Welcome back to the re-education. This is a monologue-only episode on why it's okay for

seculars to tap their feet and hum along the music of Christmas, the holiday season. It may have struck you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's a big relationship between this marvelous time of year and living in a one-party state.

Nothing makes me think more than at this time of our oldest humanity's oldest enemy,

the authoritarian dictatorship, where you can't go anywhere without listening to the same music, where you can't go anywhere without listening to the same music,

where you can't go anywhere without hearing the name of the great leader and his son, the dear leader,

where all broadcasts, all songs, all jokes, all references are,

just for that magic few weeks, just exactly like living in

fucking North Korea.

That is, of course, the great Christopher Hitchens, speaking in 2007 at a Reason Magazine

holiday party where he would go on to recite Tom Lair's anti-Christmas Carol.

It was a great evening I was there.

And this was a great cause for the great man, Christopher Hitchens,

who in most December's wrote a column decrying the holiday season

as a national lapse into totalitarianism.

Let me read an excerpt from his 2005 column on this theme.

Quote, on all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive

theme in all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of

identical propaganda and identical music, the collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory

infliction of joy. Time wasted on foolishness at one's children's schools, vapid, ecumenical

messages from the president, who has more pressing things to do and who is constitutionally

required to avoid any religious endorsements." End quote.

Now, I think Hitch is overstating things.

...