A Christmas Story

A Christmas Story
by Ilana Mercer

One truth that has pride of place in the progressive pantheon is that the traditional family is a source of oppression for women and children, at least this is the mantra my culturally savvy acquaintances keep mouthing. Women and children, however, are less likely than ever to have to endure the strictures of family. According to author Danielle Crittenden, women today are more likely to be divorced, never married, or to bear children out of wedlock. Disabused of the oppressive effects of marriage, women are also more likely to be poor, suffer from addictions and sexually transmitted diseases. And their children, a third of whom are being "raised in households headed only by a mother," are paying the price for this emancipation. These children have higher dropout, addiction and crime rates and are more likely to live in poverty. In the U.S. the black family as a social unit has, to all intents and purposes, been decimated. Having survived the perils of slavery, the black family was still going strong until the 1930s. Then the Welfare State took over and the rest is history.

What remains of the unit that was once the transmitter of values in society cannot possibly pose a threat to its enemies. Because the traditional family depicted so delightfully in the Christmas Eve film "A Christmas Story" has metamorphosed into what Charles Sykes calls the Therapeutic Family. Having "adjusted itself to the new demands of the social contract with the Self," explains Sykes in "A Nation of Victims", the modern family has ceased to inculcate values. Instead, it exists exclusively for the ostensible unleashing of "self-expression and creativity" in its members.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp., always a diligent underwriter of all other forms of cohabitation that deviate from the traditional family, must have slipped up when it screened "A Christmas Story". The film, set in the 1950s, depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of nine-year-old Ralphie, and against the backdrop of his yearning for that gift of all gifts, the BB gun. Mother is a homemaker, father is a regular working stiff, and between them they have zero repertoire of psychobabble to rub together. No one beseeches Ralphie to express his feelings, or engage in any form of abreaction. In fact, he is urged to show restraint and is disciplined when naughty. But he sure is not put on Ritalin for day dreaming in class, nor is he diverted into life skills and anger management curricula when he gets into a fistfight. Despite the dearth of therapeutic comfort-speak in his life, Ralphie is a happy little boy.

Maybe the first to have helped to conflate the values of the middle class bourgeois family with pathological authoritarianism was psychologist Theodore Adorno. Certainly, the literal punishment our Ralphie receives for uttering the 'F' word and the ubiquitous reminder he gets of starving children when he refuses his food, fail every New Age psychological commandment. By today's parenting standards, Ralphie would be doomed to an emotional abyss.

Rest assured all progressives. The bete noire of a family depicted in "A Christmas Story", with its oppressed mother, therapeutically challenged father and their firm discipline, is being reined in. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has trounced the Bill of Rights on issues of human rights, has deleted reference to the family. Coupled with the omission of any mention of the family, the Charter includes "age as a prohibited ground for discrimination." With this, writes lawyer Cindy Silver in a paper for the Center for Renewal in Public Policy, the Charter "effectively changed the constitutional status of children to one of prima facie equality with adults."

The legacy of the Adorno construct, by extension, is expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: The consensus among rights advocates being that due to its authoritarian structure, the traditional family is oppressive to women and children. "The solution", explains Silver, "has been for the State to shift the balance in the parent-child relationship through policies that would define and limit the power of the parent while increasing the power of the child." Despite the curtailing of family autonomy and parental rights by the State, children place family above most things. This was crystal clear from the results of an exercise Elections Canada undertook to have kids vote for their most favored right in schools. If kids could choose their families, I wager most would opt for the kind of family depicted in "A Christmas Story".