Accent on the Asinine

My intention was not to wish recipients of our annual holiday letter a “happy new anus.”

Although I hope it would go without saying, if you know me at all, that I always, every year, wish even my worst enemies (well, most of them, anyway) a complete absence of anal discord—whether the area is intact since birth or is new thanks to reconstruction after some tragic mishap. Anal happiness is the kind of thing that isn’t top of mind unless and until there’s a failure down there. But I don’t take mine or anyone else’s for granted. Let me be clear.

Still, I tend not to reference excrement-producing body parts in the opening line of our holiday greeting. (Although I certainly reserve the right to do so thereafter, should it serve my comedic purpose.) What I meant to do, rather, was to wish letter recipients a happy new year, in Spanish, exactly as singer Jose Feliciano had done in his 1970 Christmas-season hit Feliz Navidad—a Feliciano-penned song in which the anus is mentioned not once, in any language.

The one-page letter’s unifying theme was the fact that Lynn, in 2015, took up the study of Spanish, in egregious violation of the unstated but nevertheless time-honored mutual non-ambition pact we’d entered into when we married way back in 1992. (For further reference, see the July 2015 post titled “Tongue-Tied.”)

Along the way to sharing with holiday letter readers some of the “highlights,” such as they were, of our “year that was,” I described my disappointment that Lynn not only unilaterally embarked on a self-improvement project as ambitious as learning a second language—ripping to figurative shreds the mental and emotional (if not physical) life contract we’d all but signed in blood when we linked our lazy-assed non-fortunes together during the waning days of the George HW Bush administration—but that she thereafter rubbed salt in the wound by tirelessly studying and consistently applying herself to the pursuit. So, where I might have forgiven the transgression had it been half-hearted and quickly abandoned—as, indeed, had been our joint effort (if you want to call it that) to learn Spanish years ago in an adult education class under a crazy Cuban woman who blessedly was such a bad teacher that we happily gave up just a few weeks in—Lynn’s renewed determination to habla espanol under her yoga-class friend, Gabriela from Uruguay, seemed absurdly ambitious and almost punitive toward her TV-watching, couch-drooling spouse.

So—appropriately, I thought—I used our holiday letter as a way to air my grievances, in a nod to Festivus, yes, but, also in the way that the leader of a sovereign country might reference outrageous treaty violations in a year-end address to his or her people on the national highs and lows of the preceding 12 months. To quickly establish my theme, I opened the letter in Spanish with the salutation, per the song title, Feliz Navidad! (Merry Christmas!) Continuing the Feliciano-esque message, the letter’s first line was, “And prospero ano y felicidad, while we’re at it, although Eric had to look up the spelling of that phrase just now.” That indeed had been the case, as my proficiency in Spanish is nada. I therefore consulted a couple of different websites to ensure that I’d spelled every word correctly. (If you think I typed even the words habla espanol above without consulting the Internet, you are mistaken.)

So, I was quite surprised recently, when a friend and long-ago coworker of mine mocked me good-naturedly about having wished her, her husband and her two sons a “happy new anus” in 2016, while expressing surprise that a man who writes and edits for a living had made such a vulgarly comical blunder. Marlene’s family is from Bolivia, and she grew up speaking Spanish. She took smirking pleasure in informing me that, while I’d spelled the Spanish word for “year” correctly in the letter's opening line—a-n-o—by failing to place the squiggly-line accent mark called a tilde over the “n,” I’d inadvertently written not the Spanish word for “year” but the Spanish word for “anus.”

To quote the similarly monolingual English-speaker Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”

Had I even noticed that tilde when I’d looked up the phrase’s spelling? Maybe. Or maybe not. If I had, I no doubt asked myself, “What difference could it possibly make?” It’s long been a peeve of mine that non-English languages seem to stick all manner of vexing and seemingly superfluous accent marks over random letters, in what surely—much like the designation of masculine and feminine identities to words regardless of any apparent rhyme or reason—serve no purpose other than to stick it to English-only speakers like me who are perfectly content to play the role of global-village idiot. Why dignify such nose-thumbing with additional research, to see if the tilde’s absence could have any consequences?

