From Babe to Bushmaster

My thoughts are all over the place as Christmas 2012 nears and the new year beckons—filled with everything from holiday music to legal marijuana to the “fiscal cliff” to gun violence.

This week I’ve been telling everyone I know about a wonderful Christmas song that’s five years old but that was news to me until just a few days ago. It’s titled, “Joseph, Who Understood,” and it’s performed by the (mostly) Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers—a group I’ve mentioned in this space before who have nothing to do with pornography except some cheeky British Columbians’ sense of irony.

It isn’t often (perhaps never) that you get the story of the Immaculate Conception from the perspective of Jesus’s stepdad, but that’s what this song delivers. Two recurrent lines are “You’re asking me to believe in too many things” and “Mary, is he mine?” But this is no gag song calculated to make the mystical seem prosaic. Rather, it’s a lovely, sweet melody, showcasing the band’s trademark harmonies, in which a confused young husband achieves, in the span of three minutes, acceptance that “some things are bigger than we know” and concludes, “Mary, He is mine.”

It’s a song you needn’t be religious to find deeply moving. My reaction certainly proves that. To me, it’s kind of the musical version of Linus’s speech in a certain animated holiday classic, when he relates the same birth story in the words of the Bible, then says, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.” We all need, on some level, to believe in wondrous things that are much bigger than ourselves and all the things that weigh us down. For a few transcendent moments in this season of stress, I urge you to go to YouTube and give “Joseph, Who Understood” a listen.

With that, I’ll segue sharply and jarringly to something I personally never will quite understand, and that’s why America is so completely firearms-crazy that even after the slaughter of 20 children and seven adults in Connecticut, it’s already looking like the best we can hope for from our gun nut-cowed politicians is the possible reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. Which, even if that were to happen, would be to true gun control as a single family’s dedicated recycling efforts are to mending the ozone layer. A shaken President Obama says he wants to get serious about keeping our kids safe, but for whatever reasons—our cowboy culture, our odd distrust of our democratically elected government, our chronic macho-bullshit leanings, you name it—America as a whole remains manifestly unserious about keeping the citizenry safe from gun violence. That “discussion,” insofar as there ever is one, always is about tinkering at the outermost edges of anything approaching meaningful action, and never is about revisiting the Second Amendment and conceding that in all but rare and specific circumstances, private citizens simply don’t need to possess guns. Just as they do not in a number of more-civilized countries around the world, at least on this issue, within whose borders gun violence is rare.

It may be that the images of all those pint-sized coffins in Newtown, and the anguished eulogies for six-year-olds, will succeed in ever-so-slightly loosening the National Rifle Association’s vice grip on the trigger of public policy, but it’s instructive and sobering, if far from surprising, to note that one of today’s headlines in the Washington Post is “After School Shooting, a Run on Bushmaster Rifle.”  Also, I still think the bumper sticker should read “Virginia is for Lovers of Idiotic Reasoning,” given the fact that some state legislators there have argued in the past week that the best antidote to gun violence is to arm everybody, everywhere. That, of course, was their stance after the Virginia Tech massacre, too.

Another headline in this morning’s paper is “Boehner Drops Effort to Avoid the ‘Fiscal Cliff,’” which is all about how Republican members of Congress refuse to raise taxes even on millionaires in an effort to avert the $500 billion package of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that otherwise will take effect on January 1 in order to address the nation’s gaping budget deficit.

Now, when it comes to understanding economic theory and fiscal policy, I frankly am a moron, but I read and listen to enough analysts and commentators to know that the world won’t end if America goes off the “cliff.” (Nor did the world end today, by the way—leaving the ancient Mayans with Tabasco-tinged egg on their faces.) I also know that even if those tax increases and spending cuts—typically described as “draconian”—were to be imposed, so deep is our deficit hole that the impact would be like tossing a few shovels-full of dirt into the Grand Canyon.

Still, because doing nothing about the budget deficit is not a viable or responsible option, and  because in an ideal world the media would pronounce the House Majority Leader’s name “Boner,” since that would be both humiliating and immaturely hilarious, it really would be nice to see a deal on this before the end of the year. It looks right now like Congress will go home for Christmas without having resolved anything, but as if they’ll return next week to see if they can pop the champagne on this by “Auld Lang Syne” time. So, here’s my two cents: Republicans, tax the rich—including those well below the millionaire level. Democrats, make some concessions on entitlements.

Hey, are you guys listening to me? I didn’t think so.

What else did I imply I’d be addressing in my opening paragraph of this post? Oh yeah, legal marijuana. So, I blogged after the November elections about how voters in Washington state and Colorado passed ballot initiatives to permit recreational marijuana use. I opined that this is a bad idea, because the dopey giggling of stoners is annoying and, more importantly, because these new laws open the door to more impaired driving. I conceded, too, that I might be slightly bitter because I never learned how to inhale. Anyway, toward the end of my take on the marijuana votes, I suggested that the Obama administration might step in to stop these initiatives, given that recreational use of marijuana remains a federal crime.

Well, apparently not. It now looks like the feds don’t plan to act, meaning that if you travel to Washington or Colorado in the new year, you can be stoned in Seattle or buzzed in Boulder without the threat of a jack-booted Uncle Sam breaking down your door to harsh your mellow. This not only figures to boost Grateful Dead and Phish sales on iTunes, but it has the editors of Rolling Stone magazine creaming in their hippie-era jeans. They’ve already stockpiled mountains of munchies and have breathlessly reported on the next states likely to follow Washington’s and Colorado’s lead, on the way to creating an eventual United States of Cannabis, ideally led by President Woody Harrelson.

So, how is it that we are a country laid back enough to be legalizing recreational marijuana, yet angry and insecure enough to reject even the slightest gun control laws? That, too, I can’t quite make sense of. Still, as I replay “Joseph, Who Understood” for the umpteenth time this week, I’m trying my best to retain, heading into 2013, at least a little faith in the possibility of wondrous things.