Back with a vengeance as the Grinch of Penn Station

Sorry for long disappearance, folks. I'll give you a report on my various sordid activities during the layoff in my next posting. Meanwhile, let me share a bit of Christmas cheer--namely, my recent public battle against Chrsitmas music in Penn Station, whoich may surprise a few of you out there who have me pegged as an anti-Semitic lefty who coddles the Palestinianb enemy and never fights for Jewish issues. It turns out that on some issues--Christmas music in Penn Station, for example, I'm the one on the barricades while the ADL is taking a pass. Anyway see below the full text of my story. A shorter version has just run in the Jewish Week http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c36_a1533/News/New_York.html
but I wanted to regale with the full version the faithful readers of this blog by a faithless blogger who disappears for months.


By Walter Ruby
Now that the interminable Christmas season is finally over, let me share a cautionary tale about how I became the Grinch of Penn Station, intent on stealing Christmas from the children of New York and New Jersey.
It all began on the evening of December 12 after I arrived at Penn Station with my partner Tatyana from a reception in Manhattan to catch a train to our home in New Jersey and ended up going ballistic over the piped-in Christmas music.
Already for several weeks, I had been cringing every time I entered the station, passing from New Jersey Transit to subway and vice versa, in anticipation of the inescapable flood of Christmas songs constantly pouring out of the station’s industrial-sized PA system in all of their (at least for me) near-nauseating saccharine sweetness; all-AmericanYuletide chestnuts like the God-awful Chestnut(s) Roasting On An Open Fire, I’ll Be Home for Christmas, Hark The Herald, and Silver Bells.
Why do these songs bother me so much? I figured out in therapy a few years back that hearing them triggers unsettling memories of my childhood and adolescence in the 1950’s and 60’s, when I was a lonely Jewish kid growing up in all-gentile suburbs of Pittsburgh and Chicago and groping with some king-sized identity issues. My guilty little secret is that in those days I actually loved Silver Bells; a song that evoked images of an idealized WASPY social order I could never quite be part of, and of an idealized WASPY girl I adored in high school named Sandy who rejected my romantic advances because, it seemed to me, she was too much of an obedient daughter to upset her Episcopalian parents by doing something as outré as dating a Jew. So, for me, Silver Bells comes with a lot of baggage.
Nevertheless, as I have reminded myself more than once during more recent holiday seasons; ‘Being assaulted with Yuletide shlock in public spaces is an unchangeable part of December in America. Why get myself worked up about something I manifestly cannot control?’
Or so I felt until December 12, when Tatyana and I rushed into the station avid to catch New Jersey Transit’s 9:25 to Millburn, only to find out that we had missed the train by about a minute. That meant that unless we wanted to go back outside into the freezing rain, we had little choice but to sit in a Christmas-wreath bedecked waiting room and endure Chestnuts Roasting and Hark the Herald for almost an hour until the next train came along. And with the effect of several drinks from the reception still coursing through my bloodstream, that suddenly seemed to me more punishment than I should be expected to bear.
So I walked a few feet to an information desk with a stout middle aged woman behind it and asked who I could talk to about getting the Christmas carols turned off. She looked startled and asked in an incredulous voice why I would possibly want to deprive the travelling public of the joyous sounds of the holiday season. I replied that I was Jewish and since there didn’t seem to be any Chanukah songs in evidence, I could not see why travelers like me should have to endure a constant diet of songs celebrating someone else’s heritage.
The attendant gave me as sour a look as I can remember receiving in some time and told me I should walk across the floor and speak to a representative of Amtrak, the agency that owns the building. There I was told by another clerk that the person who makes the decision about what music to play at Penn Station is the stationmaster, Michael Gallagher. He naturally wasn’t in at 10 PM, but I was given to believe I could reach him the following day by calling Amtrak’s public relations office.
I did as requested the next morning, and soon found myself in extended phone conversation with Cliff Cole, a very personable Amtrak spokesperson who was quick to tell me that despite the mainstream sound of his name, he is Jewish himself and could sympathize with where I was coming from. After specifying that Amtrak is subsidized but not owed by the U.S. government and is not following any particular government policy in relation to Christmas, Cole sought artfully to distance Amtrak from the controversy by saying, “Whether or not to play the (Christmas) music is up to the station manager, Mr. Gallagher, and is not an Amtrak company decision. Each station manager decides what music to play, based on passenger response.” Yet when I requested Gallagher’s phone number, Cole refused to provide it, saying the station manager is covered by an Amtrak policy forbidding its employees to speak to the media.