Also, I might observe, if the tilde is so freaking important, in an age in which America fast is becoming a majority-minority country, why isn’t it even included on contemporary computer keyboards?

Oops. As it turns out, “D’oh!” again.

Actually, the tilde is there, I discovered that literally as I was typing this post. It’s in the upper left-hand corner, just below the escape key. But I guess it’s kind of like how I never see the condiment container in the refrigerator, sitting on a shelf directly in front of me, until my exasperated wife reaches around me and grabs it.

I never noticed the tilde key until I just a few moments ago Googled the search term “insert tilde in Microsoft Word.” I’d previously thought it might be included in the weird symbols under “Insert” on Word, perhaps abutting the sign for the British pound. In fact, I’d looked there after the conversation with Marlene, but, for the life of pi (which was there), I couldn’t find it.

So, I read the instructions off the Internet for how to insert the tilde over a letter. They were, “Hold control and shift keys. Press the tilde key. Press the letter “n.”

The “tilde key?” I thought. Where the hell is there a tilde key?! That’s when I took a closer look at the keyboard—and found it in approximately three seconds, “hiding” right there in plain sight.

So, I followed the instructions. And, what do you know? “Anus” quickly transforms into “year.” Ano to año. Similarly, one can change espanol to español; I realized that I got that wrong above, too.

(I didn’t check, though, to see if “espanol,” without the tilde, turns the English word for “Spanish” into something inadvertently vulgar, such as the Spanish word for “erection.” I sort of don’t want to know what transgression I may have committed several paragraphs ago.)                   

As Marlene laughed at my mistake a couple of weeks ago, I defended myself as best I could, noting, “I am a good editor in English. In Spanish? Not so much.”

At least I won’t make the same mistake in any future holiday letter. I already made an anus of myself once. That was suficiente. ("Enough." No tilde.)

Hardly Adrift

Snowpocalypse. Snowmageddon. Snow way to escape the hyperbole.

The Washington, DC, area experienced one its rare mega-snowfalls this past weekend, as you’ve undoubtedly heard, wherever you are. Because, even in this new information age, “If it snows, it goes” remains the climatic equivalent of the age-old crime-reporting mantra “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Nationally, the blizzard, which hit the entire mid-Atlantic area, no doubt delighted climate-change deniers and those who hate the federal government—when they don’t control the presidency and both houses of Congress, that is—because two feet or more of snow and single-digit wind-chills don’t neatly scream “global warming” and two weekdays now of federal shutdown have produced no hint of anarchy or evidence of the need for Washington lawmakers.

Lynn and I don’t doubt climate change for one second, nor do we loathe the federal government—not, at least, when a Democrat controls the White House and has enough party-mates in Congress to watch the Republican foxes guarding the regulatory henhouses.

Still, I’d have to say that the blizzard, on balance, delighted us, too. It did seem for a while there as if the flakes never would stop falling, and that the need, therefore, to constantly shovel the accumulating layers wouldn’t either. More than counterbalancing that, however, was the snow’s beauty and, perhaps most important, the joyfully unexpected fact that we never for one second lost power. This allowed us to stay warm indoors for the duration. And to use the computer, watch TV, prepare meals, take showers and spare our dog’s life.

About that last thing: It was touch and go for a while, as the inches multiplied but Bean’s refusal to do either form of his business remained steadfast. The snow started falling about mid-afternoon on Friday and probably measured around a foot and a half on our pink 1993 DC gay rights march yardstick 24 hours later—without our three-legged refusenik having peed so much as a drop or pooped so much as a dot in that entire timespan. This despite the fact that we’d not only repeatedly cleared and re-cleared a path down the stairs and along the driveway for him, but we also had laboriously hollowed out a large section of our front lawn down to the grass and over to the tree line for the presumed pleasure of our hesitant hound. There was nothing doing, however. And, with the world beyond our driveway a tall wall of white, he wasn’t about to venture any farther afield in search of a snowless nirvana that didn’t, in any event, exist.

