Retail-Speak American Style

Hidden or overshadowed by U.S. President Trump’s coined term, fake news, American retail’s utterly contrived, and thus fake jargon went unscathed by consumers in first few decades of the twentieth century. Even nonverbally acknowledging the verbiage spewed out by employees and even front-line managers in a retail store or coffee shop as if the jargon were legitimate subtly enables and thus extenuates the sordid trend. Were enough customers to question and even object to the “corporate correct” lines, perhaps the feedback would move its way up managerial hierarchies and result in cleaner, more transparent conversation at the store level. To the extent that business culture pervades a society, changes are greater that the verbal artifice will be received as if it were real, and thus a valid way of communicating. Perhaps the more general question concerns the extent to which linguistic artifice saturates American culture and has even come to be viewed as genuine. The subtle influence of business culture in America may be vastly overlooked.

Perhaps the most contrived verbiage utilized strategically by retail managements is, I do apologize. Especially fake is the corporate apology when for your inconvenience is added. That the customer has been inconvenienced by a managerial decision that is in the financial interest of the company without the manager being willing to compensate the customer in any way for the “inconvenience” renders the word itself, as well as the apology, utterly fake. It may even be considered to be passive aggressive, especially if the manager could offer to compensate the aggrieved customer. An apology is not in itself compensation, even if it feels good to hear the word, but such a feeling should not lead to the conclusion that the apology is genuine. In fact, customer-service employees, such as at call centers, are trained to apologize for virtually anything because apologizing is free. In a pro-business societal culture, customers may leap to the conclusion that even such an apology, even when a company wrongs a customer and the management could compensate the person for the harm or cost but refuses, is genuine. The astute customer might reply, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology because your company has not solved the problem but could do so. The use of the word unfortunately is just as fake as when it is used by an employee or manager as if the outcome were unfortunate also for the company, which is not the case because it benefits financially by not solving the problem or compensating the customer. 

The underlying brain sickness behind the corporate apology can be detected when, after replying, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology, the customer is treated to yet another apology! With such passive aggression (i.e., in the sheer disregard and thus disrespect of what the customer has just said), the angered customer could also be repetitive: Unfortunately, I cannot accept your apology. Astonishingly, even that statement may be insufficient to stop the verbal diarrhea on the other end. Perhaps the line of apology as an appeasement strategy is so entrained by supervisors that the underlying pathology triggered in the employee lies in the brain’s reversion to a primitive, reptilian stage.

Another, not so passive aggressive, instance of fake managerial jargon in retail is the fake greeting as a customer enters a store. When done by security guards, however, any greeting is inherently passive aggressive. Translated into real meaning, such a greeting as welcome means Just so you know, I’ll be watching you. The managerial decision to fuse the two roles of greeter and security guard at the entrance of a store reveals not only a basic disregard for the comfort of customers, but also an unconscious sadism, wherein the infliction of discomfort and even pain in another person gives pleasure to the culprit.

The sheer fakeness of greetings by employees and store managers when customers are entering a store even before they are oriented to the new surroundings can be seen in Starbuck’s corporate directive to have store employees say Welcome in to customers as they enter, as if welcome and come in make any sense fused together. An astute customer could reply, Greetings! Such a way of saying hello is so stilted that it can communicate the acknowledgement that the communication is utterly contrived and fake rather than genuine. Perhaps the way to eventually end the linguistic managerial fakeness is to give employees and store managers a of their own crap in return. The exchange of genuine and fake, from customers and employees, respectively, is unfair to the customers, as it is insulting to speak genuinely only to receive trite, contrived pieces of company jargon, especially if every employee is utilizing the same words.

A third instance of contrived jargon concerns a retail company’s managerial decision to revert to Happy Holidays immediately after Halloween, as if the words Thanksgiving and Christmas were toxic even though both holidays are official U.S. holidays and thus completely legitimate in all of the member-states (each of which recognized both holidays, at least as of 2026). To single out two major holidays as if they constituted cups of bland, generic water is not only dogmatic, but also passive aggressive against Americans who legitimately express positive sentiments about either or both of the two holidays. It is interesting—meaning ideologically convenient—that on the day after Christmas, the same employees who had been saying Happy Holidays suddenly can’t stop saying, Happy New Years. The fact that not every American celebrates every holiday does not invalidate any of the official holidays; nor does the fact that some people dislike an official holiday. 

It is arrogant, even presumptuous, to demand that other people refuse to acknowledge an official holiday that a person dislikes. In enabling this sordid, even pathological mentality by substituting the passive aggressive “greeting” Happy Holidays for Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, retail managers, whether in stores face to face with customers or in corporate management, do not realize that the appeasement is both enabling and passive aggressive. The astute customer could think of an equally generic response to convey a refusal to accept the squalid subterfuge as if it were not actually hostile and ideological. Perhaps Have a happy 24 hour period may be sufficient to convey the acknowledgement of the unsuitability of the generic holiday “greeting,” but something else equally generic and more oriented to holidays may be better suited as a reply. “Wishing” employees Happy Holidays for every other holiday is one possible tactic. 

If the generic holiday applies to Thanksgiving and Christmas, then the same greeting applies to Independence Day, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Halloween. After all, some American Black people object to the first holiday due to slavery existing when the Declaration of Independence was announced on July 4, 1776, some Quakers may object to Veterans Day and even Memorial Day, and some rich industrialists in labor-management disputes might object to Labor Day. Evangelical Christians may object to Halloween due to its devilish connotations, preferring instead All Saints Day on the next day. Is the name of every American holiday to be forbidden in retail settings just because at least somebody objects to a given holiday? It is unfair to capitulate to only the detractors who harshly accost people who mention Thanksgiving or Christmas by name. In doing the bidding of those detractors, retail managements take sides ideologically and even impose the ideological bias on customers whose mention of either or both of the two legal holidays is entirely legitimate and therefore should not be countered with Happy Holidays as a virtual slap on the face. Astute customers may dismissively retort, also in passive aggression, Of course you do, as well as wield the Happy Holidays club themselves on every other legal (and other) holiday.

The extent to which retail managers in stores and even at corporate headquarters engage in what is really passive aggression in the guise of appeasing customers so not to lose any has not been made transparent to the vast majority of American consumers. Taking Happy Holidays superficially at face value enables the grinches who have lashed out verbally at employees merely for saying Happy Thanksgiving or Merry Christmas. Employees and managers alike should have replied, Thanksgiving (or Christmas) is a national holiday in the United States. The corporate path of least resistance can itself be problematic, especially if enough consumers in America become aware of the sheer manipulative artifice being utilized in the retail sector and are offended by the ungenuine, scripted replies by employees and store managers. Resisting the generics with generics may cure the patient or at least shift the disease to defense.

