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Thomas Lifson - Contributor
Thomas
Lifson is a management consultant in Berkeley,
California, specializing in US-Japanese management
issues. A self-styled recovering academic, he
graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in
political science, and received a masters degree
in East Asian studies from Harvard, an M.B.A.
from Harvard Business School, where he was a
Baker Scholar, and a doctorate in sociology from
Harvard. He subsequently taught all three fields
on the faculty at Harvard, and also taught economics
at Columbia University’s Graduate School
of International Affairs. He is a partner in
the award-winning winery Sunset Cellars, in Alameda,
California. Mr. Lifson is proprietor of the website American
Thinker. [go to Lifson index]
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 Happy
(?) Festivus
Making up holidays...
[Thomas Lifson] 12/2404
Larry
David, the "co-creator" of Seinfeld, is
a comic genius who unfortunately married a left-wing woman
late in life, and has subsequently been spouting (and funding)
looney-left
causes. Laurie David has been known to harrangue SUV drivers,
while riding on private jets for her visits from Los Angeles
to New York City, a route flown by commercial jetliners dozens
of times a day. Nevertheless, Larry David's genius
is genuine, and often enough appears to satirize the mentality
his much-younger wife espouses.
December
23
marked the fictional holiday "Festivus," introduced
as the invention of George Costanza's (Larry David's alter ego)
father. For the few people who have not seen the episode in question,
Festivus involves the traditional pre-dinner Airing of Grievances,
in which family members tell each other how they have been disappointed
by them during the year.
As parody
of the regrettable tendency of big family gatherings to degenerate,
especially as holiday
spirits are imbibed, Festivus
works well, and is fully congruent with the information that
heart attacks increase sharply at this time of the year. It is
all-too-human to spoil joyous occasions with our underlying anger
over petty matters. The dark side of human nature remains an
underlying theme of Larry David's opus, and is one reason why
I admire his work so deeply.
But
I also love the implicit satire of Kwanzaa, another bogus made-up holiday,
aimed at separatism, and by extension, the airing of grievances.
To
my mind, being a sharp satirist, Larry David cannot help but
turn
his wit against
the regnant left, even as he overtly seems
to be parroting his wife Laurie's political line. I am
in no position to judge whether or not this represents a passive-aggressive,
Seinfeldian sneaky bit of human dynamics between Mr. and Mrs
David. I hate to admit that I sort of hope so. Many of the greatest
works of commentary under oppressive regimes have used second-order
satire, overtly attacking one (safe) target, while implicitly
ridiculing another sacred cow of those who hold power. tOR
copyright
2004 Thomas Lifson
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