According to the article, an 81 year-old US man living in New Mexico became angry when he found he was sharing his house with a mouse.  Unwilling to share his space, the man caught the mouse and took him outside.  Like all giants in these sorts of stories reason succumbs to passion and the man gave into his lesser demons.  Not satisfied with just removing the mouse he threw the mouse into a pile of burning leaves for a slow and anguishing death.  Yet our tiny hero would not be so easily vanquished.  Instead, burnt hairs still smoldering, the vengeful mouse ran back into the house catching furniture and draperies ablaze from the embers on his back.  The giant, too slow to respond to the fast mouse's movements was left to watch in horror as his house soon became engulfed in flames.  "I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house," he said.  While no one was hurt the house and everything in it was destroyed.

While the loss of the man's home and possessions is saddening, it may be appropriate to feel a little happy for the mouse.  Certainly everyone can agree that a fiery death would be both cruel and unusual.  At times like these it's hard not to think of karma or divine justice.  It's even harder not to think of Tom and Jerry.

We like the underdog.  We like the idea that, through brains, the tiny and crafty mouse can outsmart and outlive the bigger, stronger and meaner cat.  It’s the story of Odysseus and Polyphemos 3000 years later.  The same is true for the Road-Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, Seabiscuit and the War Admiral, and the Red Sox and the Yankees.  We like loveable losers – so long as they win, of course.

But who is really the underdog in these situations?  If the span of cartoons is examined it's bound to be found that there has never been an occasion when Tom ate Jerry for breakfast or that it was the Road Runner that fell off the cliff.  If this is true then the house should bet on Bugs not Elmer and Tweedy-Bird, not Sylvester (The more I think about this, the more I realize how much all the Warner Bros. cartoons are the same story).  So if the "giants" in these stories can never seem to win, they either aren't very good giants or we need to update our definition of what constitutes an underdog.  It's supposed to be a shock when David slings Goliath, not business as usual.  Unpredictable equals exciting.  But in the world where films like Cinderella Man, Seabiscuit, and any other sports movie you can name, are box office hits, it has come to be expected that the losers should, at least at the end, win.

Therefore, if in the underdog story the underdog keeps winning, if the Road Runner keeps running, Tweedy keeps tweeting, and our mouse friend keeps burning down houses, its time to reevaluate who is really the underdog in these situations.  The Underdog should have the odds stacked against him, not the benefit of the doubt.  Therefore, I think that, from now on, we should root for Tom in Tom & Jerry.  Sure, it may mean the end of the series, but at least it will be an exciting and memorable final episode.  It could be unpredictable and earth shattering as well.  Elmer Fudd could learn a lesson from Carl the groundskeeper and put some explosives down Bugs Bunny's rabbit hole.  Perhaps, finally dissatisfied with all his contraptions and gadgets, Wile E. Coyote will just eat the Road Runner, Sylvester will toss Tweedy's cage in a bathtub, and Tom will throw Jerry into a burning pile of leaves.

Regardless, its time for a change.  I want to see a sports film about the Chicago Bears playing against the Prairie Ridge Junior Varsity Football team, from the perspective of the Bears of course.  I want to see a game show with moms facing off against the people from Iron Chef.  Unless we have a reality check we're likely to start believing that small always beats big, that brains always beat brawn, and that the good guys always beat the bad.  What we need is to see regular average Americans everyday on TV getting thumped by bigger Americans.  Something a long the line of American Gladiators would be good.  Given the reality TV craze, it might do well between The Apprentice, Survivor and Beauty and the Geek 2.

If we're lucky, this will create a new appreciation for the underdog.  If not that, it will at least help people to better appreciate fire safety. 

You might have realized this standing in line at Best Buy last week, waiting for the girl with the gift cards to give you permission to finally advance to a checkout line, or you might have felt rumblings from below your stomach when you saw the parking lot at all the malls on the last weekend before Christmas.  We've all heard it before; but somewhere between Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and the week of returns and exchanges, we've lost some of the Christ in Christ's Mass.