San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

On my first shift as a volunteer, and I agreed to volunteer at all so I could include some examples of “gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on film as an excellent medium for stimulating philosophical and theological thinking, I casually mentioned to two young women who had just seen the film that was shown during my first shift that I was impressed that the film has two lesbian sex scenes. Even though my tone was that of a compliment, one of the young (presumably lesbian) women angrily declared to me, “That’s heterosexual sex!”  as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion on my part. “No,” I slowly retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” Translation: two vaginas without any penis in a sex act is heterosexual if one of the women self-identifies mentally as a man, which was the case in the film. The context of my remark was that I came slowly to the realization during the film that the sex scenes involved two vaginas rather than a vagina and a penis. My position was that a person’s mental state does not impact the label on whether a sex scene is homosexual or heterosexual; a (real) penis and a vagina, and, technically, penetration of the former into the latter, are requisite to a sex scene being classified as heterosexual rather than homosexual. That ideological fervor can overreach so much, even to contradict such well-established labels as homosexual and heterosexual (and violate even common sense!), means that a vulnerability exists in the human brain, and therefore human nature itself, with respect to ideology in relation to facts. In other words, the fact/value distinction is vulnerable to values overruling facts.

I was stunned during the ensuing week when I discussed the conversation with other people. A handful, all under 35 years old, pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene centered on and involving two vaginas (and no penises) is not heterosexual. One college student said, “It could be.” Plain and simply, she was incorrect. Tellingly, people over 40, on the other hand, were as stunned as I was regarding the pushback I had been encountering. “That’s just crazy,” an 88 year-old gay man said in referring to the assertion that a sexual act between two vaginas (and no penis) is heterosexual. The human mind seems to be too weak, at least in the case of ideologues, to put the brakes on an ideology when it has gone too far in a person’s mind. Psychology is in the mix. One young man who actually had been awarded a Ph.D. in natural science repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop as if he were regressing back to his childhood, “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!” He could barely control himself emotionally. The arrogance that is in ideological idolatry can be so powerful in the mind that it malfunctions without even realizing it. The impact of ideology on a mind’s self-regulatory features deserves much greater attention both in scholarship and the public square. 

In addition to mental states, ideological fervor and even intense flashes of anger do not trump cognitive definitions. The sheer presumption in contradicting definitions, even more than the flashes of anger unleased on me, is what really shocked me because I had never encountered such overreaching of an ideology. Such presumption is like arrogance on stilts during a flood, and yet strangely such an ideologue’s mind is unaware of the overreach and its presumption. Besides the blatant distortion of the word “heterosexual” beyond recognition such that it could be applied as a label to homosexual sex acts in a film, the vengeance of the two young lesbians complaining about my “inappropriate” statement—the very word, inappropriate, signals subjectivity—added insult to the initial injury of being so blatantly disrespected. But for their ideological fervor having reached the level of idolatry, the two young women could have left the theater without feeling an instinctual urge to harm me. Pleasure from inflicting pain on another person is garden variety sadism, and, according to Nietzsche, the original function of punishment before moral responsibility came to be associated.

Cicily Singh, who managed the Frameline (LGBT) festival’s volunteer corps that year, instinctually reacted to the women’s complaint of my “inappropriate” statements ideologically, meaning with much prejudice because she held the very same ideology as the two women at the theater. For Cicily wrote a hostile, accusatory email to me without even having contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two vindictive young women. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene,” and then my explaining, “because there are two vaginas,” is in no sense inappropriate, especially at a gay film festival! Ironically, it was Cicily’s email that was inappropriate. She must have been very ideologically and, relatedly, emotionally incensed, for she was sufficiently impulsive to send me the harsh, accusatory email, which contained an implicit threat that my continued involvement at the festival was then on thin ice, in time for me to read her message while I was en route to my last shift, rather than only once it had been completed. Ideological idolatry and the related emotional state can confound rationality, and thus thinking strategically. I unilaterally activated the implied threat and implemented it myself—"that’s called taking the initiative.”[1] I quickly wrote a brief rebuttal and turned back (to do my own work!) rather than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a resentful, too ideologically-driven group of people as were evidently running the film festival. Afterall, this point must be made perfectly clear: saying that a sex scene is not heterosexual because it is centered on and delimited by two vaginas is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement, and entirely fitting at an LGBT (gay) film festival.

It is important to situate both the two young lesbians and Cicily in the local gay culture of San Francisco, which I at the time may have been very distinct from the gay cultures in other cities in several respects—all in excess. To be sure, I have no empirical studies to cite to support my conjecture. From my own observations of the distinctive sub-culture, my impression is that gay men under 50 or 60 years of age in the Castro district were both more ideologically fixated and angrier at people who opposed their sociopolitical-linguistic ideology than were gay men typically in other large cities in North America and Europe. San Francisco “Pride” had arguably gone too far in its ideological intolerance and aggressive vindictiveness not in pushing back against heterosexual anti-gay prejudice but, rather, against non-acceptance of the “woke” ideology and agenda, and in particular the linguistic dogmatism. Home-grown ideology, rather than opposition by evangelical Christians to homosexuality, had become a problem in the Castro (gay) district by 2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to overreach and to lash out in anger so to verbally attack anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually ideological opinion. The advocates and defenders of the “woke” ideology had taken the place of the evangelical “Christian right” of the 1980s in claiming truth for themselves out of what was in actuality opinion. The ideological intolerance had shifted from the hard right to the progressive left since the twentieth century. That virtually none of the gay inhabitants of the Castro were probably conscious of having taken their own ideology too far both in its content and its vehement defense can be taken as an indictment on the human brain itself, and, more particularly, on its ability to perceive going too far.

After having quit the festival after the second of my three shifts, I voted with my feet on the day after the festival’s closing night by not going to downtown San Francisco to watch the gays in their parade; I had heard and witnessed too much hostility and self-righteousness in that sub-culture for its advocates to deserve being watched performing “on stage.” I will not furnish several examples of the toxicity manifested as hostility and even aggressiveness within the subculture—the dysfunctional psychology mirrors and likely even augmented or intensified the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered at the Frameline film festival. By analogy, the more general heating of the temperature at the Castro arguably contributed to the “heatwave” that I encountered at the film festival. During that very week, in fact, scientists were making precisely this argument in regard to the heatwave then occurring in Europe—the temporary El Nino was not the driving force behind the record heat.

Several contributory factors can be identified to account for the impact of the toxic Castro culture (i.e., global warming) on the film festival’s organizational dysfunction (i.e., the heatwave). Firstly, the harsh rudeness and abject inconsiderateness, and even cruelty, with which gay men in the Castro commonly would intentionally not show up for previously-arranged (sex) date without even bothering to cancel because suddenly another man is available for sex. A guy not showing up, without bothering to cancel, at a meeting place (e.g., my place or yours) previously agreed with another guy was called “flaking,” and the disrespect in particular and the passive aggression more generally were severe enough psychologically to cause strong anger. Similarly, the language that Castro men typically used in rejecting unwanted overtures by other men for sex, such as “you’re fat” and “you’re old; you don’t belong in this bar,” doubtlessly caused outrage. Rather than being emotionally hurt from prejudice locally against homosexuality, too many gay men in the Castro were slicing into other gay men there too often and too deeply. It is as if enjoying being cruel had become engrained within gay culture. It may be that the ideological anger that was directed to me at the festival was fueled at least in part by the legitimate anger and even rage caused by gay men there. It is not as if such intense anger simply dissipates on its own; rather, it seeks openings.

