Cyber snowflakes fall on Christmas.com - "Your Personal Christmas Experience". Log on and you'll see what look like tiny white asterisks tumbling across other seasonal symbols - graphics of holly, boxed gifts, Santas - and text that tells you: "Christmas.com is here to help you share your personal Christmas experience with family, friends, co-workers and others worldwide". This year, "personal Christmas experience" (before you have experienced it, mind) seems, even more than ever, a self-indulgently cosy notion packaged in a phrase that is as smug as it's snug. In 2001, an ominous shadow lies over the world's communal Christmas.
It is understandable that New Yorkers haven't really got their hearts in this Christmas. The devastation of the attacks there remains raw.
Physically, emotionally and psychically, the city can't be expected to generate a mood of celebration. The ripples of its anguish, spreading out across the US and though weakening, as ripples do, by the time they reach Europe and other parts of the wealthy Christian world, taint this Christmas.
The depth of conflict in the world makes the idea of a season of peace and goodwill appear at least hollow and arguably even disingenuous and insincere.
There have, of course, been dark Christmases before. World wars and economic depressions, for instance, tend to dampen the communal mood. But in an age when mass communication is more globalised than ever, the shadow of this year's is communally experienced as the darkest in decades. While New York, the world's apex of consumerism, is muted, depressed and angry, the "Holy Land" of the Middle East - Christmas's spiritual centre - is bleeding, with no end in sight. Short of the arrival of some unforeseen new saviour, it's hard to see improvements in 2002.
Then again, Christmas has been in decline for at least a generation (though to say so always risks a charge of sentimentality). The reality of daily plenty for so many people ensures that the holiday can't generate the sense of specialness and annual relief from scarcity that it once did.
It used to be argued that Christmas had lost its meaning by becoming too commercialised. Now, with daily life so ultra-commercialised, it's pointless to single out Christmas for this particular condemnation. The meaning of life itself has become increasingly degraded by a tyrannical commercial imperative.
That imperative is to turn money into more money for corporate investors or not survive. So we labour under corporate drives for "rationalisation", "efficiency" and "quality". But the rationale of the "efficiency" and "quality" produced is overwhelmingly to produce ever more money for those with most money, with no limit, regulation or "namby-pamby" humanist ideals permitted to obstruct the drive. In Ireland, this drive is not really experienced as a form of ideological terrorism, even though its totalitarian nature can hardly be in dispute any more. In the poor world, however, the view is much starker.
Watching those planes smash into and destroy the World Trade Centre towers, it is understandable that Westerners believe that terror comes from pre-industrial fanatics in poor countries. It does. But it does not do so exclusively. If, as multinational corporations insist - and governments in hock to them supinely agree - the world exists as a limitless marketing opportunity for maximum penetration and control, the world is dehumanised and raped. And worse: the bin Laden gang's bombers (assuming them to be the guilty outfit) have made it easier to further this totalitarian agenda.
Consider it this way. Since the murderous attacks on the US, the Bush administration's agenda, which is practically identical to the agenda of US-led multinational corporations, has been hugely strengthened. If they had a wish-list, Santa Claus could hardly have delivered better. So, while ordinary Americans and ordinary Afghanis suffer, the most powerful oil, arms and market-fundamentalists are set to prosper. Their agenda has been easily sold to a scared, scarred and angry US population and enacted, in the name of and with the support of that population, in Afghanistan.
In the process, Americans have been diverted from a free-falling economy, civil liberties have been curtailed and untold tax-payers' dollars will now be channelled to hi-tech arms manufacturers. The coincidence of releasing the bin Laden video on the same day as Bush announced that the US would pull out of the world's most stabilising arms treaty was contemptuously cynical.
Of all the dreadful events which have assailed the world since September 11th, this unilateralism, buried by the media's focus on the undeniable spectacle of the bin Laden video, is potentially by far the worst.
Quite simply, the dominance over the world's civilian life of the US military, the CIA and the monied corporations, has been astronomically increased. American citizens will pay dearly for Bush's "whole new era" and, in an increasingly globalised world, so too will workers everywhere. Most people can discern connections between a failing US economy and the loss of jobs in Ireland. Most know that the ripples from the September attacks have consequences here too. Yet the full force of the ripples from the "whole new era", presumptuously and arrogantly articulated by Bush as a case of "if you're not with us, you're against us", has yet to be felt.
In the US, the second World War is often referred to as "The Good War". The oral historian Studs Terkel compiled a fascinating book simply titled as much. Coming after the Depression of the 1930s, massively reinvigorating the economy and concluding with the country materially light years in advance of devastated Europe and atomic-bombed Japan, it was, if not a "good" war, one that was hugely beneficial for the US. The current, so-called "War on Terrorism" is shaping up to be a "good" one, not for US citizens but for the aims of Bush and his corporate allies.
Perhaps the promise of Christmas was always an illusion, propped up by lights, tinsel, cards, trees, yule logs, carols, mistletoe, Santa Claus, gifts and all the rest. But such a "humbug thesis" is surely too severe.
Certainly, there has always been exploitation at Christmas but that's not the full story. Within what's termed "the festive spirit", great numbers of people have customarily showed benign and altruistic aspects of themselves. Despite the shadow which darkens the world at present, it will be so again this year.
But it will be a very narrow-gauge, provincial and indeed anti-globalising spirit of peace and goodwill if the wealthy (for the most part Christian) world insists on pursuing ever more vigorously the agenda of George Bush and his corporate gang. Already people in Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and, of course, the Middle East (especially Palestine, but Israel too) are terrified of what may be in store for them. With good reason on their part, the prospect of Bush's "whole new era" terrifies them.
If "totalitarian" appears to be an emotional overstatement to describe the contemporary world's dominant ideology, perhaps we should all think again.
Any system which perpetuates itself to a point at which it can become unstoppable is totalitarian. Even before the attack on the US, the catechism of "no alternative" to corporate globalisation was immensely powerful. In future, it may become irresistible, though we can be sure that some among the millions on the losing side of it will attempt resistance.
Already, the daily drive to increase output and consumption has significantly consumed even our traditional holiday of consumption: Christmas. In the US, for example, once the day has passed, the obsession to feed the insatiable machine of business will be paramount again. Certainly, there remains a religious aspect to the season but even its staunchest supporters have complained for decades that consumerism was diluting, indeed colonising, the central message of Christmas.
Anyway, as ever, it will come and go, leaving us with our personal Christmas experiences. Despite all the forces using it for their own purposes, it does provide a time for reflection. After the hole that was punched in the world on September 11th, we all invested the act with our own politics and interpretations. The politics and interpretation which count most, of course, are those of George Bush. Maybe he has stabilised the world with his revenge on the Taliban and innocent Afghanis. But it's hard to see how - or to believe that he has furthered either of the seasonal causes of peace or goodwill. We'll see.