By Beau Elliot
Well, we made it through another War on Christmas, and most of us, including Christmas, came through unscathed. I think.
Well, maybe not the Hawkeye men’s basketball team, which further burnished its NIT résumé with a shambling, bambling loss to Northwestern on Sunday. Hundreds of years from now, scholars will ponder and muse on how an alleged Division-1 basketball team could lose to Northwestern by 30-odd points. One will hypothesize that it could have been a seasonal thing, given that once upon a time there was this creature called “winter.”
This Hawkeye version of basketball, by the way, would be the résumé for the 2018 NIT.
Meanwhile, back at the raunch (not that we ever left it), each year that December rambles around (sometimes November; pretty soon it’ll be October, when the most of the rest of us are more concerned about the War on Halloween), U.S. conservatives start yowling about the War on Christmas. You’d think that trench warfare were about to break out. Or trench mouth.
Given the conservatives’ yowling every year amid the glittering tinsel that every town bedecks itself in, trench mouth won the day.
For instance, the FakeNews-in-Chief himself (to be, as of this date) has proclaimed that “we’re gonna be saying Merry Christmas at every store. … You can leave ‘happy holidays’ at the corner.”
Um, yeah. Hooray for the tinsel.
Which brings us back to the Big Bang. Everything, eventually, brings us back to the Big Bang. Don’t think so? Just wait.
Conservatives refer to the Big Bang as a liberal conspiracy to destroy Christmas and the Republic as we know it and replace it with soccer practice. If so, they’re light years late.
The Republic as we know it, of course, is controlled by Big Billionaires who give gobs of money to the GOP so that the liberal conspiracy can’t gob up the election process more than the billionaires have already gobbed it up. It’s a gob scene.
Oh, well. So much for the Big Bang. But what happened before the Big Bang, according to the Big Bang Hypothesis?
We don’t know. Scientists don’t know, either, but they helpfully point out that we’re asking a nonsense question because we’re asking what happened before time was invented and, of course, that the word “happen” could “happen” before time exists is nonsense. As is, for that matter, soccer practice.
You could say all that is “nonsense,” and scientists would agree. I think. Therefore, I yam a sweet potato.
Scientists would agree.
So you see that physics is quite complicated. And we haven’t even gotten to molecules yet. Not to mention moles. Or even a mole, which has something to do with avocado’s number and nothing to do with molé, a delicious Mexican sauce or something.
Meanwhile, speaking of a gob scene, the U.S. sets job-creation record, and the Trumpster takes all the credit, even though he has nothing to do with policymaking just yet. That’s because he can create jobs just by his mere presence. It’s his aura.
Oh, yeah, it’s true. Of course, I believe in the tooth fairy. And Santa Claus. Peace on Earth. Phil Jackson can still fix the Knicks.
Next, the Trumpster will walk on water, then take seven loaves of seven-day-old bread and turn them into seven fishy condo buildings.
They will all have Russian names, for no particular reason.
Happy holidays. Or as we say nowadays, Schastlivy prazdnikov.