Secondly, I learned from two long-time residents—two friends of mine—that the gay employees in the Castro who worked as bartenders and servers (waiters) had a reputation by 2026 for being rude, and even hostile, to customers—ruder than in other areas of the city. In the Castro, tips at fast-food (i.e., counter) food-places, bars, and even coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one resentful employee at the coffee shop, Poesia, required rather than up to the discretion of the patrons. “It’s the Castro standard,” a young gay man sitting with a friend at a table near mine outside at Poesia’s street-level café said in scolding me for having just objected to the petulant, hostile employee who had angrily chastised me for not tipping on coffee orders, which, by the way, the customers picked up at the counter and returned after use to a plastic bin. The self-righteous, immature gay man sitting near me then dismissively walked away from me with his friend while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having insisted that tips are not required anywhere, even in the Castro. In other words, the “standard” was wrong, and employees of the various establishments were wholly without justification in tacitly punishing regular customers who do not tip on every occasion. That tips were by then solicited prior to any service in many food establishments everywhere is nonsensical enough; that the self-interested employees at the cash registers in the Castro retail district blatantly looked at the screen to see if customers were selecting tips is unseemly. That an employee would then lash out at a customer for not designating a tip prior to service and thus before the quality of service can possibly be assessed, as if tipping were required, is beyond the pale and thus points to a dysfunctional business climate.

It is possible that at least some of the employees’ hostility toward non-tipping customers was due to pent up anger from having been rudely and even cruelly treated by other gay men in the context of “hooking up” for sex, and from other sordid behaviors discussed below. My larger point is that the vindictiveness of the two young women in the theater and the accusatory hostility of Cicily can be seen as not so isolated as they may prime facie appear.  

Thirdly, the hostility of non-supervisory employees at retail establishments in the Castro went beyond resentment due to a presumed entitlement to be tipped by every customer regardless of service. For example, a young Black gay man working at one bar, “440,” presumed himself entitled to demand of certain (Caucasian) tourists what their purposes were in visiting the city. Another employee was reported to have told one such tourist who complained about the first employee’s invasiveness, “We do screen certain customers.” Of course, well-to-do tourists usually appear very suspicious, and may even need to be strip-searched.  This story gets even better. At least one tourist that know of told the employee at the front door, “It’s none of your business why I am in San Francisco.” Not to be outdone by a mere prospective customer, the employee abused his discretion by blocking that tourist’s access to the bar for having been rude. The tourist subsequently reported that the other employee and several young gay customers drinking beer just outside the bar chastised the tourist for being so stupid as to be rude to an employee of the bar. Because the tourist had not been at all rude, the multi-pronged attack was excessive, and thus can be taken as yet another “data point” indicative of the excessive anger and hostility in the Castro district. I suspect that the same ideology that I came up against at the film festival was in play in the attack on the tourist. Furthermore, the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered may have been excessive in part because the “temperature” in the Castro was excessive.

The position of the city’s Board of Supervisors—San Francisco’s City Council— was that screening tourists is not the job of local businesses, and the statement, “It’s none of your business,” is not rude, especially when it really is none of the employee’s business!  The outrageous presumptuousness in the Castro’s culture can be calibrated by the reality-check by the city’s own government. Of course, the likely negative impact on the city’s revenue from the wholly unjustified screening of certain tourists at a local business during a year when tourism was down was not lost on city hall. Even so, the egregiousness displayed in front of the “440” bar is not unlike that which insists that a sex scene involving two vaginas is heterosexual rather than homosexual.  

Fourthly, evincing even more hostility that the employees and even customers at “440” bar, a Black gay young man who worked as a bouncer at another bar, “The Mix,” put at risk the elderly Caucasian victim of a violent attack that had just been committed by two Black gay young men as they were walking out of the same bathroom stall (likely sniffing cocaine). Those two young men did not feel the need to walk around the victim, who was waiting in line at the bathroom, in spite of there being enough space. Instead, they decided to walk through the old man, who, after having been thrown and slammed into a nearby wall, notified the bouncer and another employee of having just been attacked, and called the emergency number of the local police, who of course wanted the address of the bar, but the employee in front of the bar checking ID’s refused to disclose the address to the victim and the police on his phone, so the victim walked outside in front of the bar and continued the call there. The two attackers, tipped off by an employee, I suspect, that the victim was on the phone with the police, went outside to verbally threaten the victim for having called the police. Astonishingly, the Black bouncer was within earshot of the threats and yet he body-blocked the door so the victim could not seek safety inside the bar, in spite having been attacked. In fact, the bouncer let the two attackers back inside the bar! That bar’s organizational culture was clearly very toxic, and the two young gay men who had been in the same stall in the bathroom clearly had excess anger. Any prejudice against gays (or Black people) by outsiders cannot be blamed; the excessive aggression was within the gay “community.”

Fifthly, perhaps the most toxic aspect of the gay culture in the Castro, and thus the source of the most intense anger, which could easily feed into hostility towards people who do not subscribe to the dominant ideology, concerns the severity of dysfunction in how too many gay men there thought of and handled their romantic relationships—not just “hooking up” for sex. It may be that Castro “standards” were too dogmatic in being presented as requirements. We encountered this above concerning tips, which were most definitely not required. A much more toxic “requirement” commonly accepted by gay men under 40 in the Castro was having to accept the imposing by a gay man on his boyfriend and even husband of a right to have separate sex (i.e., excluding the boyfriend or husband) with other men even with romantic attachment because, as this was explained to me rather dogmatically, “everyone here does it.” The obvious emotional discomfort felt, while the separate sex would be going on, by a boyfriend or husband who is in love with the person engaged in the sex with someone else may even be dismissed by the selfish and callous person in the convenient ideological belief that he has the right to impose separate romantic sex because everyone else in the Castro was doing it. Besides taking an obvious toll on the emotional intimacy and trust in the relationship in which coupling would otherwise naturally take place, both the decision to impose exogenous “making love,” as if such behavior were justified simply because many gay men were doing it and subscribed to the underlying “poly” ideology, and the callous disregard for the boyfriend’s or husband’s obvious emotional pain doubtlessly caused deep emotional hurt and anger in the boyfriend or husband that would not easily dissipate, but would instead seek out openings to erupt in misdirected and thus excessive anger, such as I encountered at the film festival. In fact, I encountered cases in which the ideology “justifying” the imposition of a polyamorous (i.e., more than one romantic love) relationship caused young men whose partners victimized them by the imposition to deny any such discomfort or hurt feelings, let along anger. One man in the Castro said to me, “I don’t mind that my boyfriend is having a separate romantic sexual relationship.” Interestingly, when I asked a few much older married gay men how they would feel were their respective husbands to announce upcoming romantic sex with an old flame, those men admitted, albeit hesitatively because they knew the polyamorous ideology was dominate then in the Castro, that they would have a problem if their respective husbands said that an old flame would be coming to town the next week and sex would occur. “Yeah, I’d have a problem with that,” a man who had been with his partner for thirty years in an open relationship. Honesty with the courage to go up against a dogmatic ideology is a virtue. In contrast, feeling obliged to “stuff,” or repress, and even deny the very existence of deep emotional discomfort and anger because discomfort is disallowed by the ideology that insists that there is nothing wrong with separate romantic sex, so any discomfort in the partner left out would be unjustified, and thus inappropriate, and perhaps even unfair to the partner having the separate romantic sex! Everyone does it in the Castro, so why should I have to put up with his discomfort and even anger? The level of psychological toxicity in such “reasoning” is astounding. Pent-up emotional pain and hostility would be entirely natural, whereas the imposition would be selfish ideological hubris that cares little if anything about the feelings of other people.