At one point Lynn hit on an idea that we both regarded as possible genius. One of us could pee in a cup, she suggested, then splash the urine in a likely spot in hopes that Bean would sniff and follow suit, the way dogs tend to do upon encountering the yellow trails of their peers. It wouldn’t be canine piss, of course, but perhaps Bean wouldn’t notice. (He spends half his life licking his own dick. A Rhodes Scholar he is not.) We quite nearly were at our wits’ end, so it seemed well worth a try. We’d do it ahead of Bean’s next scheduled trip outside the house.

Given the utter lack of street traffic during the blizzard, I offered to eschew the cup, unzip my pants and let loose in the front yard. Lynn rather prudishly, it seemed to me, nixed that idea. I was outside shoveling a bit later that afternoon when she came down the steps with a warm cup of her own excretory juice. She splashed it against a tree in the exposed area of the yard and brought Bean out. He saw. He sniffed. He … continued to hold it in. Veni, vidi, viciously annoying!

This was the point at which, had we not had heat, lights, preserved food and various entertainments awaiting us indoors, we might well have looked beyond our deep love for, and hefty financial investment in, our dog and strangled him with our own three (cumulative) hands. At that point, Lynn was envisioning Bean’s inevitable urinary tract infection and/or complications from having a waste-impacted ass. I was envisioning either everything coming out inside our house or my wife being a nutcase worry wart for days to come, and wondering which thing would be worse.

As fortune had it, however, soon after the pee toss a neighbor with a shovel-equipped truck plowed a lane down on our street. Bean, on his next trip outside, deemed this pee path sufficiently pleasing, and promptly anointed it with his urine. About six hours later—on his final trip outside before bed Saturday night, with all but the last inch or so of our two feet having dropped—Bean further christened the street with the literal shitload of number two he’d been storing up. Lynn and I rejoiced, which frankly felt a little sad as a sign of what our lives had become. But no sadder, we guessed, than the gross euphoria that doubtless seizes parents when their young son or daughter finally drops that first big boy/big girl load from atop the porcelain doughnut.

Sunday, then, was dig-out day. It was mostly sunny but still cold when I headed outside to uncover our cars and afford them clear passage onto the street. I was grateful for the continued exercise, given the impossibility of running outside, but my body already was creaky and sore by that time, my wrist hurt from lifting the shovel, and the prospect of moving the twin mounds of vaguely car-shaped snow was daunting.

About two hours in, however, our next-door neighbor, his brother and the brother’s teenage son, having mostly finished their own shoveling, offered to lend their cumulative muscle to my project. Being the proud, macho guy I am, I hesitated for as many as two seconds before vigorously shaking my head affirmatively. They did an outstanding job, completing the task in a fraction of the time it would have taken Lynn and me to do it. (This annoyed me ever so slightly, because now I feel hugely indebted to a neighbor I hadn’t much liked, for admittedly petty reasons that have everything to do with me and nothing to do with him. But I’m pretty sure I’ll get over it.)

The upshot was that, by about 1:30 Sunday afternoon, my battle with the elements was done. The snow still was, and is, beautiful. I therefore was well-rested, and literally empowered, to watch the initial episode of the X Files reboot on TV Sunday night. The federal government has given me abundant reason not to hate it by being closed yesterday and today, as this means no work for me, given that my office takes its cues from the feds. As of this morning, our sorely missed old-school print newspaper again is being delivered. Why, I could jump in my car right now and attend a movie matinee if I so chose. Life is good. (No, not for the planet in the long term, but I’m trying to stay in the moment here.)  

So, yes, I’d have to say that on balance, we count ourselves as fans of the recent blizzard. We survived it quite nicely. And our dog did, too. He can thank that neighbor with the plow.

Revenants

Yesterday I went to see The Revenant at a local movie house. It has received a dozen Oscar nominations and is getting a lot of buzz. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the story of a trapper in the 1820s West who is mauled to within an inch of his life by a bear, is left for dead by a scoundrel who also kills the trapper’s son, but survives and drags himself 200 miles across the snow—fueled by revenge and empowered by his survival skills—to exact his revenge.

