Step Right Up

And watch this circus:

The Great Sea-Tac Holiday Tree Seige of '06 is over!

The whole thing makes for great comedy in my book. You've got the wimpy "Holiday Trees" reminding us that Christmas is, for Blue Staters, the Holiday that Dare Not Say it's Name. You've got the rabbi who goes to the Port with his Big Gun lawyer demanding an instant menorah or else it's lawsuit city (and then acting surprised that the Port felt threatened). You've got the cowardly Port guys who were too timid to even defend "Holiday Trees" and too thick to say, "Sure, stick a menorah over there by Baggage Claim." You've got the wincing Jewish community in Seattle going to the Rabbi and saying, "Way to go. Now you've pissed off a bunch of people for no good reason other than your need for Insensitivity Training." You've the got the Big Gun lawyer with the chutzpah to say, "We are not going to be the instrument by which the port holds Christmas hostage" (as though the Port has somehow been plotting to remove Holiday trees and was happy to see the well-intended lawyer come in the door with his threats, the better to implement their nefarious plan). You've got the angry and bitter Christians who are demonstrating the love of Christ by sending the rabbi hate mail. You've got the hilarity of Seattle's Leftist Orwellian Newspeak about "the holidays" and the tortured attempts to simultaneously "celebrate diversity" while making a desert and calling it peace. You've got the Plucky Rebel Alliance of airport workers who stage a revolt and put more trees up anyway, political correctness be damned.

Now comes the next phase in the comedy, when the "make a desert and call it peace" agenda and the Celebrate Diversity guys try to haggle things out. In a sane world, we'd allow Christmas (not Holiday) trees, menorahs, whatever the Muslims do this time of year, as well as Kwanzaa disco balls or whatever it is they use. It would be pretty. Then it would be over. But in this insane world, we have to pretend that Christmas trees are not Christmas trees. And when some rabbi says, "Yeah, but everybody knows it's really a Christmas tree anyway, so I want a menorah too!" We can't say, "You're right. It *is* really a Christmas tree" or else we've taken the first step toward a new Dark Ages of Theocratic Christianist Fascism. On the other hand, if we *do* celebrate diversity, acknowledge the Christmasness of the tree and include the menorah, we have taken a step toward transforming the United States into a vast Davidic Kingdom of compulsory circumcision for all, because while the tree is not particularly religious, the menorah certainly is, and the Port's acknowledgment of it can only constitute an establishment of religion by the state. It couldn't be that the state just, like, acknowledge that a couple of important religious traditions in the US are having an annual celebration and we get to reap the benefits of that in the form of some beautiful lights and glass balls. Nope. Anything other than the complete denuding of the Public Square means that the 30 Years War is just around the corner.