That ideology comes with at least two internal flaws. Firstly, it backs up its approval of the imposing of a “right” to have separate romantic sex by championing the polyamorous, “multiple loves,” relationship. But as a bisexual woman pointed out to me in the Castro (as I was trying unsuccessfully to ask her out), “In a polyamorous relationship in which more than two persons are in the same romantic relationship, every party must freely consent; to affirm that outside romantic sex should be accepted, and thus is legitimately imposed, is just an excuse to cheat.” There was undoubtedly a lot of cheating on boyfriends and husbands in the Castro, as if gay men have such overwhelming sexual urges that polyamorous sex and even affairs outside of even such a multi-person relationship should be tolerated even by boyfriends and husbands. Enough heterosexual men with strong sex drives have nonetheless managed to be faithful sexually inside of marriage that manly lust cannot excuse gay men who cheat on their boyfriends or husbands.

Secondly, the ideology behind the imposing makes use of the proposition that a widely followed societal custom (i.e., “Everybody here does it”) is ethical (“Everyone here should do it”) because it is widely accepted. This is an invalid argument. David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy is precisely the error of inferring from even a common practice that it justifies ethically rather than is merely descriptive. To treat a descriptive norm that is as a should just because the norm exists is an erroneous move in ethics. Ethical justification, such as by an ethical principle or theory, is necessary to get from is to ought.

In the Castro, the naturalistic fallacy likely stems from self-righteous egoism that treats self-interest as normative. Just because so many young and middle-age gay men in the Castro who were in romantic relationships also had separate romantic sex outside of the relationships does not mean that because the separate romantic sex is ethically justified because such sex is in someone’s self-interest. For someone to inform a prospective boyfriend, “I will have sex with my friends (including old and current flames), and if you object, I’ll just have sex with strangers and risk your health.” A prospective boyfriend should run, not walk, from such abject coldness befitting a psychopath. Such disregard for the feelings of a prospective boyfriend may even include the motivation for pleasure from the infliction of emotional pain. Furthermore, a fear of commitment, which can stem from underlying severe emotional problems that have not been processed and resolved, may draw on the power that a person has in a relationship to enforce the demand that separate romantic sex be accepted. The use of separate sex as a weapon to emotionally distant a boyfriend or husband points to severe emotional problems even if the neurosis is ubiquitous in a city’s sub-culture and thus misconstrued by its residents as normal rather than pathological.

Aside from relationships, a particularly squalid sexual “tactic” practiced on the Castro and regarded as “normal” and thus as acceptable involves casual sexual “meet ups.” According to two sources, a gay man using another man who is only mediocre physically attractive to the man for foreplay—for sexual arousal only—to be followed by lying that something has come up and “to be continued later,” but then once the man has left, inviting a more attractive man over for the actual sex. This squalid practice goes on even in the city’s gay Marshall Beach, near the Golden Gate Bridge, where oral and anal sex occur on the sand, out in the open. A less attractive guy may be used only for arousal, then once that has taken place, the guy is discarded and a more attractive man is immediately sought out and secured for anal sex, even as the “warm-up” guy is still there and sees that he has been unceremoniously replaced. Beyond the intense self-centeredness, the sheer callousness is obvious in such a set-up.

The prolonging of adolescence, given the adamant refusal to deal with past emotional distresses and the widespread occurrence of drug or alcohol addiction, has arguably played a role in keeping the Castro’s sub-culture dysfunctional. Even “cheating” has also been conveniently and erroneously imposed as being “normal.” Such sordid norms had arguably come to enjoy default-status by the mid 2020’s, and it is precisely in being given the status of the status-quo that even highly dysfunctional mentalities and practices can be deemed imposable. Such flagrantly callous arrogance on stilts, as if during a biblical flood, suggests that a clean sweep was desperately needed in the Castro to clear away the hubris. Bad air!

In conclusion, the narrow ideological judgmentalism and the ensuing hostility toward (mis)perceived threats at the Frameline film festival in 2026 was in sync with the toxic sub-culture in the Castro district and aggravated by there being so much accumulated anger and hurt feelings there. Lashing out at people who do not subscribe to a dominant ideology that is rigorously enforced by passive aggression can be an easy opening for pent-up anger from other things to finally erupt, especially if an ideology shames that anger from being directed at its source. In terms of further study, investigating how the Castro’s heavily ideological culture and excessive built-up baseline of anger and hostility impacted the selection of films to be included in the festival in 2026 might reveal not only how narrow the festival’s ideological coverage actually was, but also just how reflective Framework was that year of the local sub-culture. How many films were selected that are critical of young “trophy whores,” for example, whose respective older “holders” live with their respective real romantic partners even in another country and yet the promiscuous young men who are selfishly being held at a distance presume to impose separate romantic sex, even with the “primary and secondary” in the other country on a prospective real boyfriend?  Would a gay film director even make such a film? What about a film that shows “warm up” guys being lied to so sex with a better-looking man can ensue? In other words, what would a truly diverse gay film festival that is honest look like? Would the problem of gay men ruthlessly turning on each other be covered? If indeed homosexual love can be just as healthy, self-confident and trusting, and thus emotionally intimate, as the romantic love between a man and a woman can be, then the squalid elements of the Castro culture have no excuse for being permitted by the gay men themselves. I do not believe that ideological aggression is inherent in gay culture and psychology, but is instead an aberration that can be treated even when it becomes ubiquitous in a gay district of a city such as San Francisco. Ideological idolatry should not be allowed to mask undergirding psychological pathology. As I wrote to Cicily Singh regarding the two young women (paraphrasing here): “Clinical psychology is not one of my academic fields, so I am not equipped to triage a young person who is emotionally troubled and thus triggered by a perfectly acceptable and thus appropriate statement. Best of luck.” That was my way of quitting while at the same time criticizing the passive aggression by passive aggressively “socially distancing” myself from an ideologically driven presumptiveness and hostility by reducing it to psychology.

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1. Quote taken from the film, Avatar (2009), masterfully delivered by Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch. “Reprising” his role in the sequel was so outlandish in terms of the rationale for the reprisal that the sequel itself could be said to be less than credible in terms of its narrative. In other words, the rationale put that film under water. 