It’s a ripping yarn that’s based on a true story—albeit one that’s in many respects unverifiable and in others clearly is embellished by artistic license. As impressed as I was by the film’s cinematography, attention to detail and acting, I was distracted by the number of times I found myself asking, “Why is this guy STILL not dead?!” (Each time, Leonardo DiCaprio, in his lead role as 19th-century fur trader and bear-mauling survivor Hugh Glass, answered my disbelieving query with a wheeze and a grunt, and took another emphatic bite of something disgusting—like bison liver or the flapping fish he’d just yanked out the river.)

I was thinking about The Revenant this morning as I ran through my Bethesda neighborhood in low-teen wind chills. I’d layered myself to the nines, so I actually was quite comfortable as the few drivers who passed me at that early-morning hour on a federal holiday looked out their windows and no doubt thought, “What a moron!” But afterward, back in the house, I had to concede that completing an hour-long run on a chilly-for-DC morning is pretty much the extent of my survival skills. Were a movie to be made of my epic revenge saga against the elements, starvation, and hostile whites and Native Americans, its title would be The Corpse.

Which brings up the subject of the film’s title. When I got home from the movies yesterday, Lynn asked me what a “revenant” is. I told her I frankly had no idea, but that I’d been meaning to look it up. So, I immediately did. The first definition I found on the Internet was, “A person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.” Which makes abundant sense in view of the mini-synopsis I just gave you. DiCaprio’s Glass even says at one point that he “ain’t afraid to die” because “I done it already.” The guy who wrote the book on which the movie is based picked an apt word for the story he was telling, all right.

Lynn then asked why such a simple but highly descriptive word is so obscure that the likes of us—non-geniuses, for sure, but reasonably intelligent and articulate people—had never even heard of it until it became a movie’s name. The answer to that is, who knows? I’m not a lexicographer. Maybe “revenant” sounds too much like other English words that get much more use, and society didn’t want to gum up the works with one that might become conversationally entangled with “reverend,” “reverent” and “remnant.” Perhaps “revenant” was poised for the primetime as handy linguistic shorthand for the longer “reanimation” when the Zombie Craze of the early 21st century hit and the Z Word became everyone’s go-to description for returning from the dead. It’s a mystery. The English language is littered with perfectly serviceable and even cool words that languish largely unused (take “languish”), while arguably inferior and imprecise words and phrases (such as “just sit there” in place of “languish”) thrive.

So. This word, “revenant,” and its meaning got me to thinking about the new year and the presidential race. Well, not directly, but those are things about which I also want to write today, and I’ve been looking for a way to tie all this together. What I’ve come up with is this: The story of the Republican presidential field also could, in a sense, be titled The Revenant. I mean, the campaigns of all the frontrunners, at least, are built on returning certain ideas, philosophies and approaches from the dead. Or, if not the dead, at least the largely dormant..

I’m always struck by Donald Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again." Again? What're we going back to, then? As The Donald sees it—and as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and all the others echo in their remarks and beliefs—back to a time when the United States was strong, respected, “moral” by their definition, and not enslaved by “political correctness.” As I see it, however, “Make America Great Again” means taking the country back to a time when might made right. When white meant right. When America didn’t have to accommodate or cede power to anything we, as a nation, didn’t like or couldn’t understand.

In truth, belief in things like American exceptionalism, the business of America being (unfettered) business and Big Government being the root of all ills (as opposed to the mitigator of many) never were dead—which is why the “revenant” analogy isn’t entirely apt. But maybe that’s where that “supposedly” in the word’s definition comes in.

You might suppose that such resounding successes of optimism, such triumphs of our better nature, as trust-busting, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the civil rights movement might have killed off the kinds of dark, victimized, conspiracy-laden, bigoted nonsense now being trumpeted (pun inadvertent) by the Republican presidential aspirants. But no, sadly. Those malignancies may have been left for dead, and hoped dead, by progressive thinkers, but they limped along for decades, often in the shadows, finally to be given new and pulsating life by a group of rage-filled politicians who gaze out upon a complicated and unfriendly world, and a multicultural and needy country, and don’t at all like what they see.

