, Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy, and Tracy Jordan.

Chris Rock

What she admires about Chris Rock, Fey said, is that he is “the greatest stand-up comedian of his generation, of my generation.”

Rock, she explained, has a special ability to “look closely, to look at the world really, really, really closely and notice something that's true, that no one's ever said before, and then say it. Call out something that no one's ever said out loud before. That's the best way to write a joke because only the truth is funny.”

Rock's social and (sometimes) political commentary, Fey noted, is sometimes too vulgar to repeat in front of a general audience like the one gathered in the McIntire Amphitheatre, but it is no less sharp-edged and relevant because of that.

Stephen Sondheim

“Obviously, the third artist in this completely organic triumvirate of my favorite people, is musical theater composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim,” Fey said, noting that she used to watch the VHS copy of Into the Woods every Friday night in UVA's Clemons Library.

Sondheim “is the master of many things,” she said, recommending his two books on lyric-writing to the audience. “My favorite thing about him is that he's the master of a beautiful song in a creepy context,” giving as an example “Not While I'm Around” from Sweeney Todd, as well as the show Assassins.

Like Fey, Sondheim is in the theatre because “he's interested in communication with audiences.”

What she has hoped to have learned from Sondheim, Fey said, are to “set the level of difficulty really high … and to challenge your audience, expect them to pay attention and to be smart, expect them to love language.”

Sondheim's work is “so finished,” she said, “it's made with so much care,” adding that she and her colleagues at 30 Rock would treat their script pages “as though they were going to the Smithsonian.”

“We would check every detail of the set because it's your work. It doesn't matter if it's a school play or a dumb TV show. It's your work. You should care about it so much that people get annoyed with you.”

Another lesson Fey learned from Sondheim is that it's OK to make things that are not for everyone. Setting out to create a huge commercial success is like “a recipe for Cream of Wheat.” She suggested that the “best-selling book in the world,” Fifty Shades of Grey, was written by a malfunctioning ATM machine.

“Money is not the way to measure success in the arts,” Fey concluded.

Guest Post: A short history of three very famous Christmas carols

by Peter Roennfeldt, Griffith University

Singing and Christmas seem to go naturally together, like plum pudding and custard. Even those who would not normally attend a choir concert or church service throughout the year might happily participate in a civic Carols by Candlelight or a Midnight Mass. In these settings, the carols come thick and fast, and everyone joins in, almost involuntarily. But what is the origin of the choral music which adorns these settings?

The tradition of carol singing dates from the Middle Ages, and was not restricted to the Christmas season. There were carols for Easter, for New Year, and sometimes even for political events such as the Battle of Agincourt.

The poetic form was simple: a succession of stanzas with different texts, interspersed with a recurring refrain. In more recent times, the term “carol” has come to mean any song associated with Christmas.

Medieval carols from England and elsewhere have survived, though much transformed.
Good Christian Men, Rejoice dates from the 14th century, though only its text has been reliably attributed, to the Dominican friar Heinrich Seuse (Suso). The melody is known in Latin as In dulci jubilo (in sweet joy), and has been frequently used as the basis of extended instrumental or vocal compositions.

This song found its way into English through the 1853 publication Carols for Christmastide by J.M. Neale. This and other volumes of carols contributed materially to the Victorian era’s wholesale adoption of seasonal trimmings, along with royally sanctioned Christmas trees and greeting cards.

During the centuries between the first iteration of a carol tradition and the Dickensian revival of the Christmas spirit in the mid-1800s, there was comparatively little in the way of English composition of new works in this genre. A few pieces that are more appropriately termed Christmas hymns were, however, produced during the 18th century.

One of these is Adeste fideles or O Come, All Ye Faithful. Its authorship is disputed, but the most likely source is the 1751 volume Cantus diversi, published by John Francis Wade. Like most other Christmas carols, its text has clear Christian references.

Interestingly, it is also thought to contain covert Jacobite symbolism, with the phrases “all ye faithful” and “to Bethlehem” referring respectively to the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie and England itself. Wade fled to France after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite uprising, but his hymn soon came into regular use, particularly amongst English Catholics.

An indication of its wider adoption is the inclusion of O Come, All Ye Faithful within the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, a familiar modern day tradition inaugurated at Cornwall’s Truro Cathedral in 1880. In the age of mass media, this most renowned Christmas ceremony, as practised in King’s College Cambridge has become universally familiar, firstly on radio and then television. Choirs around the world also perform their own Lessons and Carols programs every December, and most often conclude with this piece.

The most famous Christmas carol of all time is undoubtedly Silent Night, Holy Night. The original words for Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht were written by Joseph Mohr in 1816 and the melody two years later by Franz Xaver Gruber, when both were living in villages near Salzburg.

The German version was published soon afterward, and the familiar English translation in 1859, since when it has become known in nearly 150 languages. Due to its universality, Silent Night was in 2011 designated by UNESCO as an intangible item of cultural heritage.

With its stereotypical overlay of European winter costumes and snow-covered fir trees, the translation of Christmas traditions around the world is problematic. In Australia, there have been several attempts to develop parallel traditions of carols that eschew northern hemisphere references, in favour of local culture.

The best known are those composed by W.G. James, former federal controller of music for the ABC, to texts by John Wheeler. Outback images of drovers, summer heat, red dust and red-gold moon, dancing brolgas, mulga plains, Christmas bush, gully creeks and grazing sheep recur throughout these songs.