Intimidation in Retail: The Case of San Francisco

Visuals are an important ingredient in consumer marketing, so it is surprising to come across retail managers who are so purblind as concerns the latent yet obvious passive aggression in some of the visuals that those managers themselves approve in the name of security. The espoused, yet utterly fake claim that customer experience is improved by the added sense of safety—the actual underlying motive lies in loss prevention—is typically outweighed by the very human negative experience from being intentionally intimidated by passive-aggressive visuals. It may be that such managers, frustrated by high rates of in-store petty theft (i.e., “shoplifting”), are unconsciously taking their latent aggression out of the customers as a group. Even if not, the lack of judgment is palpable from the visuals themselves. It is no wonder that an increasing number of customers prefer shopping online.

The chain of Safeway grocery stores is a case in point. One store manager admitted to me that the subcontracted security company hires from “the ghetto,” meaning that the young security guards may themselves need to be watched. I was discussing one such guard, who had been standing just inside the interior entrance gates watching customers entering the aisle-area of the store as if we were suspects. The young man’s hostile facial expression was such that I instinctively took out my phone, which triggered him. “You better NOT be recording me, BRO!” he threatened. According to the store manager, the guard should not even have been standing in the entrance gate (as shoplifters typically do not bring and deposit merchandise inside stores, and watching people enter means missing people leaving). Even though the manager told me that the subcontracted guard would be dealt with, on my next visit that very same guard stood next to the cashier as I was about to pay for groceries; I left without the groceries or paying and reported the serial guard to the company. The manager, who had admitted to me that he had authority in the store even over subcontracted employees, had failed to hold the guard accountable, given the guard’s sordid, unrepentant attitude. The manager also told me that the guards were not supposed to cluster together, given the overdone visual, yet I witnessed just such a clustering a week later. Apparently latent visual passive-aggression, likely intended to intimidate, is not worth preventing in retail management. 

Sheer irony: Three security guards under a customer-service sign at a Safeway store in San Francisco.

At a Vons grocery store in downtown Long Beach, California, customers leaving the store must hand receipts to a security guard and then take the paper back in order to tap it to an electronic device that opens a gate allowing customers to exit the store. Presumably those customers who decide not to purchase an intended item must justify themselves to a guard in order to be let out of the store. Simply stated, this goes too far and yet strangely customers put up with the invasiveness such that it could become status quo, and thus the default not to be questioned. The passive aggression in the active involvement of security guards misleadingly dressed as police and the control-of-movement, if to become characteristic of society, would render it as saturated with latent hostility and severe distrust. 

At a Safeway store in San Francisco, customers using the self-check-out area must tap in order for a gate to open out of that area. Just outside that gate, sometimes as many as three security guards cluster to present a redundant display of intimidation, for they too are dressed to look like police employees. I submit that the managerial urge to dominate customers, even by using hired guns (literally), rather than to serve customers should be better studied in business schools, for the urge to control has arguably gotten out of hand at too many retail companies. If the latent hostility and over-control are allowed to reach a critical mass, a societal culture could be characterized in such terms, eviscerating connection that would otherwise exist between social animals like humans.

Even coffee shops are not off limits to overdone passive-aggressive visuals. Police should be mature enough to have the good sense to limit their number when they enter a small coffee shop to order and pick up coffee, for it is obvious that a lot of guns and uniforms in a small area are uncomfortable to customers who have not been in prison. The passive-aggression of guns should be obvious, especially given the incidence of abuse of power by police in the United States and the lack of accountability on police forces. Where, it may be asked, are the store managers in all of this? They err in judgment in favoring a sense of store safety and deterrence over providing customers with a comfortable in-store experience. Starbucks has been particularly guilty in throwing customer comfort under the bus in order to appease police. At the very least, the latter could leave their weapons in their squad-cars. 

Too many police in a coffee shop at once, as the store manager looked on in spite of the obvious discomfort of the customers.

One coffee shop in San Francisco that I walked past once even had a security guard wearing what looks like military (or police) heavy gear (or bullet-proof vest!) just inside the front door. Even if “people off the street” are a problem, the militaristic (or police look-alike) visual is antithetical to “chill” coffee shop culture; the sheer fact of being overdone should not go below the radar. Where intimidation is so obviously the intent, potential customers should indeed keep walking, for no innocent person deserves to be intentionally intimidated, especially in spending money for a product. The irony is that on the window facing outside was a poster urging love; just inside stood the security guard intimidating people entering the coffee shop. Intentional intimidation by overdoing visuals is antithetical to love, and yet there were the two visuals, back-to-back. 

Love may well be love, but just look inside the window and the door! San Francisco, the self-vaunted city of love, was only a patina of its label by 2026 in the retail context.

The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. The related impact on the psychology of individuals is also important. Moreover, the individual-organizational-societal nexus should not be minimized. The uptick in store security-presence in the early-to-mid 2020s was no doubt due to a surge in shoplifting (stealing merchandise), but this does not justify either in moral or psychological terms the collateral damage that is done culturally and to the psychological well-being of individuals while in public.

The only security guard in a small grocery store in San Francisco closely watches customers paying while tcustomers in the aisles are presumably free to take what they like, unobserved. Where does shoplifting take place?  At the cash register? The store manager refused to intervene.

The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. Perhaps more subtle, but no less dysfunctional both in terms of human psychology and the reputation of a city is severe rudeness when it becomes the norm among nonsupervisory employees enabled by their immediate supervisors. 

I am by no means a regular frequenter of bars, so the bar culture is not particularly well known to me, so I reported the following incident to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco to obtain a more official reaction than my own to the conduct of employees that I had recently encountered at the entrance of a bar there. Just outside a bar, I encountered a regular employee, rather than an employee hired specially as a bouncer, who in spite of my advanced age demanded to see an ID, which I provided. He then demanded to see inside my laptop computer case even though the dive bar was not a dance club and this happened before 9pm. As he was looking in the case, he demanded to know, "What is the purpose of your trip to San Francisco?" That he assumed that I was visiting was strange enough; that he said that I was rude in telling him that my purpose was none of his business and therefore he was not going to allow me to enter the bar as a result was beyond the pale and utterly unacceptable, according to the city's Board of Supervisors. That the employee was acting as de facto security means that this was yet another manifestation of the presumptuous over-reaching by retail security in a business context in San Francisco. In my report to the city government, I added that when I had returned to speak to another employee of the bar who was then outside the entrance, that second employee, after repeatedly ignoring my initial statement that I had not objected to the bag-search, scolded me for not agreeing to the search. "You should not expect to be let into a bar when you refuse a bag-search." That employee's mental state could therefore stand to be scrutinized, for he had blocked out my initial statement, going on a lie told by the first employee! As if being corrected for blatantly ignoring an entire sentence were not enough, he presumed to have confidence in his opinion that saying "none of your business" is rude, so rude in fact that the original employee had been justified in baring me from the bar. The Board of Supervisors' clerk was stunned when I reported this. "It's not rude," he said emphatically; "It was none of the employee's business! Saying 'It's none of your business' in itself is not rude." That more than one of the bar's employees allowed their personal feelings to warp their judgment and perception of what is actually rude and yet presumed themselves to be omniscent, without there being a supervisor to intervene, permits a damning verdict to be made concerning San Francisco's small-business culture at least with respect to how sordid it had been allowed to become. Being so mistaken and emotionally warped, the two employees were so jejune that they should never have been hired, so the culpability extends back to the bar's manager, and ultimately to its owner. 