This new revenant has something else very much in common with the cinematic one: lust for revenge. This new revenant says, “This is not the America we want—the one that conforms to our inaccurate but self-serving vision of what America was and should be—and somebody has to pay for it. Actually, a lot of people must pay for it. Without nuance and without mercy. We will carpet-bomb Syria—civilians and ISIS foes stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time be damned. We’ll close our borders, arm our citizenry and impose our vision of what a righteous God Would Do on the liberals, the illegals and even the insufficiently compliant women who’ve continually thwarted us from getting our due! Which is to say, everything we want.”

The thing that the political revenant has stirred that perplexes me is the dimension of the societal revenant it has exposed. That so many of my fellow Americans find the fury, vitriol and incivility of Trump and his ilk energizing, empowering and expressive of their deepest thoughts is frankly startling, alarming and confusing to me. It tells me that I’m out of sync and out of touch with a force that’s big enough to be a movement, and perhaps even to win the White House.

I’ll concede that I’m economically in a better and more secure place than are many of the most ardent Trump supporters, who counterintuitively trust a transparently megalomaniacal billionaire to champion their interests over those of (his fellow) rich and powerful. I’ll grant that I’m not religious like Ted Cruz’s evangelical followers, and thus don’t feel threatened by alleged evidences of the insidious spread of “secular” society.  I’ll admit that, while I admire much about my country, its history and its people, I can’t and won’t edit out the flaws. I’m not in every instance proud to be an American, so the jingoistic appeals of seemingly the entire GOP slate go nowhere with me. Likewise, I didn’t grow up with guns, though I’d like to think that even if I had, and therefore liked to target-shoot or hunt, I wouldn’t equate reasonable steps to curb gun violence with a government plot to confiscate them.

Recently President Obama gave his final State of the Union address. Like every incumbent chief executive regardless of political party, he pronounced the state of the union to be strong. Which, by many economic and social indicators it is, whatever Obama’s detractors might claim. But the words I’d use to describe the state of the union I see before me at the beginning of 2016 are “angry,” “paranoid,” “bitter” and, yes, “vengeful.”

Admittedly, many months—too many, I think both Left and Right can agree—remain in this election cycle. Presumably, moderate voices will yet be heard among the many millions of Americans who have no proverbial dog in this internecine fight among highly partisan Republicans. It’s far from a foregone conclusion that Trump or Cruz or Rubio or one of the other frightening entrees on the GOP plate will prevail in the general election, although I’d feel better if the Democratic candidate wasn’t destined to be either a woman many people irrationally hate or a guy who proudly calls himself a socialist. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that word—speaking of words—except for the fact that a lot of Americans deem “socialist” less a shorter way to say “adherent of European-style democratic socialism” and more a synonym for “communist.”)

So, will the American revenant succeed? Will the forces of rage prevail in wreaking their revenge upon those they despise? It’s too early to tell, but this revenant’s strength and seeming momentum are deeply unsettling.

Interestingly, there’s another way in which the story of Hugh Glass nearly two centuries ago and that of a slice of the 2016 electorate diverge—besides the whole resurrection-from-death thing and the differing justifications for vengeance.

After I looked up the meaning of “revenant,” I sought out the details of Glass’s real-life story. Again, much is unknown and unverifiable, beyond the facts that he indeed was mauled by a bear, was left for dead and was understandably aggrieved by that. Historical accounts seem to agree on one key point, however, that was understandably ignored by the yarn-aggrandizing novelist and filmmakers, but that, one wishes, the modern-day revenants would consider:

The revenant Hugh Glass, in the end, forgave his adversary.

Do You See Watt I See?

There’s a wealth of interesting information about the National Christmas Tree and its associated “Pageant of Peace” within a massive Wikipedia entry that numbered a whopping 31 (ironically tree-killing) pages when I printed it out. And that didn’t count all the pages of footnotes I elected not to print.

