Other Writers

The unbearable kitschness of Christmas

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THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE of America was up in arms in 2002 about an exhibition in Napa, California, which included the “caganer”, a traditional Catalan figurine who is placed squatting in the corner of the Christmas crib, trousers around his ankles.

Perhaps predictably, the Catholic League was offended by the presence of a defecating peasant in the holy stable. What it didn’t appreciate, however, is that the Christmas story is supposed to be offensive, and that the caganer is a reminder of the theological revolution that scandalized sophisticated opinion of the first few centuries of the Christian era: that God became human, that the sacred was no longer to be protected from the profane.

In his great masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech novelist Milan Kundera develops an innovative moral vocabulary around the notion of kitsch. Kitsch, he argues, isn’t primarily about bad taste or the vulgarities of popular devotional images: kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”. Kitsch is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It’s the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Kitsch excludes shit in order to paint a picture of perfection, a world of purity and moral decency.

THE PROBLEM WITH KITSCH is not readily apparent because (by definition) the treatment of what is considered unwholesome takes place off stage. Think of those Nazi propaganda films of beautiful, healthy children skiing down the Bavarian Alps. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Of course there is. For this is a world that has been purified, where everything nasty or troubling has been eliminated. The logical conclusion of kitsch, argues Kundera, is the ghetto and the concentration camp – the means by which totalitarian regimes dispose of their shit, variously construed.

Opening the infamous exhibition of degenerate art in the summer of 1937, Hitler gave notice that “from now on in we will wage a war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture”. Kitsch turns out to be motivation to cleanse the world of pollution. It is the aesthetics of ethnic cleansing.

Kundera himself thinks theology to be the ultimate source of kitsch. He recounts how as a child an aimless thought experiment led him from God having a mouth to God having intestines – the implications of which struck the young Kundera as sacrilegious. This instant and visceral reaction against the association of the divine with the messiness of the human helps us appreciate something of the hostility of many early thinkers to the idea of the incarnation. God and the messiness of the world must be kept at the maximum possible distance. But what then of God become human? What of the word become flesh?

Even many who felt the attraction of the Christian story believed this was going too far. Convoluted ways were sought to mitigate the offence. Christ was not really human or Christ was not really divine. Others created a firewall between the sacred and the profane within the person of Jesus himself. For the second century Gnostic, Valentinius, Jesus “ate and drank but did not defecate”.

The Jesus of Valentinius is thus the kitsch Jesus. And it’s this same kitsch Jesus of sentimental benevolence that features in countless Christmas cards and community carol services. The baby in the manger now presides over a celebration of feel-good bonhomie that makes the true meaning of Christmas almost impossible to articulate. Boozed-up partygoers and proud grandparents demand the unreality of “O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie”. Elsewhere Kundera writes of kitsch as “the need to gaze into the mirror and be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection”. And it’s this gratifying reflection that many want to see when they gaze into the Christmas crib. Christmas has become unbearably self-satisfied.

THE CAGANER IS A REMINDER of another Jesus and another story. From the perspective of official Christian doctrine, the story of Christmas is a full-scale attack upon the notion of kitsch. Valentinius’s theology is declared heretical precisely because it denies the full reality of the incarnation. For Valentinius, Jesus only seemed human. “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see”, as the equally heretical carol puts it. Orthodoxy turns out to be vastly more radical, not because it provides a way of squaring the circle of a God-man, but because it refuses to separate the divine from material reality. God is born in a stable. The divine is re-imagined, not as existing in some pristine isolation, but among the shittiness of the world.

The temptation to disassociate the divine from material reality marks the beginnings of kitsch. For, once unhitched from the divine, the complexity of the world can be too easily by-passed and ignored. The orthodox formulation of the incarnation allows no way of avoiding politics, food, sex or money. Nor, as the Christian story of God goes on to make horribly clear, does it offer a way of avoiding suffering and death.

The problem isn’t that Christmas has become too materialistic – but rather that it isn’t materialistic enough. Kitsch Christmas is another way of uncoupling the divine from the material, thus spiritualizing God into incapacity. I am not being a killjoy attacking the kitsch version of Christmas. Three years ago, my wife gave birth to a baby boy. The labour ward was no place to be coy about the human body and all its functions. The talcum-powdered unreality of kitsch childbirth cannot compare with the exhaustion, pain and joy of the real thing.

But perhaps the most important corruption of Christmas kitsch is how it shapes our understanding of peace. This is the season where the word “peace” is ubiquitous. Written out in fancy calligraphy everywhere, “peace and good will to all” is the subscript of the season. It’s the peace of the sleeping child, peace as in “peace and quiet”, peace as a certain sort of mood. But this is not what they need in Bethlehem today. They need peace as in people not killing each other.

