11.24.2005 | Thanks for the Malls

Richard Cohen has a column today which, I hate to admit, I agree with. Mostly. It's about one of my pet peeves -- the loss of meaning in many of our national holidays. They've become just another excuse to go the the mall and spend, spend, spend.

When I was growing up in the Bronx, my Irish "friends" (I'm ethnically Jewish) would taunt us around Christmas time. Nasty words, to the effect that it was all of those "Jew merchants" (you know, the pushcart pedlars who owned the big department stores in Manhattan) who had stolen Christmas.

What I never noticed were the guns pointed at the heads of all the nominal Christians who complained about this, making them go and buy buy buy...

One quibble with Cohen's column, though. He wrote "if it [the Declaration of Independence] were introduced into the current Congress, Republicans would bottle it up in committee." Actually, given the way the Declaration begins with all those references to God, I think that it's the Democrats who would kill it before it's birth.

After all, Congress has the right to choose...it's their body.