Don't get excited.  This isn't a treatise on how to bring back the religious and spiritual into the holidays.  It may be too late for that anyway.  No, this is just a few simple thoughts on what Christmas is now and how we got here.
Any discussion of Christmas must pause for a brief discussion of things historical.  If you've been at all bored during the run-up to the 25th, you probably had a chance, as I did, to stretch out on the couch and watch one of the many PBS, A&E, or History Channel documentaries on the origins of Christmas.  For those of you that had better things to do you may find it interesting to know that Jesus, whether the Son of God or not, was not born on December 25th, but probably sometime in April.  Also, if our dating system is truly based on "The Year of Our Lord" as Anno Domine would have us believe, then this is not 2005 but either 2011 or 2001 – it has to do something about Mary and Joseph trying to escape a Roman Census, and the historical years for when that Census actually occurred: 6BC or 4AD.

I'm sorry to say that, according to astrological star charts and computer models, the Christmas Star was no star at all, but instead three stars and a planet all grouped together in precisely the right way so as to appear as a single overly bright star to Mesopotamian onlookers. To the superstitious this star was a portent.  Three particularly bright-eyed stargazers from the Kingdoms of Ind, Chaldea, and Persia (think southern Iraq near Basrah) noticed the new star and decided to check it out.  From these we get the tradition of the Three Kings, whom were probably not kings at all but the equivalent of modern day priests crossed with palm readers.

So if that was Christmas back then, how did we get from three Iraqi's who liked to read their horoscopes and a couple of dead-beats trying to skip out on their taxes?  The answer, like all things silly and ancient, comes from Romans.  December 25th is the birth of Saturn, or as they called it, the Feast of the Saturnalia.  The Romans, like the Greeks, were known for their good parties.  The Lupercalia was one particularly smash hit where they would celebrate a race like you've never seen done before.  The men and women would strip down to nothing but their dignity and race down the street.  The twist, if nudity wasn't twisty enough, was that the men would carry torn up wolf hides (lupus meaning wolf… Lupercalia) and whip the naked women as they ran… okay, so perhaps the girls lost their dignity.  Regardless, it was a riotous good time and you can only imagine what they did to celebrate the birth of Jupiter's Dad.

Years later, the Emperor Constantine decided that Jupiter was out and Jesus was in.  The state religion of Rome changed from the whacky Greco-Roman gods we all know and love to the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  Mary's in there somewhere, so are the saints… so the religion wasn't all that different; it even had the same parties.  The Birth of Saturn became the Birth of Jesus.  The Saturnalia became Christ's Mass.

If that has you feeling a little cheated, especially when you go to Midnight Mass and sing O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, it should.  With the Pope in control things got a little more serious back in Rome at Christmastime, but up in England, it was a different story.     In the 17th Century, Christmas was less like it is today and more like a cross between Mardi Gras and Girls Gone Wild.  The drunks would move from house to house of the English upper-classes singing songs and demanding presents such as things like figgy-pudding, only they actually wouldn't go until they got some.

In the United States we celebrate a combination of all the Christmas Traditions.  With singing and dancing like the jolly-old English buggers, the consumerism and feasting of the Saturnalia and the leftovers of the piety the Catholics brought with all the name changes.  Of course, we've misplaced most of the last over the past 200 years.

So here we are, the week of returns and exchanges.  All that jingling and belling on the radio is about to stop.  That lingering feeling of Christmas cheer is about to run out and New Year's will finish with whatever's left.  When you look at your bank account you may feel a little overspent.  When you look in the mirror you may feel a little overfed.  Either way, you are probably wondering how we let it happen again.  Where did we go wrong?  Why did we drink so much egg nog?  It doesn't even taste good.

None of this is all that useful; only about half as useful as it is interesting.  And that's not saying much.  Maybe this will all come in handy next year.  When the War on Christmas heats up again and you can't decide whether to say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, just remember what you are actually celebrating and wish all a happy Feast of the Saturnalia.  If your good, maybe someone will want to party in the proper Roman way.  Oh— remember that whole running around naked with the wolf hides?  Turns out, Christmas isn't the only holiday leftover from our Imperial friends of old.  Lupercalia lives on today.  Although somewhat tamed, we now call it St. Valentines Day.

I set up this blog "A Jack In The Blog" as Christmas gift for my brother, Jack. I hope he finds blogging as enjoyable as I do.

Merry Christmas!

~Somewhat Frank

With this gift Jack will be offering unwarranted and unsolicited social and political commentary to the blogosphere. Jack is an excellent debater and the blogosphere is an excellent place to debate. Jack plans on being involved politically throughout his life and A Jack In The Blog will help him stay in tuned to the most recent happenings in the political world for years to come.

Email Address: ajackintheblog at yahoo dot com

Blog: http://ajackintheblog.com

Interests

Politics, Literature, History, the State of Affairs