This sort of peace requires a stubborn engagement with the brute facts of oppression and violence – which is the very reality that the kitsch peace of Christmas wants to take us on holiday away from. How ironic: we don’t want the shittiness of the world pushed at us during this season of peace. This, then, is the debilitating consequence of kitsch. Kitsch peace is the unspoken desire that war takes place out of sight and mind – it’s the absolute denial of shit. Political leaders who are preparing for yet more fighting will be happy to oblige. Christmas has become a cultural danger to us all, not just a danger to orthodox Christianity.

Rev. Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. This article was first published on Ship of Fools in 2002.

Municipal

Character? Substance? Priorities?

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Has Abbotsford become a community so lacking in character that we would choose to build a Coliseum were we will watch gladiators, or their modern equivalent, battle for our amusement while so many capital projects that would fill real, pressing and important community needs go unbuilt.

With all the desperate social needs, issues and problems facing Abbotsford; while so many in Abbotsford burn with poverty, hunger, homelessness, mental illness and hopelessness; why are council and senior city staff fiddling around with an extravagant, nonessential complex for entertainment. Lacking in leadership, ideas, principles and honesty they seem to have chosen to try to distract the citizens with entertainments as have self-serving tyrants from the Christians and lions of ancient Rome to our modern times.

Yes our City needs facilities, but we need a sense of priorities, we need to involve and engage the groups that will use the facilities, we need to listen to the ideas of the citizens – they are a pretty bright bunch with wide experience and then we need to tell and show people what will be built (NOT imaginary pictures and wish lists). We do not have to build in a mad rush or all at once. We should have a building program that is steady, consistent and well thought out. We do not need snake-oil sold to us as a plan, eh?

Soccer mom’s have spoken to me about an all weather soccer field and covered practice fields – take an idea from a farmer and just use some pole barns and voila a reasonably priced covered fields. We have a lot of young soccer players. We have many swim teams but no 50-meter competition pool, not to mention being able to attract events like the BC summer games in future. Do we need a better live theater/music venue? Encouraging local talent and participation seems far better for the community’s spirit. There are many such needs from small to large that would far better serve the community than Plan A.

I suggest we send the council and senior city staff a loud and blunt message of our displeasure with their performance on this matter via a resounding NO vote. And if, like spoiled children, they keep their petty threats to throw a tantrum and build nothing I suggest we come together as a community to set our priorities, decide what we need to build to meet those priorities and set out a consistent and long term building schedule to meet our current and future needs. Should egos and self-interest get in the way I am quite willing to bang heads together and hold feet to the fire to ensure we move forward, compromise and reach some form of consensus. Then we hand it to council and senior city staff and tell them ENOUGH – get your asses in gear or get out of the way.

Municipal

Free Speech? Citizen’s Rights? NOT in Abbotsford says the City!

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Free speech on important issues? Not in Abbotsford with this staff and council. The right to disagree; to ask questions; to ask for real plans not just whish lists and pretty, but imaginary, pictures; to ask for hard numbers behind their claims and the methods used to arrive at these numbers; equal access to city owned facilities to present the opposing views and answer the publics questions on the No side? DENIED by senior city staff and council.
Only propaganda in support of Plan A is allowed in or on city property. Only those in support of Plan can use city facilities for public meetings on this important matter. If you put up any anything that raises any of the important questions or facts the city and council choose to ignore – down it comes and into the garbage. If you bring a display to the obviously misnamed “public information” session that asks questions they cannot or do not wish to answer – NO, not in “their” building, not in front of “their” building, not on the property of “their” building – you are directed to the nearest public sidewalk or roadway. While they get not only to spread vast amounts of taxpayers money on their sales campaign but also the free use of all city facilities to power sell their position, if you as an ordinary citizen disagree with their claims and wish to share your concerns with your fellow citizens, you must rent the same facilities they get to use for free.

While taking away and/or denying the rights of ordinary citizens to ask for explanations, just what special rights or favours are they selling to those who place ads in support of council and senior staff’s position? Just what will the returns on investment will all these special interest groups get or expect to get, on their investments in advertisements in favour of the “official city’s” position? I have no idea. What I do know is that other lower mainland municipalities faced with similar circumstances refused such support. Not just on the grounds that it was a situation with the potential for “special” favours or debts repayment, but because it could be seen as selling special favours to the supporting organizations or companies. I suppose it is naïve of me to expect ethical behaviour in a city widely noted for “business as usual” and its’ ‘old boy network.”

The behaviour and attitudes of Council and City Staff have turned what was a referendum on what facilities Abbotsford needs, into questions on a citizen’s right to disagree, to ask questions and expect answers; does Council and city Staff have any sense of ethics and what exactly is the City afraid of that it seeks to deny opposition and engage in a high-pressure sales campaign that one expects from telemarketers or hucksters but not your city government?

I will be voting NO to Plan A, not just for all the unanswered (and ignored) questions about the project but also NO for the behaviour, policies and practices of Council and City Staff. Abbotsford deserves better Plans, Council and Senior Staff.