They were published in several sets, commencing in 1948. Despite several recordings by major ensembles, their familiarity and popularity has fluctuated greatly. However, two of James’ carols recently made it into a “top 10” list of Aussie Christmas songs by the Australian Times, whose target audience is expats living in the UK.

The tradition of singing Christmas carols is embedded in the season, even though the contexts where they are performed may differ widely from that where the words and music originated. We happily ignore the obvious disconnect between the imagery of some familiar carols and our hot Australian summers, and there is something reassuring about hearing and singing them once again, with feeling, every Christmastime.



Peter Roennfeldt, Professor of Music, Griffith University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Holland Taylor supplies engaging on-stage portrait of Ann Richards in ‘Ann’

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on December 22, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Holland Taylor supplies engaging on-stage portrait of Ann Richards in ‘Ann’

'Ann,' a new play written by and starring Holland Taylor, at the Kennedy Center through January 15, 2012

On its way to Broadway in 2012, Ann, an affectionate portrait of the late Texas Governor Ann Richards (1933-2006), officially opened at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater on December 21 for an engagement that ends January 15.

Starring Holland Taylor, who also researched and wrote the script, the play’s setting is a college graduation ceremony, where Richards is the commencement speaker. (This kind of set-up seems almost required for one-man or one-woman shows. Thurgood, which also played at the Kennedy Center, had Laurence Fishburne as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall deliver a lecture on a college campus. A lecture is, perhaps, the most believable conceit that can explain why one person on stage talks at an audience for two straight hours.)

Holland Taylor has a long list of distinguished credits on stage, screen, and television, but today she is best known as the acerbic mother/grandmother on CBS-TV’s Two and a Half Men. Known for playing strong (sometimes headstrong) women, Taylor brings all of that attitude and edginess to her portrayal of Ann Richards.

History lesson

Richards begins by noting that she was not the first female Texas governor. That would have been “Ma” Ferguson, wife of the aptly named “Pa” Ferguson, who was elected in the 1920s after her husband was impeached and sent to prison for selling pardons to convicted criminals. “Ma” Ferguson’s winning campaign slogan was “Two governors for the price of one.”

Taylor’s script does not make the explicit connection, but this episode in Texas history may explain an aspect of Texas law that comes up in a later sequence, when in the second act Richards, who is trying to figure out what to do about the fate of a death-row inmate, complains bitterly that only the state’s parole board can grant a pardon, while the best she can do to prevent the man’s death is to issue a 30-day stay of execution.

Ann’s “commencement speech” traces her life from her childhood in a hamlet near Waco called Lakeview (“where there was no lake to view”) through her marriage and divorce and her early political career, first as a county commissioner, then as a state treasurer, and finally as governor from 1991-95, with a coda regarding her post-statehouse activities.

Along the way the audience is treated to a stream of quips, slightly dirty jokes, shaggy dog stories, and a “day in the life of the governor” when the stage is transformed from a lecture hall into Ann Richards’ office in the state capitol.

Hard work

Not shy about expressing herself, Ann says “I have a lot of opinions. Can you imagine if I were your mother-in-law? I could fix you.”

Reflecting on her work ethic, which she absorbed from her parents, Ann remembers a slogan of her local civic group: “If we rest, we rust.”

Even when the play takes a darker turn, Ann keeps her sense of humor. In discussing her battle with alcoholism, which hit her hard in her early 40s, just as her political career was about to launch, Ann says she “was like a poster child for functioning alcoholics everywhere,” because she never let her drinking get in the way of her many tasks and commitments.

At the time, she claims, being an openly alcoholic politician was something novel and noteworthy. “Nowadays,” she points out, just about rolling her eyes, “you can’t even get into a primary unless you’ve been to rehab.”

What’s missing?

Oddly enough, the play continues for two hours without Richards ever mentioning the names of her two bêtes noires, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush (who defeated her gubernatorial re-election bid in 1994).

Even more amazingly, although the play opens with a “clip” of the 1988 Democratic National Convention speech that made then-state treasurer Ann Richards a national celebrity, Taylor’s script never quotes the snarky line that made Richards famous: “Poor George! He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” That comment alone sent Michael Dukakis’ poll numbers soaring – although that may have been the high point of his ill-fated presidential campaign.

Throughout the play, and especially in the extensive “day in a life” sequence, Taylor’s Richards expresses the political and social values that animated her: concern for equality, racial harmony, gender equity, justice, and a “government that looks like Texas.”

“Life is not fair,” says Richards, in one of many epigrammatic utterings, “but government should be.”

Given the subject, it should come as no surprise that the play has a liberal bias. There’s no hidden agenda, though it was somewhat disconcerting when some in the opening night audience applauded Richards’ mocking of Second Amendment rights. (Ann speculates that her pro-gun control views were what led to her defeat for re-election.)

Despite exhibiting the rough-and-tumble life of the governor, the on-stage Taylor always looks elegant as Richards, from the famous silver beehive (“Molly Ivins said I have Republican hair”) to her businesslike jacket-and-skirt combination. In this, Taylor is ably assisted by costume designer Julie Weiss.