I discovered, for instance, that this heartwarming symbol of nation unity and peace on Earth was a product of pure capitalism, conceived in the 1920s by an electric-industry trade group to promote its fledgling product. I learned that attendance lagged at the annual lighting ceremony during the years when President Truman flipped a remote switch from Independence, Missouri. This forced Harry to return to the White House for the 1952 lighting—a development about which he presumably was not wild. I found out that the 1969 and 1971 lighting ceremonies were disrupted by hecklers—Vietnam War protesters in the first case and nattering nabobs of anti-Spiro Agnew negativism in the second, because the vice president was doing the honors that year. I also learned that in 1978, First Daughter Amy Carter took a break from advising her dad about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in order to begin a First- or Second-Family tradition of topping off the tree with an ornament.

(If you’re counting, that’s a least three references in one paragraph—“wild about Harry,” a Spiro Agnew quote and a President Carter statement—that no reader under 50 likely will understand. Fortunately, if that's the right word, I probably haven't a single reader in that demographic.)

To me, the key page of the Wikipedia entry is number 20, which features a photograph that literally illustrates what I perversely love about the National Christmas Tree and its trappings—which occupy (currently, but not always) a small square of land on the Ellipse just south of the White House in the heart of Washington, DC.  That one photograph both solved a mystery for me and hints at—without quite telling the whole story—the big, ugly, but amusing truth about the whole operation that Wikipedia declines to acknowledge. That truth is this: The National Christmas tree, and everything that surrounds it, is hideously, godawfully tacky.

Let me to describe to you the photograph to which I’m referring. (Because, as you know unless you’re the very rare newcomer to this site, I’m too low-tech and lazy to have any idea how to post photographs, or even to have much interest in doing so. Use your damn imagination, and get the hell off my lawn.) The photo shows a big evergreen (or fir, or whatever) that’s trapped inside a framework of mesh wiring. Beside it sit a couple of wood crates on which the words “National Tree Train” are written. The photo caption reads as follows: “The model railroad train is ready to be unpacked and set up at the base of the 2012 US National Christmas Tree. An undecorated ‘state tree’ is to the right.”

Where to start? First, I alluded above to a “mystery.” I’d been wondering in recent years if I’d only thought the National Christmas Tree was an actual tree, as opposed to what it really looks like against the night sky: a huge triangular mass of lights resembling a monster version of the gaudy aluminum trees Snoopy hawks in the Charlie Brown Christmas special while the horrified round-headed kid decries the commercial greed-fest Christmas has become.

I mean, I seemed to remember, walking through the Ellipse at other times of year, there being a real, living tree at that spot. But then, every December when I’d arrive to marvel at the obscene Vegas-of-the-East spectacle that is the Pageant of Peace—with its giant, formless, zillion-watt “tree;”  its rows of smaller, bland, identical-looking "state" trees; its mixed-messages side-by-side nativity scene and Santa’s workshop; its fascinatingly Hades-like fire pit (an apocalyptic conflagration that seemingly might at any moment jump its hole and threaten the presidential mansion); and a jerry-rigged stage on which amateur-hour entertainers churned out holiday standards over a bad sound system—I’d see zero evidence of an actual living pine tree. In fact, the star of this yearly light show looks like nothing so much as the wet dream that had consumed Coolidge-era power-industry executives: Complete obliteration of the natural world, replaced by a constellation of glorious artificial light.

When I saw that photograph on the Wikipedia page (a quick aside: I don’t go to Wikipedia for evidence-based facts, but I do seek it out for the kind of detail that only obsessive citizen-researchers will happily spent vast volunteer hours compiling) it confirmed what I’d sort of suspected, but what had seemed too weird to quite believe: There really IS a tree underneath those uniform strings of diagonal lights and ornaments. But that living organism is utterly undecorated and dark. It is the irrelevant guts of a bedazzling, 100% -fake superstructure.