A local bar employee who, in demanding to know the purpose that visitors have in coming to San Francisco, dismisses his own presumptuousness and is angered when the reply is, "It's none of your business," as if saying that in itself were rude. He abuses his power by refusing entrance on that basis alone, and no supervisor is on duty at night to restrain the young man from acting out against customers who have and enforce personal boundaries.

All this goes to show the extent to which security services in that city's retail sector had become utterly unacceptable. To say that a power-trip mentality had become well ensconced is a euphanism. Sector-specific and even societal norms can have a tremendous impact on people in their daily lives even if they are not conscious of the source of the stress. "Over-kill," such as in there being three security guards clustered inside a Safeway grocery store, can, if allowed to go on long enough, be regarded as normal by customers whose measuring device has become subtly recalibrated by the sheer passage of time. That a new practice has been allowed to go on and on does not furnish it with legitimacy, and yet, sadly, as the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of ownership. 

In illegally approving Israeli settlements in the West Bank, for example, Israel's government has been relying on this de-facto natural law; the facts on the ground come to constitute law, such that efforts to change the facts is regarded as an illegitimate usurption of someone's rights. The sheer presumptuousness of treating illegal settlements as legitimate and thus any attempt by the UN or any national government to remove said settlements as justifying military aggression is astounding, and yet how rare it is to hear something like, "Well, you shouldn't have approved the settlements in the first place." 

In San Francisco, the presumptous latant and even blatant hostility in the retail sector evinced through its security human-apparatus had arguable reached intolerable heights (or lows) in 2026. Even if crime were high, the motive to intimidate even innocent (prospective!) customers is unethical, as the actual intimidation, because such customers have done nothing to deserve even the unconscious emotions of anxiety and even of being regarded even in visually as a target. Local norms can indeed be dysfunction and yet go on, and even get worse, like arrogance on stilts during a flood. 

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #162.

An American Proto-Fascist Presbyterian Church

Mixing religion and politics can be a dangerous business, especially if done from the pulpit and backed up by fully-weaponized police poised in a worship space at the laity in the pews, and from the front so the congregants know they are being intensely watched even as the words, “Peace on earth” are shown on the big screen directly above one of the uniformed police employees. To my utter astonishment, I encountered just this scenario when I visited a large Presbyterian church in the U.S. early in 2026. A Christian who has read the Gospels might look askance at the weaponized, uniformed police in the sanctuary who were facing the people from near the front, and the television cameramen who were standing on the stage even very close to the altar, and think of Jesus castigating the money-changers and sacrifice-animal sellers operating inside the temple.

During the piano prelude, a cameraman hangs out near the altar.

The modern equivalent to the greedy businessmen in the temple is the power-tripping, weaponized police officer staring down congregants in a sanctuary even while the people are worshipping God. To see people worshipping the prince of peace while a fully-weaponized policewoman looks directly at the worshippers from just left of the stage in front—staring at the people—is surreal. True Christianity cannot thrive in such a hostile environment. Lest any members of that Presbyterian church might consider complaining about the obvious hypocrisy, the pastor’s sermon could easily be interpreted as a warning against complaining, not just about the church, but also, and even more troubling, the government.

Just one day before my visit to the large church in a Trump-friendly state in the U.S., Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Kamenei denounced rioters, saying that they “must be put in their place.”[1] Such a sentiment is hardly surprising because Iran’s “democracy” is severely constrained to include only approved candidates for office. So, it does come as a surprise that Iran’s supreme leader went on to say, “We talk to protesters, the officials must talk to them.”[2] It may also come as a surprise that the pastor of the Presbyterian church would not agree with Iran’s leader on talking with protesters, for that pastor said in his lengthy sermon that Christians should not complain about government. To do so is to “rebel against God’s sovereignty.” Anyone who complains has an overblown, selfish sense of oneself. The pastor also urged his congregation to contact the White House’s office of religion about a public prayer for the U.S. coming up.

Because it is unclear how a democracy can endure without complaints being made about elected officials, government policy, and even laws, I contend that the pastor was advocating a proto-fascist, anti-democracy message as a religious sermon. That he lapsed in overreaching from the domain of religion to that of politics and government—a category mistake—was dangerous because he had stationed fully-uniformed, and fully-weaponized local police not only at the periphery of the building outside, but also inside the sanctuary and in front, facing the people—staring at them as they (presumably) worshipped amid the blatant show of force. 

I intentionally made transparent the latent hostility by pivoting in the pew in the direction of the policewomen because she was staring in my direction throughout the entire service, except during the sermon, when she faced the pastor. Her loyalty was clear, and this means that the pastor’s demand that the laity not complain, even though in the Gospels Jesus complains about the money-changers, is dangerous. Were he to have seen me holding my phone/camera at my chest in the direction of his hired gun and told her to harass me, she would not have hesitated to do so, and with manufactured anger directed at me. In short, the pastor’s autocratic mentality plus the blatant, literally “in your face” presence of a fully-weaponized police officer is so toxic to Jesus’ message in the Gospels that the pastor could hardly be trusted to wield such power as he did.

The policewoman was even staring in my direction through a gap between the cameraman and the camera. She probably took my sustained stance toward the screen above her as a provocation, as she was well accustomed with passive aggression. So much overt hostility in a Christian church belies its raison d'etre. 

The environment inside and outside of the church was so toxic to worship that the pastor actually did his congregation a favor by talking through almost all of the service, lest the people be put in the uncomfortable position of closing their eyes in engaging in transcendent religious experience. Outside of the building, before the service, at least two uniformed, near riot-gear police employees roamed around the perimeter while security guards were also present. It was a sight, ironically, of excess, and thus bad judgment. As I sat in a pew inside the sanctuary, I noticed two cameramen standing near the main table/altar even though the only activity was that of a piano-player, who was very good. The Christmas lights were still up, and the sight was beautiful, but unfortunately false (which is what Aristotle wrote of Plato’s theory of the forms). After a hymn was sung, just before the Creed was said, the pastor warned his congregation, “If you don’t believe in the Apostles’ Creed, you aren’t getting into the kingdom of God.” Apparently that minister had never read Paul’s dictum that without the love of compassion, even, and I would like to add, especially for one’s enemies and even rude and dislikeable people, even faith that can move mountains is for naught. Love is not primarily about belief, though that it part of it, as I discovered ironically as I was walking from the pews.

The pastor went from reciting the Creed to making a bunch of announcements of upcoming church social-events. Any sense of transcendence that the laity may have felt arising in them from reciting the Creed was instantly wiped out by the profane announcements, which were essentially advertisements. The profane turn was made complete when he urged people to contact the White House’s office of religious affairs regarding an upcoming public prayer for the United States, which was then aiding and abetting Israel’s committing of what the UN and the International Criminal Court have both determined to be a genocide. “Praying for the country” would not include praying that the United States hold the guilty accountable and extend compassion to the million of homeless, starving civilians in Gaza.