“Aha” I said, “So Gallagher is, after all, a representative of Amtrak, rather than an independent actor? “Well, yes, Cole acknowledged after some prodding, “Mr. Gallagher is an employee of Amtrak, and ultimately responds to Amtrak.” So why then does Amtrak sanction such a heavy diet of Christmas music in the most Jewish city in America, with no Chanukah music or displays whatsoever at Penn Station to counterbalance the barrage of Christmas carols, or the wreaths decorating the waiting room and the large Christmas tree alongside the main ticket window? Cole responded, “The Christian population is our largest client base and we entertain for that group. Many passengers tell us they find the Christmas music enjoyable and want us to continue it…Why aren’t the Jewish holidays represented? I don’t know. Maybe in the future we could mix it up a little bit.”
Cole called back later to say he had checked into the situation and the official Amtrak line was that the company “considers the music to be secular and seasonal, rather than religious in nature.” What about Hark the Herald, Angels Sing? Cole allowed that some might consider that song to have religious content, but then blandly repeated that overall the music was clearly seasonal in nature. He added, “Amtrak is satisfied that the music is not offensive. If we had been getting complaints from the public, that might be a consideration, but this is the first such complaint I have ever received.”
Could that really be possible? As Cole himself had informed me, over half a million people pass through Penn Station every day. Could it really be that amidst that mind-boggling mass of humanity, which surely included many thousands of Jews, not one person except me had ever complained about the Christmas music? That seemed to me unlikely; at least until I called the Jewish community’s top defense agencies, the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee, to get their reaction to Amtrak’s defense of its policy. It turned out that the two agencies were decidedly lukewarm to my complaint. I left several messages with the ADL’s national director Abraham Foxman, America’s supreme arbiter of all things anti-Semitic, but the usually accommodating Foxman never called me back. The same week I was pestering him, Foxman released a statement upbraiding presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee for injecting too much religiosity into the campaign, contending that, “There is also a point at which an emphasis on religion in a political campaign becomes inappropriate, and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours,,” It struck me as passably strange that the same Foxman had nothing whatsoever to say about whether the overt emphasis on Christianity at Penn Station might not be unsettling to members of the religiously diverse public that frequents the facility.
The AJC’s premiere spokesman on church-state issues, legislative director Richard Foltin, at least returned my call, but he too seemed unperturbed about the situation at Penn Station. “Yes, this is a pluralistic society, but one that is largely Christian,” Foltin said. “The courts have recognized that a secular recognition of the holiday season is appropriate and will not be totally absent of (content) showing the religious roots of (American) culture.” But has not the AJC been active in recent years making legal challenges to the display of creches and menorahs in front of public buildings across America? Sure, Foltin said equably, but the agency sees such displays as an overt government endorsement of religion, whereas it does not consider the canned music, wreaths and Christmas tree at Penn Station to be “overtly religious symbols.”
Foltin then threw me a sop, remarking, “I can’t see AJC going to court to stop the Christmas music at Penn Station, but to the extent that Amtrak recognizes pluralistic nature of society, it would be appropriate to recognize Chanukkah as well.”
Foltin’s last comment left me with the modest hope that if a few people who read this article take the time to call Cliff Cole to complain, the unreachable Mr. Gallagher might next year condescend to play I Have a Little Dreidel once in a while amidst all the Hark the Heralds, or perhaps display a menorah among the Christmas wreaths. Would I take that as progress? Definitely, though it wouldn’t go to the heart of my existential angst, which is that I will continue to feel personally violated by the barrage of Christmas music and imagery deluging me from all sides at Penn Station, at shopping malls and my local bank.
But as a professional at a Jewish organization said to me; “Walter, it is high time you figured out that you are living in America, not Mea She’arim. I mean, get a life. Do you know how many Orthodox Jews pass through Penn Station every day and don’t get all bent out of shape by the PA system playing Silver Bells? They just tune it out. Why can’t you”?
Indeed, why can’t I? Well, I seem to have some unresolved issues that better adjusted and more observant Jews don’t. So in lieu of moving to Mea She’arim, I plan to keep pushing Amtrak to make sure we get a dreidel or two at Penn Station next December.