In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. Obviously, I didn’t know that because I have no idea who he is, or rather was, and it only appeared when I was searching for the origins of the expression “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, all of which is a clumsy way of sharing with you a genuinely authentic copy of the Daily Mail from Sunday 25th December 0000. Yes, that front page really happened, ladies and gentleman. It is as real as the bible’s Christmas story itself.
If the alleged Jesus of Nazareth ever existed – and my feeling, based on the available evidence, is that he didn’t, or if he did he was a Paul Daniels type conjuror who went from town to town performing magic tricks, like turning water into wine (“You’ll like this … not a lot”) – can you imagine how he might be treated? What if circumstances dictated that He escaped the wild east and ended up arriving in whatever Dover 2000-odd years later? Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman would be trying to put him on a plane to Rwanda and Nigel Farage would be standing in front of a large poster, complaining about how we were being swamped by dark-skinned foreigners.
That Mary was pregnant, claiming also to be a virgin – “Yeah, right love. They all say that” – is one thing, but I can just imagine her and Joseph turning up at the DWP a few days later, undergoing the habitual residents test in order to claim benefits. “So, you claim you were sent here by God? Pull the other one.They all say that, too. Do you think I was born yesterday?” As the Mail pointed out, the local taxpayer would be footing the bill in order to subsidise the lifestyle of more illegals. “Let’s look after our own, first!” said a local halfwit.
I am being serious here, sort of. The alleged Jesus, son of God, would undoubtedly have been regarded as an alien, likely an illegal alien and I can just imagine crowds of “protestors”, like the ones that appeared after the Southport killings, turning up and trying to set fire to Joseph and Mary’s barn. (Incidentally, what made them think that getting a hotel room on Christmas Eve would be anything but impossible?)
While I consider the Christmas story to be made-up nonsense, I have neither the energy nor enthusiasm to try to stop it. Christmas, certainly as we know it in the UK, is little more than a cynical opportunity for businesses to make money and for us, the Christmas consumers, to enjoy an excess of anything. The peace and goodwill message is cheery and comforting, even if it is likely a work of fiction, but the hatred our media feels for anyone considered to be foreign is very real and the baby Jesus would not have been exempt from their ire. Fear and loathing in Bethlehem.