Production design

Other aspects of the physical production are noteworthy, as well. Scenic designer Michael Fagin has created a fluid set that benefits from projections (by Zachary Borovay) of long-ago Texas scenes and from the lighting design by Matthew Richards (presumably no relation to the title character).

Benjamin Endsley Klein took on the difficult task of directing an actress in a play of her own creation. Not to suggest that Holland Taylor is herself a diva – I have no evidence of that and suspect that it is not true – but it must be daunting to translate page to stage when the playwright is also the star.

It is clear from this production that Taylor has a great deal of respect for her subject, and also substantial affection. At the risk of committing a cliché, she embraces the role with gusto, radiating both energy and intelligence along the way.

Ann continues at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater through January 15, 2012. Ticket prices start at $54. For ticket information, call the Kennedy Center box office at (202) 467-4600 or (800) 444-1324, or visit www.kennedy-center.org. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Guest Post - Which Fosters the Spirit of Giving: Free Markets or Socialism?

by Robert Higgs

Christmas will soon be here, and preparations for this holiday are proceeding apace. People are buying gifts for family members and friends and making preparations for great feasts at which family, friends, and other loved ones will gather to share the joy and love of the occasion. Notice how much effort and expense are going into giving to and bringing joy to others. Notice, too, how much of the spending people do during this season would be impossible except for the affluence made possible by the remaining elements of the market society that the government, to date, has failed to destroy completely.

Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

The free-market society is often criticized or condemned root and branch for its alleged dependence on the unsavory human trait of greed. Socialists have always claimed that their system would replace one dependent on greed with one based on compassion and caring for the unfortunate. Both theory and history have shown, however, that socialism cannot produce the wealth that makes possible the highly effective expression of compassion and caring. Before one can be very generous, one must have something to be very generous with.

In any event, the idea that the free-market system rests on greed has always been mistaken, if not an outright lie. The system rests on allowing people to pursue their self-interest, to be sure, but self-interest is quite different from greed and indeed often consists of the very opposite. People in general have an interest in, for example, earning more income, and a major reason for this desire is that they wish to have the wherewithal to give to or take care of others more effectively—their own families first of all in most cases, but hardly their own families exclusively.

The amounts of money, time, and effort that people devote to making others happier or better off—amounts vividly on display during the holiday season—belie the slander of a free market’s dependence on greed. But such transfers also occur throughout the year and amount to an enormous proportion of all the uses to which people in free-market societies put their wealth.

In contrast, the alleged compassion and caring for the unfortunate that many have supposed support socialism are scarcely to be seen. For one thing, the incentives inherent in socialism entail that the socialist society will become or remain lodged in poverty, thereby crippling its capacity for effective compassion and caring in the material realm. For another thing, socialism does not so much eliminate the greed that exists in a population as it alters the forms in which the greed can be directed and expressed.

The opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is a great blessing.
Leaders of socialist societies have a habit of living lavishly amid the squalor of the system they control and despoil—Mao, Castro, and Chavez provide ready examples. Ordinary people in socialist societies, being deprived of free-market outlets for the pursuit of their self-interest must instead strive to better themselves and those for whom they care by struggling for political power and, often, by diverting resources intended for the general public to their own enjoyment. Socialism does not build the generous character that socialist dreamers have touted; on the contrary.

So, at this time of the year, let us remind ourselves not only of the love and compassion that Christmas calls forth, but also of the systemic economic underpinnings that permit people to express their love and compassion so effectively. The love of family, friends, and others is the greatest blessing, but the opportunity to live in a free-market society—even one as hogtied as ours—is also a great blessing.

Republished from the Independent Institute.

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review.  He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Charlottesville lawyers compile rules against ‘politically correct’ Xmas

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on December 21, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Charlottesville lawyers compile rules against ‘politically correct’ Xmas

Presidential candidate Rick Perry recently raised some hackles – and generated dozens of parodies – when he stated on a campaign video that “You don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

Perry was reflecting a meme that emerges year after year, seemingly with greater urgency in the past decade or so, that social or political forces are being applied to suppress the celebration of Christmas – not just in schools but in the wider public square, as well.



Christmas was illegal

It does not take much of a history lesson to find out that suppression of Christmas celebrations was much more common – and much more painful – in the early days of the United States than at any time in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

As University of Virginia historian Peter Onuf put it on the public radio program, BackStory with the American History Guys, “the Puritans' approach to Christmas was not low key -- it was no key. In fact, they actually banned it, made it illegal.”

Along the same lines, “New England’s War on Christmas” was the title of the first chapter of historian Stephen Nissebaum’s 1997 book, The Battle for Christmas.

Expanding on Onuf's point, Nissebaum informatively and dispassionately upends some widely-held misconceptions about the pedigree of the “traditional” Christmas:

“In New England, for the first two centuries of white settlement most people did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period and largely ignored by their descendants. It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five shillings). Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did Christmas gain legal recognition as an official public holiday…”

‘Twelve rules of Christmas’

Still, bureaucrats being bureaucrats, there are times that it may appear that the government is trying to obstruct, if not ban outright, the celebration of Christmas and other winter holidays.

Coming to the rescue of people who find themselves in an uncomfortable situation vis-à-vis school superintendents, parks administrators, or local elected officials is the Charlottesville-based public interest law firm, the Rutherford Institute.

