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Joshua Tanzer is the founder and editor of Offoffoff.com. He has been a journalist for a really long time and a blogger for a really short time. He likes romantic dinners by candlelight and long walks on the beach. His turnoffs are regressive tax policy and mean people. Being of mixed French, German and Russian ancestry makes him feel like an honorary member of the Axis of Evil.
NOTE: Offoffoff's blog section is in development and will be open to readers soon. If you're interested in starting your own blog, please write to jmt@offoffoff.com.
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Week of December 19, 2004:
RELIGION | Season's gripings
TRAVEL | For soothe
RADIO | National Pablum Radio
JOURNALISM | I hear Hawaii is a nice town too
PREVIOUS: December 5, 2004 | NEXT: December 26, 2004
RELIGION: JEWS AND CHRISTMAS
Season's gripings
Once again, it's the most wonderful time of the year. Right-wingers' latest thing is to accuse liberals of trying to destroy Christmas. This is one of our most ambitious America-hating projects to date, given that almost everybody in America celebrates Christmas, the entire retail sector would go bankrupt without it, and the culture is subsumed by Christmas music, decorations and advertising for six weeks of every year. There's a very, very long way to go. But I'm going to come out and say this: I hate Christmas.
Christmas and I go way back. We had Chanukkah until my parents' divorce when I was about 8. After the divorce, two things happened. One was that my mother decided to celebrate Christmas again. She seemed wistful about it, hoping every year that it would be the kind of perfect, happy, sepia-toned, family-togetherness affair that she may or may not have experienced during her own strict Catholic childhood. Maybe she thought a little Christmas magic would turn a broken home into a happy home. Some years we mixed Christmas with Chanukkah; some years we didn't bother.
The other thing that happened was that my mom sent all of us to all-day Hebrew school. Where did this idea come from? I don't know. But I got more Judaism in four years than my dad probably ever had growing up in a truly observant household. My Hebrew got pretty good, and I'm pretty sure the principal of the school had me picked out as rabbi material. One of the things I learned, which I believe to this day, is that if you're going to be Jewish — or have any belief worth having — you stick to it. You don't put on tallis and teffilin Saturday and go to Mass and eat pork chops Sunday. If you want to be a Jew, you live like a Jew.
That also means you don't celebrate Christmas. So going to Jewish school every day and coming home to the Christmas tree at night stirred up genuine anguish in my heart. Some years I categorically refused to participate, bringing my mother's considerable wrath down on my head, and my sisters' resentment as well. Still, as a Jew, I would no more celebrate Christmas than stab myself in the eye.
So our typical Christmas experience went like this:
- Dec. 1-10: Occasional mild exchanges about the propriety of Jews celebrating the central holiday of Christianity, ending with the assumption that I would eventually see reason.
- Dec. 11-20: My failure to buy presents is noticed, and I am ordered to begin celebrating immediately. Plans are made for the most perfect storybook Christmas ever.
- Dec. 21-22: Open shouting matches ensue. Why are you ruining Christmas, I am asked. Because Jews don't celebrate Christmas, I answer. (If I were having this argument today, I would probably add a "duh" for emphasis.) Well you do, I'm informed. I continue to refuse. The arguments gradually expand to every subject under the sun.
- Dec. 23-24: Mom has a nervous breakdown, screams that she hates us and is going to sleep through Christmas and we can all go live somewhere else for all she cares.
- Dec. 25: Mom finally drags herself out of bed, everybody sulks while opening presents, and I stay in my room. It takes until new year's for the rage to subside.
So Christmas was a catastrophe, from a religious and psychological standpoint. It was an integral part of the destruction of my once-stable family, and it seemed like an annual assault, from within my own family, on my identity as a Jew. Once we went to celebrate it with my grandparents in Wisconsin and that was an even bigger disaster than the Christmases at home. It was an all-around source of dread every year.
That accounts for grade school and high school. I went across the country to Philadelphia for my first year of college. It was an eye-opening experience for a lot of reasons. For one, it was the first time I'd lived in a place with a cohesive Jewish community rather than a few scattered families. And for another, I guess it was the first time in 10 years that I saw young people whose families weren't fucked up and whose parents didn't abandon them or torment them daily. I could see the love. I had totally forgotten there were families like that.
The most fateful day of my life occurred a couple of days after I came back home on Christmas vacation. On December 25, 1981, my mother woke me up from a jet-lagged sleep and threw me out of the house for "spoiling our fun." (That's close enough to the truth. I won't go into the details of what really happened, which is an even worse story.) I never went back. Except for one day 12 years later, I haven't seen my mother since then.
I'm only kidding about liberals stamping out Christmas. (I hope that was obvious. And I hope it's obvious that someone like Bill O'Reilly who needs to turn Christmas into a political brickbat is pretty lame.) But there's a side of Christmas that Christians lack the perspective to comprehend. Their reality — the whole present-buying, office-party throwing, Mass-going, tree-decorating, nativity-displaying, commercial-broadcasting, "Jingle Bells"-playing culture that constitutes the Christmas spirit for them also represents the Christian domination of the culture for others. You can't turn on the television or step outside your door without entering Christmasland, a gleeful, over-the-top, semi-religious consume-o-rama that Christians don't recognize as a majoritarian construction. To them, it simply feels like the way we celebrate our national holiday. If you're not doing it, you're not a good American.
The lousiest Christmas of my adult life came in 1996, when my lousy employer, the Home News Tribune of New Jersey, decided in mid-December that it would not be publishing the scheduled newspaper on Christmas. That meant that everybody would have Christmas Eve off — and would be required to use their own vacation to do it. I was forced to cancel a scheduled trip to visit friends for New Year's so I could commemorate the birth of Christ. I doubt it ever occurred to the people in charge that not everybody does commemorate the birth of Christ on Christmas Eve. It never does.