Empty pipes even during the sermon.

The pastor’s sermon came after a reading not of the Gospels, but of one of Paul’s letters to a congregation. Philippians 2:12-6 was the reading. Interestingly, it includes the expression made popular by Soren Kierkegaard, fear and trembling. These words rightly apply to a human’s reaction to the presence of God, rather than to that of a uniformed, weaponized police officer confronting a congregation inside a sanctuary. Not surprisingly, the pastor referenced his recent sermon on fear and trembling. Fittingly, in the current sermon, the minister claimed, “Paul is almost like a sergeant.” Not. Then the pastor turned to his personal dislike of people who complain. “Remember God hates complaining,” he said without any scriptural justification. Furthermore, “complaining is a type of unbelief,” by which he probably meant atheism. Then he overreached onto the domain of government—something that Jesus refuses to do in the Gospel stories. “Complaining about the government is really complaining about the sovereignty of God.” Only self-centered people who think too much of themselves complain. Of course, democracy requires criticism of government officials, their policies, and even laws. In fact, in strenuously opposing people who criticize their respective governments, the minister was advocating autocracy because under that form of government, political criticism is prohibited. 

How do you suppose the elderly couple felt about a heavily-weaponized, uniformed "off duty" police employee of the city looking in their direction at such close range? That the couple was effectively barred from complaining even about such an overt wrong goes without saying. Forget about worshipping; transcendent experience, had there been any during that service, would have been utterly untenable in the face of such a blatant show of force. Such palpable distrust of people who could be regular members evicerates the conditions that are necessary for worship.  

Consistent with his heavy-handed political ideology, which also manifested in there being weaponized police in the sanctuary, the minister's theology of grace had little room for credit going to free-will, which is why complaining can only be rooted in arrogant selfishness. His draconian theology can be likened to that of the Jansenists, who were extreme Augustinians—extreme because they believed that the Fall is so devastating on human nature that even free-will is severely warped. Redemption by the Cross is by grace alone. The use of free-will to extend humane compassion to one’s detractors and even enemies is instead totally by grace—the person deserves no credit for making the choice to help. 

As I was thinking about the pastor's theology in the church that I hated so much as I was walking in a line past pews at the end of the service, I saw a cell phone fall on the carpet ahead. Immediately, I picked up the phone and another person helped me locate the man who had just dropped it. As I returned it to him, I said to just a few—now I wish I had had the guts to really speak up as Jesus does to the money-changers in the Gospels—“I am really opposed to your church, but, here, this is real Christianity—I am intentionally returning this phone to this man to show humane compassion even when it is not convenient. I really oppose your congregation.” The few people who heard this nodded in agreement that what I was intentionally illustrating was indeed what Jesus stands for in the Gospels, and that my complaint against the brazen police presence was valid. Even though credit is deserved for my use of my free-will to pick up and return the phone—this was not solely due to God’s grace, though I did wonder about how fortuitous the phone being dropped such that I saw it first was. It was as if a supremely intelligent being sourced beyond our realm—including our domain of politics—was testing me to see if my anger at the violations in a house of worship was in line with authentic Christianity, and thus akin to Jesus’s anger at the money-changers in the temple. As in the Gospel of Mark, the word immediately came into my mind as I saw the phone on the carpet. I knew it would have to be a split-decision whether to ignore the phone out of spite for the minister and the policewoman who had been staring at me, or to be compassionate in such an environment in which I was so angered. I would even state that it is precisely in making the choice to be compassionate when being so is inconvenient at the very least that the image of God is in us, and that the proverbial Fall does not diminish that image in us. Even Augustine argued that a person’s self-love of that in oneself that is in the image of God is theologically laudable, whereas selfish self-love is a sin.

During my first master’s degree (and Ph.D. minor-field) program in religion, my advisor used to take his graduate students to a variety of religious places on weekends so we could observe religious rituals along the lines set out as a methodology by Geertz. We were to bracket our respective religious backgrounds and perspectives to focus on knowing “the other of the other.” We did so at Hindu and Sikh temples, Greek Orthodox churches, Protestant churches, and Roman Catholic churches. I’ve continued this practice off and on through the rest of my life. In visiting the anti-democratic police-state Presbyterian church at the beginning of 2026, however, Geertz’s methodology of bracketing one’s own religious view went out the window; I couldn’t get away from that church fast enough, though I did get a glimpse of real Christianity as I paused to pick up a phone on the way out.  

By chance, I was wearing blue and the man I helped wore red. I had come from a very "blue" state, and he lived in a red state. The phone returned, nonetheless, from one hand back to the rightful owner. That he was still holding his phone when the photo was taken may suggest that having his phone back meant a lot to him. That humane compassion can seep through the cracks in such a hostile environment as a proto-fascist church is a testament to the value of the principle itself. Without valuing it and willing it into praxis, belief in the Creed is for naught. 

 

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1. The Associated Press, “Rioters ‘Must Be Put in Their Place’ Following Week Long Protests, Iran’s Khamenei Says,” Euronews.com, 3 January, 2026.
2. Ibid.

Enjoy Your Holiday: On the Weaponization of Kindness

In Europe, the word holiday can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter, the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally, as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not!

Nietzsche, late nineteenth-century European philosopher, theorized that the weak seek to beguile the strong by pressuring the latter to be ashamed of being strong, which includes being self-confident rather than resentful. Whereas the strong designate the weak merely as bad, the weak, who resort even to cruelty as a desperate means of feeling the pleasure of power, the weak label the strong as evil. The asymmetry here leaps off the page! Such seething loathing of the strong is itself an indication of the deplorable weak constitution of the weak, especially those who are too weak to master their intractable urge to dominate. The strong are strong enough to master their most intractable instinctual urge, so any resentment toward the herd animals is mastered such that they are merely bad, rather than evil. With such internal mastery, the strong can bathe in their self-confidence, out of which generosity naturally flows. Even in regarding the resentful weak as merely bad rather than as evil, the strong can be viewed as being generous, for the attitude of the weak toward the strong is indeed sordid and even toxic. Therefore, Nietzsche suggests that the strong maintain a pathos of distance, which can be interpreted both as social distance and emotional distance, from the ill herd lest the strong too become sick. The shift to “happy holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas” had by 2024 become so ubiquitous in public without any official mandate that a herd mentality can be inferred.

It is not enough for the resentful weak to refuse to celebrate a national holiday, such as Christmas or even Thanksgiving (who doesn’t like food?); the weak who seek to dominate the strong, in spite of the obvious point of being weaker both in terms of external and inner power, actively attempt to beguile the strong into being ashamed even for saying the word Christmas in public! The American retail sector has been acting as an enabler for the weak by tacitly refusing to recognize Christmas even though stores are almost all closed on Christmas Day. The retail executives and middle managers who espouse passive-aggression by directing employees not to say, “Merry Christmas” even on the day before Christmas; instead, customers buying Christmas presents are accosted with the inherently passive aggressive, “Enjoy your holiday” as a looping recording blasted out throughout the store, “This holiday, . . .” A national holiday is by definition not your holiday, as the holiday is officially recognized within the territory of the nation.