This month, the institute’s lawyers compiled a list of the “twelve rules of Christmas,” saying that “unfortunately, Christmas has become a time of controversy over what can or cannot be done in terms of celebrating the holiday.” The rules aim “to clear up much of the misunderstanding” that has arisen in recent years.

Here are four examples from the list:

“Public school students’ written or spoken personal expressions concerning the religious significance of Christmas (e.g., T-shirts with the slogan, ‘Jesus Is the Reason for the Season’) may not be censored by school officials absent evidence that the speech would cause a substantial disruption.”

“Public schools may not require students to sing Christmas songs whose messages conflict with the students’ own religious or nonreligious beliefs.”

“Private citizens or groups may display crèches or other Christmas symbols in public parks subject to the same reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions that would apply to other similar displays.”

“Government recognition of Christmas as a public holiday and granting government employees a paid holiday for Christmas does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”

In a news release explaining the twelve rules, Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead explained:

“Political correctness should never trump the Constitution. Schools, government officials and businesses have an opportunity to take the high road and not be relegated to playing the Grinch this Christmas. It’s time for some common sense.”

It goes without saying that expressing greetings such as “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” is perfectly acceptable both legally and socially. Few people need twelve – or any – rules to know that.

Guest Post: How the Nazis co-opted Christmas

by Joe Perry, Georgia State University

In 1921, in a Munich beer hall, newly appointed Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler gave a Christmas speech to an excited crowd.

According to undercover police observers, 4,000 supporters cheered when Hitler condemned “the cowardly Jews for breaking the world-liberator on the cross” and swore “not to rest until the Jews…lay shattered on the ground.” Later, the crowd sang holiday carols and nationalist hymns around a Christmas tree. Working-class attendees received charitable gifts.

For Germans in the 1920s and 1930s, this combination of familiar holiday observance, nationalist propaganda and anti-Semitism was hardly unusual. As the Nazi party grew in size and scope – and eventually took power in 1933 – committed propagandists worked to further “Nazify” Christmas. Redefining familiar traditions and designing new symbols and rituals, they hoped to channel the main tenets of National Socialism through the popular holiday.

Given state control of public life, it’s not surprising that Nazi officials were successful in promoting and propagating their version of Christmas through repeated radio broadcasts and news articles.

But under any totalitarian regime, there can be a wide disparity between public and private life, between the rituals of the city square and those of the home. In my research, I was interested in how Nazi symbols and rituals penetrated private, family festivities – away from the gaze of party leaders.

While some Germans did resist the heavy-handed, politicized appropriation of Germany’s favorite holiday, many actually embraced a Nazified holiday that evoked the family’s place in the “racial state,” free of Jews and other outsiders.

Redefining Christmas

One of the most striking features of private celebration in the Nazi period was the redefinition of Christmas as a neo-pagan, Nordic celebration. Rather on focus on the holiday’s religious origins, the Nazi version celebrated the supposed heritage of the Aryan race, the label Nazis gave to “racially acceptable” members of the German racial state.

According to Nazi intellectuals, cherished holiday traditions drew on winter solstice rituals practiced by “Germanic” tribes before the arrival of Christianity. Lighting candles on the Christmas tree, for example, recalled pagan desires for the “return of light” after the shortest day of the year.

Scholars have called attention to the manipulative function of these and other invented traditions. But that’s no reason to assume they were unpopular. Since the 1860s, German historians, theologians and popular writers had argued that German holiday observances were holdovers from pre-Christian pagan rituals and popular folk superstitions.

So because these ideas and traditions had a lengthy history, Nazi propagandists were able to easily cast Christmas as a celebration of pagan German nationalism. A vast state apparatus (centered in the Nazi Ministry for Propaganda and Enlightenment) ensured that a Nazified holiday dominated public space and celebration in the Third Reich.

But two aspects of the Nazi version of Christmas were relatively new.

A Christmas-themed stamp emphasizes light

First, because Nazi ideologues saw organized religion as an enemy of the totalitarian state, propagandists sought to deemphasize – or eliminate altogether – the Christian aspects of the holiday. Official celebrations might mention a supreme being, but they more prominently featured solstice and “light” rituals that supposedly captured the holiday’s pagan origins.

Second, as Hitler’s 1921 speech suggests, Nazi celebration evoked racial purity and anti-Semitism. Before the Nazis took power in 1933, ugly and open attacks on German Jews typified holiday propaganda.

Blatant anti-Semitism more or less disappeared after 1933, as the regime sought to stabilize its control over a population tired of political strife, though Nazi celebrations still excluded those deemed “unfit” by the regime. Countless media images of invariably blond-haired, blue-eyed German families gathered around the Christmas tree helped normalize ideologies of racial purity.

Open anti-Semitism nonetheless cropped up at Christmastime. Many would boycott Jewish-owned department stores. And the front cover of a 1935 mail order Christmas catalog, which pictured a fair-haired mother wrapping Christmas presents, included a sticker assuring customers that “the department store has been taken over by an Aryan!”

It’s a small, almost banal example. But it speaks volumes. In Nazi Germany, even shopping for a gift could naturalize anti-Semitism and reinforce the “social death” of Jews in the Third Reich.

The message was clear: only “Aryans” could participate in the celebration.

Taking the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas

According to National Socialist theorists, women – particularly mothers – were crucial for strengthening the bonds between private life and the “new spirit” of the German racial state.

