Joyce rips Gibson for his sloppy reporting and his scam approach:
We all know that publishing is, first and foremost, an industry, many of its books - and the arguments contained therein - assembled like cheap plastic toys on conveyer belts from materials of questionable integrity. John Gibson's ponderously-titled clip-job, "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Think," is one more example of this shoddy 99-cent store literature: a dubious hash of rumor, sketchy news reports, sentimental memoir, and the fake populism and persecution complexes that color most conservative missives in today's culture wars.
This Gibson-type of propaganda is all too often the kind intellectual nourishment on which the Christian Right feeds.
Joyce picks up on the psychological projection phenomenon we often see with political extremists. Gibson, she observes, harshes on liberals and secularists for their alleged hypersenstivity to particular words and phrases, while praising and encouraging such hypersensitivity on the part of the "culture war" fundis:
Beyond this dubious cast of characters, who shift roles as needed, but essentially retell the same story from town to town, Gibson is not dedicated to consistency. What he derides in one chapter as the "eggshell sensitivity" of "PC-types" who want to limit public expression of Christmas and don't want to "have to explain someone else's faith to their children," he defends in cases of Christian parents upset that their kids weren't instructed to draw Christmas trees in class (thus allegedly depriving one New York parent of the opportunity to teach his son how to spell "Christmas"), or those who feel that the school's restriction of overt religiosity in the classroom led to a "conflict of conscience" for the parent and child. For these parents, Gibson implies such a "conflict of conscience," or the necessity to explain one's own religion to one's own child, are unacceptable burdens, while secular, or non-evangelical, parents are expected to suck it up and relax, already: a double standard that amounts to majority rule, plain and simple.
She gives a good idea of the kind of whiny victim posturing that Gibson's book conveys and which is a specialty of the Christian Right, drawing heavily on the whiney-white-folks style of Southern segregationists. She doesn't use the phrase that James Wolcott seems to have adopted form Atrios - "whiny-ass titty-baby" - to describe Gibson's posturing in that book. But it would fit.
Joyce also whacks Gibson for one of his kookier assertions, that Christmas is somehow uniquely American (say what?!?):
One of Gibson's victims, the widow of a Georgia school board member named Richard Tiede, gives voice to this belief system in describing her late husband's motivation for getting involved in a Christmas Wars skirmish: "'Rich felt that Christmas had become more than just a religious holiday Something that was uniquely American, but had spread to other countries.'" Gibson also summarizes, "Tiede simply thought of Christmas as a uniquely American holiday that was essentially an observance of family, not religious, ties."
The notion that Christmas, the holiday which Gibson defines as "the sacred Christian holiday," is an American invention is not only an example of American arrogance and ignorance at their most absurd - it is also a telling description of the state of the culture wars themselves: too broad to be contained within any conventional religion, and so widespread that theyÂve become close to a religion themselves. In redefining the sacred, and Christianity itself, to mean misty-eyed Americanism, the only truth The Christmas Wars touches upon is the current state of religious and political division in our country, and the inanity of so many evangelical Christians that parades as piety. But of course, this is an industry book: intended to perpetuate division, not examine it. (my emphasis)
I'm normally hesitant to criticize an article like this for what it doesn't say. Because that's often a cheap-shot way to cover up the fact that you yourself don't have enough to say about the article.
But in this case, it is disappointing to see no mention of the anti-Semitism that sticks out a thumb with a festering sore in this book, as I discussed in my post in November. Because this particular brand of religious bigotry is an important element of this phony rightwing hoopla about the "war on Christmas".
But otherwise, her review is a good look at the kind of radicalism that the Christian Right often promotes. Her observation of how Christian values and an militant patriotism are merged in Gibson's tract is an especially good observation.