This bit of Internet intelligence reinforced everything that, to me, is bizarrely wonderful about the Pageant of Peace—despite the sad absence nowadays of the Yule log/fire pit, which was bulldozed in 2012 as allegedly incompatible with a reconfigured “site plan,” according to the National Park Service, which oversees the site. (I’m guessing what really happened was that President Obama suddenly realized in December 2011, gazing from his back portico to the Circle of Hell raging almost literally in his backyard, “There is a freaking inferno just beyond a flimsy fence that millions of right-wing nuts who irrationally hate me easily could stoke and fan in my direction.” Whereupon a presidential order was issued to fill in the pit, ideally with NRA President Wayne Lapierre having been thrown into it beforehand.)

I again lamented the fire pit’s absence this past Sunday night, when I made my annual pilgrimage to the site. I also didn’t see the nativity scene or Santa’s workshop, for that matter. But it’s possible I missed them both, as the crowds were crushing and there was a tented area to which I never got. (Another great irony is that the Pageant of Peace—a term coined in the 1950s to emphasize the “goodwill toward men” biblical aspect of Christmas—isn’t remotely peaceful. The place is packed with locals and tourists chattering away in a multitude of languages. You can’t move an inch without somebody’s camera-phone nearly hitting you in the eye. And the musical acts intermittently add a further level of noise.)

Still, this time as every year, there was much for me to enjoy. The central “tree” was every bit as blindingly, geometrically absurd as always. The 56 smaller trees (one for each state, the District of Columbia and five US territories), though in theory uniquely decorated, again looked thoroughly uniform. This is because—as presumably dictated by the Park Service—all the lighting and decoration is standardized, except for a few clear plastic ornaments on each tree that contain drawings or other artwork that’s been created by schoolchildren from that state, district or area. The problem is, given the size of the ornaments and the lighting, it’s nearly impossible to discern these unique details even upon close inspection—let alone from any distance. This is another compelling feature of the ludicrous spectacle that is the Pageant of Peace.

Then there are the trains—per that photo on the Wikipedia page. There’s not just one set of train tracks laid at the base of the National Christmas Tree. There are several. They collectively form a crazy quilt of locomotive madness, with trains chugging through a zig-zaggy landscape of toy villages and scenery that defies rhyme or reason. It is as if the Park Service noted the empty space surrounding the Triangle of Electricity and summoned a particularly disorganized model train enthusiast from his basement lair to please populate the area. Don’t get me wrong: Kids, even in 2015, love choo choos—as do nostalgic adults. I heard many happy exclamations. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the trains, per se. What I am saying that they add to the air of vaguely themed chaos.

This year’s music didn’t disappoint, either. While I don’t wish to disparage the generous donation of time by unpaid musicians and singers, who brave the weather to entertain the throngs—and it was actually cold Sunday night, atypical of this global-warming December—the Park Service always seems to get exactly the level of talent it doesn’t pay for. What I heard a few nights ago was a brass band that sounded like a Victorian nightmare—the kind of ensemble that might have propelled scared-straight Ebenezer Scrooge straight back to deep-humbug mode.

The brass band’s missed notes still echoed in my ears as I turned around, en route to my car, to give the National Light Show, 2015 edition, one last look. What is it that I cherish so about this crazy conglomeration of clutter, this national Hoarders episode? For one thing, it’s resoundingly retro in this increasingly too-cool-for-school world of super-high-tech gadgetry. There’s nothing sleek or sophisticated about this annual event. It remains, by and large, the same as it ever was. Furthermore, it actually forces people to get out of their houses and cars, put on their coats, and stand around outside.

As corny as it sounds, the Pageant of Peace really does, too, succeed, at least in a small way, in promoting goodwill on Earth. It brings people together in one place at one time to enjoy something—and to momentarily leave behind all the rancor and vitriol that increasing poisons America and the world. It scarcely matters whether that enjoyment springs from love of God, electricity, trains or timeless (call it evergreen) tackiness. It just makes a body feel good.

In that, it’s something of an annual Christmas miracle.