As if turning on a dime, every year on December 26^th, public discourse suddenly reverts back to being able to say the name of the next holiday, New Year’s Day, without any hint of the previous month of “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday.” Making this switch it itself a passive aggressive slap on Santa’s rosy cheeks. As an experiment one year, I turned to “Enjoy your holiday” after Christmas whenever a stranger (including retail employees!) said, “Happy New Year.” More than once, the other person was offended. Imagine if I were to say, “Enjoy your holiday,” to a Black American on Martin Luther King Day in January. Naturally, the person would take offense, as the explicit implication would be that the holiday is only valid for Black people even though it is a national holiday. Were I to apply the phrase to July 4^th, which is Independence Day in the U.S., I would be implying that I am against that nation. Were I to say, “Enjoy your holiday” on Thanksgiving and even go so far in passive aggression to insist that the holiday be called a day of mourning (even though the holiday is based on a peaceful feast in 1620 attended both by American Indians and European settlers in Massachusetts), my resentment would (or should) be quite evident to other people. Were I to inform people in public places, including stores, not only that they cannot say Thanksgiving, but also that they must refer to the holiday as the Day of Mourning, the hearers could legitimately call me out for not only stubbornly refusing to admit that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, but also imposing my own ideology as if everyone else must speak in line with it. One year at a “Holiday Party” at my alma mater, Yale, an employee replied to me, “We can’t say that,” after I had quietly observed that it was really a Christmas party. We can’t? Was a law passed in Connecticut prohibiting people from using the words, “Christmas Party” even at a private university? It is precisely the default of can’t as if its pronouncement were a jurisprudential fact of reason that I wish to expose and eviscerate as not only sordid, but enabling too.

There is a qualitative difference between personal and public holidays. To unilaterally, whether as an individual of a member of a group, implicitly castigate people even for saying the name of a public holiday as if it were a personal holiday, whether of an individual (e.g., a birthday) or a group (e.g., the Solstices, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Hanukkah, Devali, and Quanza) is to conflate two different categories. In fact, a third category exists: holidays that are not official national holidays and yet are not limited to a group and thus are de facto (rather than de jure) public in nature (e.g., Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and perhaps St. Patrick’s Day, as drinking green beer is hardly limited to Americans under 40 of Irish ancestry). Were there no difference between private and national (and even de facto public) holidays, then governments would hardly go to the trouble of proclaiming national holidays, which of course are explicitly valid officially valid throughout a country. I turn now to some implications.  

Firstly, that everyone does not celebrate a national (or de facto public) holiday does not nullify that holiday. In fact, it is ridiculous for a person to claim that because one does not like or do anything on a given national holiday, it is therefore not really even a legal holiday. 

Secondly, that a number of private, group-only holidays occur in the same month as a national (and even a public) holiday does not mean that people should not refer in public to the national holiday by name. In the U.S., there is only one national (and public) holiday in the month of December; Americans don’t say “happy holidays” leading up to Halloween even though Veterans Day is not far behind in November.

Thirdly, the fact that a group relishes a certain national (or otherwise public) holiday does not render that holiday only private, and thus devoid of any broader meaning or significance. If the group is religious in nature, this does not necessarily mean that the public holiday is religious. For other religious groups to stubbornly suppose so in utter resentment and jealousy ignores the separation of “church and state” in the U.S. Constitution, which bars Congress from establishing a religion and thus proclaiming a religious interpretation or origin of a public holiday. A secular holiday can be proclaimed as such and thus clear the bar of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution even if a religious group celebrates the holiday in a non-secular way and even if the holiday itself had a distinctly religious origin. Halloween, for example, which admittedly is not a U.S. national holiday but it generally observed nonetheless (rather than being a group holiday) had by the twenty-first century become almost completely secular in America even though it is on the eve of All Saints Day in Christianity. The latter does not negate or nullify the secular holiday of Halloween; children need not accept the Nicene Creed in order to put on costumes and go trick-or-treating for candy. As for Christmas, the distinctly Christian feast of it is not theologically significant as neither the Incarnation or the Resurrection are celebrated on December 25th, for the Incarnation is celebrated on March 25^th—nine months before December 25^th, and the Resurrection is celebrated on Easter in March or April. It is a blunder, therefore, to assume not only that there is no secular holiday (e.g., gift-giving, Santa, and even Frosty the Snowman), but also that that even the religious holiday marks anything distinctly theological (qua  supernatural)!  Jealousy and resentment can indeed be blinding, or at the very least have a distorting effect on a person’s emotions, cognitions and perception.

For an advocate of a group-limited private holiday not only to refuse to admit that a public holiday is such a holiday, but also to insist that other people cannot acknowledge and even say the name of such a holiday in public simply goes too far. Resentful selfishness that resorts to passive aggression is indeed evil, for to insist that other people abide by a social reality that is a projection of the selfish self denies that none of us are deities. That is, self-love over love directed to God is the root sin behind the over-reach here. To counter such evil, I recommend that people in the U.S. say “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday” for every holiday except Christmas, even to retail clerks. Even though most people might be confused, others—the more insightful—will get the passive-aggressive message that it is unfair to single out a certain national holiday as non grata and even as forbidden in public discourse. The main point is of course that passive aggression should be rendered transparent so that its beguiling and hateful spite can be weakened, as befitting the weak who tacitly, yet intentionally nonetheless, weaponize the phenomenon of holidays.

That the American retail sector enables this weaponization renders companies as de facto accomplices, and thus hardly as neutral parties. To the extent that American culture reflects the retail culture, including its nomenclature and mannerisms, the responsibility of business not to perpetuate and enforce a specific passive-aggressive ideology whose source is exogenous to business is all the greater. By interiorizing such an ideology, a store (i.e., its employees, including store managers) becomes passive aggressive and thus deserves push-back from resentful customers. The irony is that the store managers and even their executives at company headquarters intend precisely to avoid offending customers. Including the name of all national holidays, rather than substituting this holiday or happy holidays for one such holiday both in the stores and in advertisements, is a legitimate and fair alternative marketing (retail) strategy. That some customers might be offended just by the name of a specific public holiday is no reason for the dog to be led by its tail. Being led by oversensitive ideologically-driven customers is not socially responsible, as it is not fair to all of the strong, self-confident customers who are willing to generously spend in the midst of celebrating a national holiday. For a national, public holiday is a statement that a certain holiday is legitimate and thus valid in a country, even though not every resident necessarily does anything to mark the holiday and some residents, even citizens, may be personally opposed. To be sure, the latter have a protected political right to oppose something based on an ideology, but they do not have the authority to impose that ideology to limit the free speech of other people, not to mention to unilaterally cancel a national holiday. Such a holiday is valid whether its opponents like it or not, and the latter do not have the right to cancel the free-speech of other people who wish to specify even just the specific name of such a holiday. Arrogance looking down on the rest of us from the stilts of false-entitlement is indeed unbecoming of anyone.