The War On Christmas

by Flippin on December 3, 2010

I posted this last year but I think it’s just as seasonal this year:

Let me explain why I’ve not posted over the past several days: simply put, I’ve been waging a war on Christmas.

My liberal colleagues and I have been working in elfin haste to banish the spoken or written form of the phrase “Merry Christmas” during this holiday season. Farewell “Merry Christmas” and hello “Happy Holidays”! As the reviled “liberal intellectuals” we know that to win the war against the true meaning of Christmas we must wage the battle where the Christmas holiday retains its greatest spiritual significance: retail.

That’s right, if we’re to win the war, we need to attack it at the source– big-box retailers and their brethren. For it will surely mean the end of days for our liberal movement if we allow the phrase “Merry Christmas” to be uttered upon your completed purchase of a plasma TV or Xbox. Worse yet, if we allow those dastardly retail associates to proclaim “Merry Christmas” with every purchase of inflatable Santas, inflatable penguins and reindeer, our movement to vanquish Christmas will be lost. Christmas will win!

Enough snark.

If your celebration of the season relies upon the frequency and audacity of the phrase “Merry Christmas” at your favorite shopping destination, I get why you need a scapegoat. And what better scapegoat than the uber-evil “liberal”. I don’t need “Merry Christmas” or “Have a nice day” from my retail shopping experience– it’s rarely authentic, it’s more often than not disingenuous and trite. I will find much more joy in a heartfelt “Merry Christmas” from a paucity of dear ones than the unctuous and insincere proclamations from the many. Of course, this runs counter to the true meaning of Christmas which mandates ever more consumption; looks like words are now a material good as well to be accumulated and counted so the quality of your Christmas season has a new metric built around the utterances of the phrase, “Merry Christmas”. Somehow this now defines the righteous and just manner to celebrate the season along with a convenient way to gauge how good or bad the season will be; think of it as akin to Black Friday retail figures as a harbinger of the season.

Bah! Humbug! to that!

Have a very happy day

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Economic Growth and Risk

by Flippin on November 24, 2010

I live in a small but once large industrial city in upstate New York. As a result, a lot of the policy discussion centers on how to revive growth in a city where all trends show decline.

I think this article gets it right in the sense that achieving growth entails embracing some risks:

All of those are well-intentioned efforts to build Silicon Valley-style technology hubs, but they are based on the same flawed assumptions: that government planners can pick industries they want to develop and, by erecting buildings and providing money to entrepreneurs and university researchers, make innovation happen.It simply doesn’t work that way. It takes people who are knowledgeable, motivated, and willing to take risks. Those people have to be connected to one another and to universities by information-sharing social networks.

From my experience it seems that embracing risk or much less failure is a tough sell to policy makers especially in local culture that may be utterly risk-averse.

Again, speaking from my own local experience, the notion of taking a chance finds few takers and of those that champion taking risks, they are often shut down before any meaningful execution can take place.

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Rewind and Forward

by Flippin on November 10, 2010

I’m going to be repurposing Sassafras Journal so posts, old and new, have been posted on the Flippin Amsterdam site. The rules there will be the same as here so while comments there have been off, they are now on.

I will leave  this site as-is for a several days but will post new 12010 related content there and then a new set of content will start to be posted here.  My hope with this site is that it will be an outlet for thoughts outside of 12010; I think pairing hyperlocal commentary with non-local commentary makes  for a confused and unfocused voice so that is the driver for retooling the sites.

I think we’re now well beyond what prompted the move from my former site  and I feel comfortable that I can post there under my terms exclusively. So let’s move on or more aptly, let’s move back, but not too far back.

As to what will evolve on this site, I am not quite sure; I think that will be the fun part , for me, and hopefully a few readers as well.

Cheers

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