Everyday acts of celebration – wrapping presents, decorating the home, cooking “German” holiday foods and organizing family celebrations – were linked to a cult of sentimental “Nordic” nationalism.

Christmas tree bulbs featuring the swastika were only one of a number of ways that Christmas became Nazified.
Author provided

Propagandists proclaimed that as “priestess” and “protector of house and hearth,” the German mother could use Christmas to “bring the spirit of the German home back to life.” The holiday issues of women’s magazines, Nazified Christmas books and Nazi carols tinged conventional family customs with the ideology of the regime.

This sort of ideological manipulation took everyday forms. Mothers and children were encouraged to make homemade decorations shaped like “Odin’s Sun Wheel” and bake holiday cookies shaped like a loop (a fertility symbol). The ritual of lighting candles on the Christmas tree was said to create an atmosphere of “pagan demon magic” that would subsume the Star of Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus in feelings of “Germanness.”

Family singing epitomized the porous boundaries between private and official forms of celebration.

Sheet music for the popular carol Exalted Night of the Clear Stars

Propagandists tirelessly promoted numerous Nazified Christmas songs, which replaced Christian themes with the regime’s racial ideologies. Exalted Night of the Clear Stars, the most famous Nazi carol, was reprinted in Nazi songbooks, broadcast in radio programs, performed at countless public celebrations – and sung at home.

Indeed, Exalted Night became so familiar that it could still be sung in the 1950s as part of an ordinary family holiday (and, apparently, as part of some public performances today!).

While the song’s melody mimics a traditional carol, the lyrics deny the Christian origins of the holiday. Verses of stars, light and an eternal mother suggest a world redeemed through faith in National Socialism – not Jesus.

Conflict or consensus among the German public?

We’ll never know exactly how many German families sang Exalted Night or baked Christmas cookies shaped like a Germanic sun wheel. But we do have some records of the popular response to the Nazi holiday, mostly from official sources.

For example, the “activity reports” of the National Socialist Women’s League (NSF) show that the redefinition of Christmas created some disagreement among members. NSF files note that tensions flared when propagandists pressed too hard to sideline religious observance, leading to “much doubt and discontent.”

Religious traditions often clashed with ideological goals: was it acceptable for “convinced National Socialists” to celebrate Christmas with Christian carols and nativity plays? How could Nazi believers observe a Nazi holiday when stores mostly sold conventional holiday goods and rarely stocked Nazi Christmas books?

Meanwhile, German clergymen openly resisted Nazi attempts to take Christ out of Christmas. In Düsseldorf, clergymen used Christmas to encourage women to join their respective women’s clubs. Catholic clergy threatened to excommunicate women who joined the NSF. Elsewhere, women of faith boycotted NSF Christmas parties and charity drives.

Still, such dissent never really challenged the main tenets of the Nazi holiday.

Reports on public opinion compiled by the Nazi secret police often commented on the popularity of Nazi Christmas festivities. Well into the Second World War, when looming defeat increasingly discredited the Nazi holiday, the secret police reported that complaints about official policies dissolved in an overall “Christmas mood.”

Despite conflicts over Christianity, many Germans accepted the Nazification of Christmas. The return to colorful and enjoyable pagan “Germanic” traditions promised to revitalize family celebration. Not least, observing a Nazified holiday symbolized racial purity and national belonging. “Aryans” could celebrate German Christmas. Jews could not.

The Nazification of family celebration thus revealed the paradoxical and contested terrain of private life in the Third Reich. The apparently banal, everyday decision to sing a particular Christmas carol, or bake a holiday cookie, became either an act of political dissent or an expression of support for national socialism.



Joe Perry, Associate Professor of History, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: UVA English professor Paul Cantor explores zombies and liberty in pop culture

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 16, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

UVA English professor Paul Cantor explores zombies and liberty in pop culture

Speaking at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University on November 14 on the topic, “The Economics of Apocalypse: Flying Saucers, Alien Invasions, and the Walking Dead,” UVA English professor Paul A. Cantor drew upon his research on popular culture to discuss opposing visions of individualism and collectivism in contemporary catastrophe narratives in film and television.

Cantor, a Shakespeare scholar, is author of a recent book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, a follow-up to Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, published in 2001. He is also co-editor, with Stephen Cox, of the 2010 volume, Literature and the Economics of Liberty. Cantor and Cox are among the most prominent libertarian thinkers working in the field of English literature today.

After his lecture and an audience discussion moderated by Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, Cantor explained to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner why he was looking into the presence of zombie themes in pop culture today.

'Self-reliance'

“These zombie stories are a very interesting way of exploring questions that Americans are interested in,” he said.

What he has noticed in zombie stories, he explained, is that “almost the first thing that results from the zombie apocalypse is the collapse of the federal government. These stories explore what life would be like in a world that was more like the American western, more like the frontier, in which people are forced to rely on their own resources.”

Sometimes, he said, those situations are “frightening but for many of the characters, particularly in The Walking Dead, the experience is empowering. They develop a sense of self-reliance, they face a a challenge, and they meet it.”

In his book, Cantor traces recurring themes in film and TV since the 1950s, a time when there were just three television channels available to most viewers, compared with the hundreds available through cable and satellite services today.

The proliferation of channels, he said, “has really opened up the creativity in television.”

