Hollywood doesn’t just push some boundaries; it pushes them all. Remember that these are the same people who can’t understand why Roman Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl was all that big a deal. But Hollywood is far cleverer than any government bureaucracy. After all, this video is beautifully done! That’s why we are outraged at those running the schools in Chicago but fail to see the subversion of our values in cute Christmas videos. We need to have our eyes open – all the time.

Imagine for a moment that you lived in a culture where everyone had the flu all the time. Life would be pretty awful, but then again, you wouldn’t necessarily realize it. Constant sneezing and feverish chills would simply be among the regular struggles of life in a broken world. Even if your grandparents reminisced about a time when the flu was uncommon, or at least the symptoms less severe, you probably wouldn’t take them seriously. You wouldn’t even understand the need for a word like “flu,” since it only described life in its normal state.

Now consider this: you live in that culture. We are sick – far sicker than we realize. Occasionally our symptoms are so acute that we notice, but the basic, underlying pathology has become so commonplace that we either ignore it or fail to recognize it as unhealthy. When word comes out that the Chicago schools (mistakenly?) revealed a plan for graphic instruction on anal sex in elementary school, most recognize that something has gone terribly wrong. But do those who are crying foul recognize how we got here?

A Little Holiday Music

It’s Christmas. I know that seems crazy, but in my neighborhood there is more than one family that puts up Christmas decorations while taking down Halloween decorations. I thought for a while we could buck this trend, but I came home to find a wreath on my front door, so who am I to condemn?

Of course this means that before long, holiday music will be on every station. My tolerance for this trend goes down while its duration goes up. I can still remember when I had to hear “Little Drummer Boy” a few dozen times before I became annoyed; now the second cover of the season sends me into a towering rage. Holiday music, though, is a good way to gauge the culture.

We still have the Christmas standbys, hymns of praise to the Infant Savior. There was a time when the secularized holiday music was of a more or less wholesome type as well. Holiday songs spoke of wintery gatherings at grandma’s house, of kindness to neighbors, and of cheer in the darkness. But in late 1940s, flush with the redefinition of sexuality which was already underway in postwar America, one Frank Loesser released another sort of winter song.

Baby It’s Cold Outside is a light-hearted, amusing, light-jazz treatment of sexual coercion. The song is a conversation between an obviously unmarried young woman (she’s worried about her father and mother waiting up for her at home) who finds herself in some difficulty attempting to leave a man’s apartment. He pleads the cold as a reason for her to stay, pours her a stiff drink, puts on romantic records, and begs her not to “hold out.” Although foolish enough to be at his apartment in the first place, the victim at least has the sense to want to go home. In the end, though, she gives in, joining him in singing about the cold. The implied ending is that she remains in his embrace…and in his bed? Loesser’s original score called the man a wolf, and we know what it means when a wolf entices a young girl to remain at his place.

I’m not certain at what point this bit of bawdy comedy became one of the holiday standards, but it has been covered about as often as “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and plays on all the same stations. It is a catchy tune, and the title words seem so fitting this time of the year. I have caught myself whistling the opening line whenever it’s cold in Wisconsin. (I have to find something else to whistle during the second week of August.) But it is everywhere, and it’s Christmas-y, so I wonder if we realize just how awful it is.

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