Subliminal Seduction

My mother, who art in Marion, Mary be her name is a formidable woman of 85 - a fact that I have a hard time comprehending. But truth be told she is great health (after all, 85 is the new 75), mental soundness and progressive thinking.

When she came down for Christmas, she seemed a bit off. First, she didn't do a good job of parallel parking her car (aka Vantasia), and mother is a good parallel parker. But then she said something odd as we were unpacking her car and bringing the goodies into our house.

"I don't like that Barack Obama one bit."

Now this is a huge turn around from last year when she like the President a great deal, and she liked him enough to vote for him. "Well of course I'm going vote for him - besides I hate that trashy woman from Alaska, Sarah Paleface..."

So we got inside, got settled, got a cup of decaf in her hands, and I began to walk around this whole idea about Mother not liking Obama.

"Was it something his wife wore?" I asked.

"Well no," mother ceded, "he's just a Muslim that doesn't celebrate Christmas."

Now hold on here, Hoss. There are things my mother will say and things she'll repeat. And this isn't anything that she would dream of saying on her own. So I asked for further elaboration on this point of nonsense sensing that she's been watching too much Fox News.

"Well, he's in Hawaii and they don't celebrate Christmas," she said.

So I asked her what she thought Hawaiians did on December 24th and 25th, and she thought about it and said "Oh, I guess they celebrate Christmas, but they do other things, too."

I spent the next couple minutes telling her that while they might cook a suckling pig and body surf, that the majority of Hawaiians probably exchanged gifts, and that the likelihood that the Obama's were doing the same was in truth, the most likely activity. But it was the Hawaii part that was getting to her.

"But the President always celebrates Christmas in the White House!" mother stated. Not true, as it turns out. Of the modern Presidents most have spent Christmas at their private homes, or at Camp David, but seldom at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While the White House is the official residence of the President, the fact is, they like to get away from it at any chance they get.

What about Bush clearing brush at his ranch, I asked. Well, mother doesn't know about W. because she really didn't like him. The Clinton's? Well, mother thinks that they were the Camp David type. By the time we got to the Nixon's and San Clemente, she let loose the notion that President always has to spend Christmas in the White House, and that simply because Barrack and Michelle Obama were in Hawaii, they weren't spending their time throwing virgins into the volcano's to appease some sort of foreign god, as opposed to American God.

With that done, I went to outside re-park Vantasia, and once I got the seat moved to a place where an adult could fit in it, and let the car warm up a bit I heard this murmur of excitable voices, which turned out to be the radio, which is odd because mother listens to 1940s music. She doesn't much go in for modern radio. So I turned up the volume and, low and behold, the murmuring revealed itself to be the Serpent himself.

Turns out that those asinine ideas about the Obama's were the same types of sleaze that Rush Limbaugh calls entertainment because it was Limbaugh himself on the radio. So I parked Vantasia and went back inside and asked my mother when had she become a fan of Rush Limbaugh?

"I can't stand the man," she replied.

"Well you have been listening to him on the radio."

"Oh, was that what was on the radio?" she asked. "I just had it on for the news and must have forgotten to turn it off."

So for Christmas I hope I saved my mother from a fate worse than fruitcake - being further subliminally seduced by Rush into a Limbaugh Zombie.