Citing The Simpsons and The X-Files as pertinent examples, Cantor explained that “a lot of shows almost certainly wouldn't have made it onto television in the era of the three networks. It was the Fox Network, the fourth network, that really opened things up.”

'Greater quality'

Despite the increase in the number of networks and shows, he said, “there's a lot of continuity. Again, what I'm seeing in these contemporary zombie narratives is in many ways a reconstitution of what westerns were like in the Fifties. What we certainly have now is greater variety and, frankly, greater quality because people are able to take more creative chances.”

Cantor's new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, he said, “carries on some of the same issues” addressed in Gilligan Unbound.

One section of the more recent work “is devoted to globalization,” the primary theme of Gilligan Unbound, which was published the same week as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This book has given me a chance to see how things have played out in popular culture” over the past decade, Cantor said.

Writing the book gave him an opportunity to ask “how shows like Fringe, V, Invasion, [and] Fallen Skies have reacted to developments since 9/11 and [a] world with a threat of terrorism but also the problems created by the war on terrorism.”

Flying saucers and totalitarianism

He was also able to compare and contrast pop culture during the Cold War and during the post-9/11 era.

“I look at flying saucer movies in the 1950s,” he noted.

In those days, Cantor said, “the invaders are an image of real foreigners. It's Soviet Communism that's showing up in the flying saucers.”

By contrast, he pointed out, “when you look at shows like V, The Event, Invasion, [and] especially Fringe, the people invading us are us. 'We've met the enemy and he is us.' These shows explore a disturbing image of the American government as having moved in totalitarian directions.”

With so many choices of movies and TV shows to watch, Cantor sometimes relies on serendipity to find what he's looking for.

“It's chancy,” he said.

“Sometimes I just like a show, often because I like the characters or the actors in it. Sometimes I force myself to watch a show because it's obvious it's raising the kind of questions I'm interested in. For example, The Walking Dead, I really just like. It's really well-made, well-done.”

On the other hand, he watches Revolution on NBC “even though I don't think it's such a good show because it fits into my thesis and I've got to consider the evidence” as he continues exploration of libertarian and apocalyptic themes in popular culture.

Guest Post: How the Soviets Stole Christmas

by Michael de Sapio

When totalitarian regimes (particularly those of the Left) come to power, one of the first things they typically do is destroy hallowed cultural symbols, the better to remake society from the ground up. The Soviet campaign to replace the symbols of Christmas is an interesting cultural chapter in the history of what Ronald Reagan famously called the “Evil Empire.” It is discussed here.

All symbols deemed religious and/or "bourgeois" were eradicated and replaced with new, secular versions.

Following the Russian Revolution, the new atheist government began an anti-religious campaign. All symbols deemed religious and/or “bourgeois” were eradicated and replaced with new, secular versions. Thus Christmas (which in the Russian Orthodox calendar occurs on January 7) was abolished in favor of New Year's, and several traditional Christmas customs and characters received new identities. St. Nicholas/Santa Claus gave way to Ded Moroz or “Old Man Frost” (a popular figure originating in pagan times), and the new “nativity scene” featured him and his granddaughter the Snow Maiden in place of Joseph and Mary, sometimes with the “New Year Boy” added in place of Jesus. Christmas cards often featured Ded Moroz riding alongside a Soviet cosmonaut in a spacecraft emblazoned with a hammer and sickle.

Such images seem laughable now, but the impulse to destroy tradition is part and parcel of radical social movements throughout history. Think of the French Revolutionaries, who replaced the Christian calendar with a naturalist one, and even renamed the months and the days of the week so as to avoid any possible reference to Christianity.

And the Soviets weren't the only ones to have a problem with Christmas. The Puritans of seventeenth-century Boston were vehemently against it too. A “Publick Notice” from the period survives proclaiming the following:

The Observation of Christmas having been deemed a Sacrilege, the exchanging of Gifts and Greetings, Dressing in Fine Clothing, Feasting and similar Satanical Practices are hereby FORBIDDEN with the Offender liable to a fine of five shillings.

The one group hated Christmas because it was religious, and the other hated it because it was irreligious. History and human nature are full of paradoxes.

As for the Soviets, they eventually softened their stance. In 1935, the Communist Party official Pavel Postyshev wrote an editorial in Pravda mocking the extreme anti-Christmas faction. He declared that Christmas customs ought to be brought back for the enjoyment and benefit of children. (Needless to say, the goal vis à vis the children was always to make them obedient servants of the State.) After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Christmas became popular again.

All of which goes to show that while you can fight against tradition, you can't utterly destroy it. It may go underground, it may lie dormant, but once restrictions are lifted it will spring forth to new life. And any regime which tries to replace the familiar world with a synthetic one is fundamentally at war with the human spirit.

This first appeared at Intellectual Takeout.

Michael de Sapio writes at Intellectual Takeout.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 30, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

While best known in academic circles as a scholar of Shakespeare and of 19th-century English Romanticism, University of Virginia English Professor Paul Cantor is also a well-regarded critic of popular culture whose 2001 book, Gilligan Unbound, took a close look at TV staples from the 1960s through the 1990s, including Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The X-Files.

Cantor’s most recent book, co-edited with Stephen Cox, is Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, which applies concepts of Austrian economics to the analysis of literary works.

At an event hosted by Students for Individual Liberty on the UVA grounds on September 29, Professor Cantor was in the audience and, afterward, spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the new television season.

