Christmas Time This Year: Cheer for the Children Coming Home in Plastic Bags
Santa Claus is coming to bring the boys and girls back home
Christmas time is marked by vibrant colors and heartfelt joy.
Decorating the tree, buying gifts for the kids and making plans to see family and friends, are all cherished traditions of the festive season.
It’s a time to relish your blessings and feel the spirit of giving.
For kids, it’s a special time of the year. For parents, it’s a time for children.
Except for those families welcoming their kids back home in body bags.
Gifts From the Iraq War
The United States led the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein.
The war ended on December 18, 2011. The premise was global terrorism.
To jog your memory, President George W. Bush made the mistaken case for war:
States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger …
After eight years of conflict, the outcomes speak for themselves:
Over 4,400 Americans and up to 100,000 Iraqis died
No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were found
The invasion was based on unreliable or misinterpreted intelligence
In 2011, Ry Cooder released the song Christmas Time This Year. According to an interview in Marketplace, he wanted to write protest songs with “stories as vividly as I can and try to get the point across in four minutes”.
Vivid is not a usual Christmas theme, though, it is full of spirit here:
Now Johnny ain't got no legs and Billy ain't got no face
Do they know it's Christmas time this year?
Tommy looks about the same but his mind is gone
Does he know it's Christmas time this year?
Cooder is a craftsman of traditional music. Set to Tex-Mex music, with an accordion and a Mexican twelve-string guitar, Christmas Time This Year is infested with festive flavor. It’s the kind of tempo you’d expect when celebrating a holiday.
So, the antiwar message in the lyrics hits your gut hard.
Our children will be coming home in plastic bags I fear
And then we'll know it's Christmas time this year
An Eclectic Musical Wizard
Nobody infuses distinct cultural melodies like Ry Cooder. He is an instrumentalist, a bluesman, a collaborator and a unique artist.
His fourteenth studio album, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down, is a masterpiece of mixing Americana with political disillusionment.
The album covers politics, war, economic disparity, and social injustice. All to the tradition styles of Tejano, country, blues and folk music.
It’s embedded in a working-class narrative that blares out from a parked truck.
Coda
When wars create screams and dead silence in distant lands, holiday magic is an illusion.
But, there is no place too far from reality. The internet brings the horror of bombing campaigns and dust-covered bodies into your kitchen. No space is safe from the carnage.
However, prolonged wars and daily video feeds tend to desensitize the everyday ugliness. Some how it becomes normal. We start to bypass the reruns.
I admit that I pause before clicking on “sensitive content” on Twitter. I know what’s coming and take a second to prepare. But I still cringe and avert my eyes.
I don’t want to see children in pain or torn in pieces.
But I don’t want to forget either.
So we need songs to remind us of the tragedies of current life, even if its during the jolly holiday period.
Thank goodness, Ry Cooder was under no illusion.
He was just pissed off.
[Photo Credit: Ry Cooder, Dani Canto, CC BY-SA 2.0]
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I think we all want to avert our eyes; not seeing it, doesn’t make the cringing brutal reality go away.