Subject: Yeah... knowing that there's Jewish PPCers makes this an uncomfortable read for me, too.
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Posted on: 2022-12-01 23:58:22 UTC
Not everyone needs Jesus, nor do they want it. But the ideas of comfort and family and warmth in midwinter are much better than the overcommercialised capitalistic dreck that Christmas has become.
No, not that Multiverse Monitor. Not that one, either. Not even that one!
Elf Corner is the only remaining piece of the original, 2002-2003 Multiverse Monitor. Even I only have vague memories of this Monitor - all I actually remember is the plotbunny adoption centre. Who wrote it? Where was it hosted? How long did it run? Not a flaming clue.
But apparently, Al's Waiter the MSTing blue elf wrote a column for it, "Elf Corner". I've archived the six columns he wrote from... somewhere, I don't even remember where. They were undated, but there's context clues enough to give at least vague dates. The first one is all about Christmas marketing, so I've arbitrarily assigned it to December 1st (and presumed that it's 2002):
Elf Corner: The Christmas Commercial
hS
Everyone else has already talked about the awkward real-world implications, but I'm a bit curious about something else. The Multiverse Monitor is an in-universe newspaper, right? It's been a while for me, but that's vaguely what I remember. This makes me wonder what the in-universe response to this would be, especially with the number of non-World-One fellows in HQ who'd have no idea what Walter Blue was talking about.
-OrangeFox
or Jesse Jackson to synthesize as much cocaine as possible to leave behind a fortune for his broken and dying family
Why are you making a Breaking Bad reference? With Jesse Jackson? It just...WHAT?
--Ls
AW was totally being a God-pusher in that article.
(See, that's what comparing AW to a drug-dealer looks like. And it's a joke. It has been made with zero ill will toward religion generally or AW personally. Chill.)
~Neshomeh believes the dose makes the poison, really.
And, uh, because I didn’t say so, I was rude in my last reply to you on the other thread. I’m sorry for that.
Anyway, I dislike Karl Marx mainly because his ideas, when put into practice, do not produce greater prosperity. They instead produce authoritarianism.
Separately, from what I recall, he spent his entire life mooching off his best friend, and I believe he cheated on his wife.
—Ls
Prosperity for everyone? Prosperity for some? What percentage? At what exchange--i.e., since no society is perfect, what is it acceptable for a society to give up in order to achieve your definition of prosperity?
And, do you actually dislike Marx because his ideas didn't work in practice? Do you apply that rationale to everyone, whether or not you like their ideas?
Feel free not to answer, but do think about it.
~Neshomeh
...because there's some serious messed-up crap going on here in the name of profit. Just look at any of the oil wars in Iraq, or the Haymarket Affair and other things that happen when workers try to ask for their rights, or the more recent way mainstream news stations have been covering the railworker strike (the latter makes a lot more sense if you've read Manufacturing Consent). You might not arrive at the same conclusions I do but it can't hurt.
... ideas are not their applications. Marx led to the USSR, absolutely. But US-style democracy, exported to other countries, has led to swathes of dictatorships and military juntas across the centuries. Capitalism led to the Atlantic slave trade. The Christianity of the Gospels led to millennia of Popes, Kings, and Emperors massacring each other in ostensible service to God. Ideas are not their applications, because 99% of the time, they are misapplied in the service of whatever atrocity someone feels like justifying.
hS
All the later ones - the tabloid, the magazine, the new tabloid - have been, but this might have been more of a PPC newsletter? It might even just have been an AW-and-friends "news"letter that happened to be mentioned to the PPC. Like I say, all I actually recall is the Plotbunny (Plot-Nuzgul, maybe?) Adoption Centre, which doesn't have a very in-universe feel to it; and AW's columns are very clearly just AW's thoughts on stuff.
Al's Waiter barely exists as a character in the PPC - I think his only appearance was in bjam's Tale...
... which, conveniently, actually establishes this Monitor as an in-universe publication, and tells me that bjam herself was behind it. That checks out; she was very much the type. I've no idea where she would have hosted it though; her LJ has been purged, and that's the only idea I had.
hS
I see other folks have already hit the commercialization-yes-bad-but-proselytizing-no-also-bad, so I won't harp on that any further. Okay, I lied, I want to put something into words: AW says, ". . . they need Christ in their lives to give it meaning . . ." but life is inherently meaningful; the fact that Earth has developed this complex web of exchanging and recycling matter is amazing and wonderful and beautiful. The living is the meaning. To me, the "give it meaning" language implies that we need an outside authority to tell us why we exist, and that no reason or purpose we find on our own is valid—in other words, it's a very authoritarian sort of meaning to seek, and devalues our own view "from the ground," as it were. And the thing is, we don't even need our own reason to exist. There doesn't need to be a point at all! It's okay for us to just be alive, to be tiny, unimportant components of this complex life web, who coexist with earthworms and weeds and bacteria and pond scum, who aren't any better or worse than those other organisms, and who just get to be alive for a little while before we return all of our components back to the soil, where they came from in the first place, and disappear and never exist again. It's okay to be unimportant, to just be a terrestrial ape with a complex language center for a while, and nothing more! The living is the point.
Also, holidays are boring. Except Halloween, of course. Halloween be bumpin'.
Oh, one other minor thing to respond to: AW refers to commercialism as a mask that conceals the true feelings underneath, but see, I've never been one to express much emotion*. To me, the obligatory good cheer is the mask; I would much rather have another ordinary day on Christmas, working, enjoying stories, and minimizing social interaction.
—doctorlit is a temporary carbon construct, and that is enough for him
*Except when I'm screaming at hoses at work, but I'm getting better about that! Remarkable how much easier it gets to learn to control your temper when one of the zookeepers you frequently work with has major PTSD over people yelling!