'CSI' and Justin Bieber

His first thought was about the season opening episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original franchise, set in Las Vegas).

Paul Cantor

“I read a description of” the episode in TV Guide, he said, and “was a little suspicious of it.”

After viewing the first episode, Cantor suggested that it may have been “first salvo in Hollywood’s attack on the Tea Party,” because, as he described the show, “it more or less treated Tea Party types as if they were some sort of 1960s-style militia, as if they were terrorists.”

He explained that, “on the one hand, it [showed] a gathering of dissident political figures [who] clearly were attacking -- though not by name -- the Obama administration. On the other hand, they were then connected with bombings and terrorist acts,” including exploding a policeman’s coffin at his funeral.

“I’m afraid,” Cantor said ruefully, that “this is the Hollywood take on the Tea Party. This is the beginning of a lot that we’ll be seeing on television.”

Cantor is not alone in his assessment: political commentator Alex Knepper made a similar point on Big Hollywood on Wednesday.

The fact that Canadian singer Justin Bieber made his debut as a dramatic actor in the season opener of CSI was not coincidental, Cantor said.

“They were certainly exploiting” the teen idol’s celebrity, he explained. “Clearly they were trying to get him to get more interest in this episode.”

The producers “probably got a lot of people to watch the show who might not have watched it” otherwise. Bieber “actually gave a surprisingly good performance. He was supposed to convey an aura of innocence and yet then turn out to be involved,” in the domestic terrorism. Moreover, the ending of first show is “setting him up as a returning character.”

'The Event'

Cantor said the new NBC mystery-thriller series, The Event, is “clearly a recycling of The X-Files. I don’t know where it’s headed but it does seem to be the first attempt to portray Obama on television.”

In terms of plot, The Event is “an allegory of the issue of shutting down Guantanamo, though in this case it’s a holding area for extraterrestrials in Alaska. (Don’t ask me to explain that.)”

Veteran TV actor Blair Underwood plays a Cuban-American president, who is also black, and, Cantor said, “he’s being portrayed as a sympathetic character.”

In the second episode, the Underwood character is shown “in charge of things,” Cantor explained, “but there was this amazing line where he was trying to get information out of one of the aliens and he said, ‘I hope I’m not being too narcissistic, I hope I’m not being too obsessed with my place in history.’”

For Cantor, that line “was very interesting because it’s such an accurate characterization of Obama.”

'X-Files,' 'Weeds,' 'Breaking Bad'

Today’s cultural climate, Cantor agreed, is “absolutely” open to conspiracy-type shows along the lines of the 1990s Fox cult hit, The X-Files.

Having written about The X-Files in his book, Gilligan Unbound, Cantor said he gets “annoyed when people treat The X-Files as dead and buried and said it was, ‘a show for the ‘90s.’”

Virtually “half the shows on television now are conspiracy shows,” Cantor said, naming Rubicon, Sons of Anarchy, Weeds, and Breaking Bad as examples.

Shows like Weeds and Breaking Bad, he added, are rather sympathetic to (in this case) drug dealers” and they also “portray DEA officials in a very negative light.”

That, he said, is “an interesting sign of what’s going on in popular culture.”

Cantor’s personal “must-see TV” is Breaking Bad on AMC. He notes that it is produced by X-Files alumnus Vince Gilligan and judges it to be “the most powerful show dramatically.”

As an aside, Cantor adds, Breaking Bad “has a strong libertarian element in it, so I can recommend it on political as well as on aesthetic grounds.”

From the Archives: Colin Dueck explains libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on October 28, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Colin Dueck explains libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy

Colin Dueck teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he is associate professor of public and international affairs. He is also the author of a new book, Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy Since World War II.

On October 28, on the eve of an election widely expected to bring in a new Republican majority to the House of Representatives, if not the U.S. Senate as well, Dueck addressed an audience at the Heritage Foundation about his book. In his lecture, he argued that the Republican approach to foreign policy has been remarkably consistent over the past six decades.

Dueck says in his book that “despite apparent oscillations between internationalism and isolationism, there has in fact been one overarching constant in conservative and Republican foreign policies for several decades now, namely, a hawkish and intense American nationalism.”

After his lecture, Dueck spoke briefly with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his book, about libertarian influences in conservative foreign policy making, and prospects for free trade after the election.


McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft

Dueck said he was motivated to write Hard Line as he “was reflecting on some of the changes that had taken place in U.S. and, specifically, Republican foreign policy after 9/11 -- the arguments for war in Iraq, the Bush doctrine, and so on.”

His original manuscript, he said, was 600 pages long and “started with McKinley," he said. “Then I talked to my editor,” who told him, “’This is totally out of control.’”

The first version of the book had chapters on McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, but, Dueck said, he “decided the story would hold together a little better with a start in World War II.”

He explained that the “main storyline is the decline of that anti-interventionist trend represented by Robert Taft. That’s the big story in the Forties and Fifties.”

Anti-interventionist and Libertarian Strains

Taft represented what Dueck calls an “anti-interventionist” strain in foreign policy, with origins in libertarian thought.

