Bad Christmas Music

 

Some Christmas songs I do not like:

“The Rebel Jesus”

“The Rebel Jesus” urinates on the season. The singer declares him or herself “a heathen and a pagan.” So shut up, then. Not your holiday. And he sings:

“But if anyone of us should interfere

In the business of why there are poor

They get the same as the rebel Jesus.”

 

This suggests that Jesus came only for political and economic reasons. And that poverty is a problem that can be fixed, and fixed by some “business” we are refusing to do. A thing that is done to people. Conceptually, it cannot be fixed, as Jesus points out: “the poor you will have always with you.” Poverty is a relative measure; a poor man in Canada would be rich in the Philippines, or rich in Canada a hundred years ago. So long as any one person is making more money than the next, that next person will be “poor.” But the wealth of the one is not a problem for the other, barring the sin of envy.

“Christmas in the Trenches”

“Christmas in the Trenches” is unfair to the men who fought in the First World War. It ends:

"For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war

Had been crumbled and were gone forever more

My name is Francis Tolliver. In Liverpool I dwell

Each Christmas come since World War One I've learned its lessons well

That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame

And on each end of the rifle we're the same"

 

A trite observation, that supposedly deep last iine―as if this were not perfectly clear to most if not all of the soldiers at the time. As if they were all both selfish and stupid. They knew it was a fratricidal war, and the men they were shooting at were just men like themselves. Read All Quiet on the Western Front. Soldiers rarely or never fight because they have some abiding animosity towards the stiffs on the other side. They shoot because they are being shot at. They fight to protect their honour, their buddies, and the women and children at home.

Nor is it fair to say that the ones who called the shots took no risks. The British officer corps was decimated in that war. Winston Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty to serve on the front lines. Lord Kitchener, the British War Minister, drowned at sea by enemy action. Loss in war can lead often enough to execution for the top leadership.

The song tries to impose a Marxist interpretation on the war, that it was fought for the interests of the rich at the expense of the working class. This is a lie, not too far from the Nazi “stab in the back” lie. The war may have been a catastrophe for all concerned, but if a small nation is attacked by a larger one, it is immoral to stand aside, just as it is immoral to stand by and watch a woman being raped.

“Little Saint Nick”

Brian Wilson is a musical genius. But the Beach Boys’ lyrics are often embarrassing. I’d like to blame Mike Love; I hope Brian isn’t responsible. “Christmas comes this time each year” is not a profound thought. Neither is “Run, run, reindeer.” To refer to Saint Nicholas as “Little Saint Nick” seems deliberately demeaning.

There; now I feel better.