I mean, I know we have a strong Christian contingency in our membership, but the PPC never struck me as a Christian organization. Maybe it was the early presence of Slashers that did that to my perception...
Anyways, this post just... squicks me out a bit. I'm cool with the anti-capitalist sentiments there, but the I-know-better-than-you, you-need-jesus-to-give-your-life-meaning, oh-you-poor-decadent-sinners elements just... really, really rub me the wrong way.
Maybe it's the immediate association with people who would consider my existence a sin. Actually, no, it's definitely that.
Not everyone needs Jesus, nor do they want it. But the ideas of comfort and family and warmth in midwinter are much better than the overcommercialised capitalistic dreck that Christmas has become.
It's certainly not the average bit of PPC writing, but it...has very little to do with the PPC. In-universe presence or not, it's not exactly connected to HQ. Maybe New Cal, if you stretch it a lot and add in a highway (or a smaller road) called the Queensway, but I think that's pushing it.
I obviously don't agree with a lot of what he's written, other than (very generally) a bit about holidays being increasingly commercialized and that if you're celebrating them as religious holidays you might ideally know at least some of the relevant history and traditions, even if you choose to celebrate it differently than your ancestors did (though if you don't know, I'm not about to think worse of you, or anything - it's just that I have a background in both history and Jewish Studies, including the religious side, so historical memory is especially important to me and I feel there's a lot of richness that can be added from that cultural history).
I might be mildly off topic. My point is: I don't feel like this piece is for me. I don't celebrate Christmas. Judaism is agreed that Jesus holds no religious significance to Jews. I...don't especially care here. Maybe I would have cared a little if I was a Boarder at the time and felt this was somehow aimed at all of us - and for all I know it was! Christianity does allow proselytizing (Judaism forbids it) - but I think it's more likely I would have had the same reaction, which is: okay, this is clearly not for me. I can see a few cross-religious echoes in a sentiment and a half of what you've written, and while this maybe wasn't the most relevant place to post this, so long as you don't try to proselytize to me or badger people about this, I don't really mind all that much that this is your viewpoint. So long as you can continue to engage with others respectfully, this basically just means I now know you're more religious than I'd realized.
I read AW's MSTs back in the day. I don't remember much, just that I enjoyed them at the time and was sad when the website went down. I don't remember his writing being some kind of proselytizing tract. I just remember enjoying it. It's possible that if there was anything there I just missed it, and would be more likely to catch it now (the Narnia allegories felt far more blatant to me a couple years ago than they did when I was a pre-teen, for example), but...yeah. My point is, apart from being connected to an in-universe PPC publication, this is basically just a religious opinion piece that found its way in, presumably around the relevant holiday. I don't agree with it. I can see y'all don't all agree with it. Odds are at least a number of Boarders at the time didn't agree with it. But unless it became a bitter argument rather than an expression of opinions and mutual agreeing to disagree (if a discussion around it even got that far) - or took a proselytizing turn that was difficult to shut down - I just...don't feel especially harmed by it. I can see the potential for feeling harmed in some way there, but giving the benefit of the doubt (to someone I don't remember anything particularly negative about, though it has admittedly been many years), my response is kind of just...cool, that's your opinion. Not sure this is entirely the right forum for it, but so long as you aren't about to get on my case in some way over, say, running a Purim RP or having my characters celebrate Jewish holidays on and off screen (written in a way that's hopefully reasonably accessible enough to people who don't know much, if anything, about them), then whatever. Believe what you believe. It is my deeply held hope, wish, and belief that, in this day and age, we can coexist in peace.
So yeah. Religious Christians exist, including in the PPC. The PPC probably wasn't the best audience for a religious opinion piece, but so long as there wasn't ill intent and it didn't blow up into something big and hurtful (which...I guess we can't know, at this point), then...whatever. It only affects me in the sense that it's yet another bit of Christmas stuff in my vicinity, which is a whole other topic that boils down to that if you live somewhere the majority of people are religious or secular Christians, including the people who had the majority presence at the start of what became the current culture, and you engage with pop culture even a little bit, it's very difficult to avoid both things like knowing some of the music and traditions and feeling absolutely surrounded by it when you go out of the house at the relevant time of year. But that's a whole other topic.
~Z, clearly not the target audience for this piece and trying hard to stay hopeful for the future
I imagine it sparked a lively conversation, 'cause yeah, as far as I recall, the PPC has pretty much always had an irreverent if not downright atheistic streak to go along with its queer-friendliness.
AW is, of course, entitled to his opinion. But that doesn't mean we have to agree with him wholesale. {= )
~Neshomeh
Completely different—in a very good way.
—Ls
Sorry, AW. Christmas will never be about the birth of Jesus for me.
But it isn't a capitalist extravaganza for me, either.
In my Unitarian Universalist tradition, we do tell the nativity story, but it's taken as symbolic of the miracle that is the birth of any child. We also remember that many, many children are still born in humble and even loveless circumstances today, without it being part of some beautiful fairytale where strangers turn up with valuable gifts. At least Jesus' mom and even his non-biological dad wanted him—some babies don't even have that much going for them.
Those of us who can are encouraged to support organizations such as UNICEF that work to improve living conditions for children around the world. Link provided so that anyone able and so moved may do so themselves.
But we all have our own struggles, and sometimes the best we can do is just keep striving to live our values in our everyday lives. That's important. That matters. That is worthy. Never feel ashamed about doing the little things. Take it from another elf:
There is naught that you can do, other than to resist [the Enemy], with hope or without it. But you do not stand alone.—Elrond Peredhil
Whatever the Enemy is to you, you are not alone.
~Neshomeh
This reminds me of my LDS Light the World initiative, which is about spending December in service to others. “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God.”
Merry Christmas! And Happy [Insert any other holiday here]!
—Ls