Colin Dueck

Libertarian thinking, Dueck explained, “was prominent in the sense that for Taft and, actually, for most conservatives and most Republicans, the belief was that if the U.S. intervened, for example, in World War II, that you would get an expanded national security state -- big government, in a way. So for Taft, the priority was ‘let’s avoid that at all costs.’ Therefore, that’s the argument for staying out of war.”

History, however, intervened. As Dueck put it, “Obviously, Pearl Harbor settled the issue.”

That anti-interventionist tendency, he continued, “still persisted after the war and for somebody like William F. Buckley [it was a] major theme, but what trumped it eventually in the Fifties was a concern over Communism.”

What happened was, said Dueck, “in practical terms a lot of libertarians or libertarian-leaning conservatives [and] Republicans embraced this new consensus over the course of the Fifties, which was a more hawkish, anti-communist, cold war policy.”

Dueck did note that there were “important exceptions” to this trend, such as economist Murray Rothbard, “who was strictly libertarian.”

Rothbard, he said, “stuck to this anti-interventionist position throughout the Cold War and in that way, almost ended up having more in common with the New Left, beginning in the Sixties and Seventies.”

While Rothbard and his circle represented “an interesting strain,” Dueck said, “it was clearly not, politically [or] in practical terms in Congress, a major force in the Republican Party,” either in the Sixties and Seventies or “in the later Cold War period.”

Free Trade Policy

One foreign policy issue that generally divides Republicans and Democrats is free trade.

Asked whether a new Republican majority in Congress will affect the pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, Dueck replied:

“Well, that will really be up to President Obama. There’s been no sign that he’s going to make that a priority.”

If Obama wanted to make free trade a priority, Dueck noted, “he might get more support from the next Congress than from the last one.”

The reason, he said, is that “at the end of the day, new Republican Members are going to be friendlier to these trade agreements than most Democrats have been.”

From the Archives: Steve Forbes makes the moral case for free markets and free people

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on January 9, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Steve Forbes makes the moral case for free markets and free people

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, January 9, two-time presidential candidate Steve Forbes made the ethical case for free enterprise in summarizing his most recent book, Freedom Manifesto (coauthored by Elizabeth Ames), which has as its subtitle “Why Free Markets Are Moral and Big Government Isn’t.”

Forbes, chairman and editor in chief of Forbes Media, began by invoking Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning about “soft tyranny” – when, Forbes said, “government takes more and more responsibility away from you and makes you more passive and dependent.”

When people like himself express fears about “big government,” he said, they are not talking about the kind of government James Madison wrote about in the Federalist. They are not expressing a desire for what the “other side” tries to portray as a desire for “anarchy.” Rather, Forbes said, they are trying to make a cogent case for keeping government limited to a few things that it can do well and properly, leaving to the private sector and to individuals the overwhelming rest of things.

'Deeper sense of humanity'

Forbes defended free markets as being “moral because they meet the needs of other people.” Free markets, he said, promote both opportunity and a “deeper sense of humanity” by stimulating creativity and innovation, in the arts and philanthropy as well as in commerce and industry.

Steve Forbes at Heritage Foundation

Commerce, he said, “is a profoundly creative exercise” that produces “extraordinary circles of cooperation around the world.” He cited Leonard Read’s widely-distributed essay of the 1950s, “I, Pencil,” which explains how thousands of individuals divided by thousands of miles contribute to the making of a single pencil.

Markets, Forbes explained, “are about transactions” – not, as Hollywood stereotypes might portray it, as about “taking” but about “trade.” Commerce, he continued, “breaks down barriers between people. It channels their energies toward constructive ends.”

Because commerce is about people interacting with each other, he scoffed at the notion that economics is “the dismal science.” It isn’t dismal, Forbes said, because “it’s about people, and people are always fascinating.” Contrary to old definitions of economics as being about studying scarce resources, he said, it’s quite the opposite: “It’s about creating resources” and making useful things out of things that were not useful.

Luxuries no more

He gave examples of how products once reserved to the very rich are now commonplace. A century ago, he said, “the automobile was a plaything for the very rich” and it cost about $150,000 in today’s dollars. When Henry Ford and his engineers created the mobile assembly line, that changed, and the automobile became a product nearly anyone could afford.

Similarly, he said, 30 years ago, a cell phone cost about $3,000 and “it was the size of a shoebox.” With innovation and new technology, the cell phone became ubiquitous – even in poor, Third-World countries.

Looking further back, Forbes noted that “200 years ago, famines were common in Europe. People then didn’t even make $1,000 a year in today’s dollars.” Agricultural technology and the division of labor has, since then, eliminated famine in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, even as the number of farmers has declined to a tiny fraction of the population.

Although free markets have an undeserved reputation of being unstable, Forbes said, they instead allow for the improvements that are built upon failure. Steve Jobs, he pointed out, was fired by the very company he created, only to come back and make it even bigger and better. He quoted Bill Gates as saying that “success is a poor teacher.” Free markets allow failure to teach and serendipity to guide innovation.

Money as 'liberator'

Citing Alexander Hamilton’s view that “money is a liberator” because creating things in a commercial environment is blind to race, class, and ethnic differences, he pointed out as well that “money is just a facilitator” for people making transactions with “each other in a common endeavor” – even people who never meet each other and may not even know about the others’ existence.

Forbes concluded his remarks by reiterating that “free markets are about people creating” – creating products and services that meet the needs and wants of other people. Free markets, he said, look to the future while governments look to the past.