Every year, I'm invited to office Christmas parties, and I tell people I'm not celebrating Christmas. A momentary look of confusion crosses their faces. "Oh, well, it's really a holiday party," they say. I tell them I'm not celebrating a holiday. "What about Chanukkah?" they ask. I explain that Chanukkah is a minor holiday that's observed mainly for children (it's Halloween with a better story); whereas the major Jewish holidays generally involve guilt and suffering, and don't fall in December. "But Christmas is for everyone," they protest. "It's not a Christian holiday — it's a consumer holiday." This actually gives me even less cause to celebrate, not more. I entirely agree with the more observant Christians who want to see Christ back in Christmas. I doubt that Jesus ever contemplated being responsible for millions of PlayStation and Barbie sales annually. I say, let the believers celebrate Christ — I wish them a very merry Christmas indeed. Let the non-believers ignore it as surely as the pope ignores Yom Kippur.
December 25, 2004 | 5:44 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20041219.php#e73
TRAVEL: COFF COFF OFF
For soothe
Jon Blackwell sent this picture from his vacation in England, where he saw the ad for our new cough syrup. As the fine print states, "Nothing is more effective without a prescription," which is how we feel about all our Offoffoff products.
December 23, 2004 | 11:49 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20041219.php#e72
RADIO: NPR MORNING EDITION
National Pablum Radio
I've been waiting for a sign, some aural indication that everything was going to be all right on the new "Morning Edition." This summer NPR replaced the steady, knowing, unforced Kentucky lilt of Bob Edwards with the flat, hyperprofessional pair of Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne. I think I finally got the sign — the other one, the one that says it was a colossal fuck up. I don't like what the show is turning into at all.
Here was the moment:
The story was "Sorting through Intimidating TV Choices," narrated by Montagne. A synthesized jingle-bell sort of theme comes on and she says, "Time now for our Monday focus on ... technology!" Her plain, regionless voice is perky, and she wants us to come along with her to a happier place — the electronics store.
The first thing jarringly wrong was the word "technology!" with its emphatic pause before and its crowning exclamation point after. (You can hear it here.) She wasn't telling us something — she was selling us something.
That was the moment that I realized what we've been given in the person of these two featureless voices adding dollops of fake good cheer to their increasingly unexceptional newscast — it's "Good Morning Edition America," basically the mild-mannered radio equivalent of the "Today" show. Not too Jewish, not too Southern, not too Spanish, not too black, not too distinctive, not too interesting, they aim to be the Matt Lauer and Katie Couric of the radio dial. Everybody likes them, right?
Inskeep even has a fake chuckle that he tacks onto the end of the feelgood story of the day.
This isn't only about style. It's about the news. NPR never gave an explanation for canning Bob Edwards but denied that they wanted to replace him with somebody younger. (Of course they did.) Somebody at the time said Edwards wasn't alert enough during scripted interviews with correspondents, something the network wanted to do more of.
I wish they'd do less of that, myself. The scripted interview is a hallmark of television news, in which, instead of putting together a news report with footage of the news subjects, the reporter becomes the story and the anchor pretends to interview him. The questions and answers are written out in advance, so it's a thoroughly artificial conversation intended to seem spontaneous but make both parties sound all-knowing. This is important in TV, where all the networks compete to be seen as the "most trusted," whatever that means, and where camera time is crucial to a reporter's career. It's part of a star system that has nothing to do with covering the news and everything to do with creating celebrities. No reporter wants to give his face time to the secretary of something or other when he could be on the White House lawn himself, looking important. ("For that story, we go live to Joe Blow at the White House. Joe?")
What do you lose with the I-interview-you, you-interview-me style of journalism? You lose any connection to the story itself. Instead of five minutes or one minute or even seven seconds with the people making the news, you get the reporter's summation — or often his opinion — about the story. The news is filtered through the limited perspective of the reporter, and the viewer is disconnected from the thing that actually happened or the people involved.
That makes for bad news. It rolls a big rock over the tunnel that is the television camera. The people don't see their public officials; neither do they see their fellow citizens living the American life. They experience the news as an abstraction. They see only television personalities meant to be familiar and reassuring.
But that's TV. Why do the same thing on National Public Radio? Because of a failure of imagination. An atrophy of skills. A loss of nerve. The executives making their anonymous decisions at the network, rather than envision an original role for themselves, seem to be cutting costs, chasing demographics and copying formulas. A network that once operated close to the ground and unearthed eye-opening stories about people and places and what it meant to be American outside the camera's eye, now offers scripted conversations with its own correspondents. Of 17 segments on yesterday's program, only three featured actual reporting from the field.
Today, you can choose three or four decent newspapers to read from anywhere in the world and get better, deeper, more thought-provoking news than you get from "Morning Edition." That wasn't true five to ten years ago. And that, not the age of the listeners, is the real challenge to NPR.
I have a prediction: A year or two from now, NPR executives will be trying to figure out why their efforts to attract 20-something listeners away from their computers and their PlayStations haven't worked, while their existing listener base is alienated and their contributors' wallets are closing tighter. The answer they will come up with is that they haven't become good enough entertainers. The true answer will be that they have become bad journalists.
December 21, 2004 | 5:55 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20041219.php#e71
JOURNALISM: COPY EDITING 101
I hear Hawaii is a nice town too
From an AP story about an Italian sculptor who made the Wall Street bull and now wants to sell it:
"Di Modica insisted that any deal require the buyer to donate the landmark sculpture to the City of New York — his second-favorite city next to his native Sicily."
Related links:
Original story as reprinted in Newsday
December 20, 2004 | 6:42 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20041219.php#e70
PREVIOUS: December 5, 2004 | NEXT: December 26, 2004
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